Cheerful Voices: Hark! Hark! Glad tidings charm our ears

Hark! hark! glad tidings charm our ears,
Angelic music fills the spheres;
Earth spreads the sound with decent mirth,
A God, a God is born on earth!

A God is born! the valleys cry;
A God is born! the hills reply;
Evening repeats to wondering morn,
A God, a God on earth is born!

Another lovely bit of shape note music from Southern Harmony. I think this would lend itself to trumpet instrumentation too, but my trumpet is not good enough to use, so it’s on horn and serpent with portable harmonium doubling the soprano.

There aren’t any other words to this that I could find, but it would work with any DLM tune, or a LM tune with even numbers of verses. I’ve moved the repeat, which in the original appears for the last two lines of text rather than the last four.

Unlike many of the tracks in Cheerful Voices, this one is pretty unambiguous: what you see and hear is what you get.