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The Truth Sent from Above

[ Roud 2109 ; Ballad Index Leath196 ; Bodleian Roud 2109 ; trad.]

Heather Wood sang the traditional carol The Truth Sent from Above on the Young Tradition's eponymous first album, The Young Tradition. The album's liner notes commented:

This is a traditional carol, collected in 1909 by Vaughan Williams from Mr. W. Jenkins, of King's Pyon, Herefordshire. The tune is in the Dorian mode, and has affinities with several others, including Searching for Lambs. In 1823 it appeared in Hone's list of carols. Heather learned it at school.

A live recording of Maddy Prior and The Carnival Band singing This Is the Truth from their December 1997 Christmas Tour is on their CD Carols at Christmas.

The New Scorpion Band sang The Truth Sent from Above in 2001 on their CD The Carnal and the Crane. They noted:

During the summer of 1909, Ralph Vaughan Williams received an invitation from the Herefordshire folklorist Ella Mary Leather to assist in her local researches. The result was a marvellously fertile period of song collecting, which produced several classics of the English folk song repertoire, including several carols. Two of these, The Carnal and the Crane and The Truth Sent from Above, appear on this recording. This very beautiful melody, somewhat reminiscent of plainchant, was collected from Mr W Jenkins in the village of King’s Pyon, near Weobley, about twelve miles northwest of Hereford. A sixteen-verse version of the text was printed in A Good Christmas Box in 1847. Vaughan Williams’ choral arrangement, now regularly performed in Christmas carol services, appeared in Twelve Traditional Carols from Herefordshire in 1920. This is our own three-part setting of the tune, sung unaccompanied by Tim [Laycock], Brian [Gulland] and Robin [Jeffrey].

Kerfuffle sang The Truth from Above in 2009 on their Midwinter album Lighten the Dark.

Magpie Lane sang This Is the Truth Sent from Above in 2006 on their CD of carols, songs and tunes for the Christmas Season, Knock at the Knocker, Ring at the Bell. Andy Turner sang it solo as the December 17, 2012 entry of his project A Folk Song a Week, and he also included a Magpie Lane version recorded at the Roman Catholic Church of St. Dunstan, Woking, on December 8, 2012. He commented in his blog:

I got this—and a number of other goodies—on a carol-collecting expedition to the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library ten or so years ago. I had the song from Cecil Sharp’s Folk Tunes MS. He noted it down in October 1911 from seventy-one year old Samuel Bradley and seventy year old Seth Vandrell at Lilleshall in Shropshire. His notes in the MS say “Always sung to this tune. Learned many years ago.”

Sharp published this carol, and at least a couple of others noted on the same 1911 collecting trip, in his English Folk Carols—and he can’t have wasted any time preparing these songs for inclusion since the book was published late the same year.

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