This is probably the best known of all French carols. It was first published, text and tune, in Nouveau recueil de cantiques, 1855. There have been numerous versions of the text, but all evidently from the same source, "Les anges dans nos campagnes."

There are differing reports on whether or not Dr. Earl Marlatt altered the text as we have it. Here is Dr. Marlatt's reply to an inquiry on this matter: "The rumor that I 'had nothing to do with the hymn' is a complete mystery to me. Even now, after 30 years, I remember the reasons for the major changes. In the first stanza I wanted to eliminate the contraction in 'singing o'er the plains'; I made it 'singing through the night.' This, of course, necessitated a new rhyme for the last line of the stanza. As it happened, I was teaching Shakespeare's The Tempest just then and had talked at great length about Miranda's exclamation: 'O brave new world that has such people in it!' That gave me, I thought, the perfect rhyme for the line: 'brave delight.'

"In the second stanza the story was much the same. In the second line I wanted to escape from the object before the verb: 'strains prolong.' Here William Blake rather than William Shakespeare came to my rescue. I was teaching "The Piper" and had emphasized the line, 'Pipe your songs of happy cheer.' In another course in the Fourth Gospel I had practically preached a sermon from the text, -'Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.' In fact I had written and published a hymn beginning, 'Be of good cheer, the Master said.' So, you see, William Blake and St. John gave me my 'songs of happy cheer.' All of this, in turn, called for new rhymes for 'jubilee' and 'cheer' with little change in the thought of the lines except reversing 'tidings' and 'song' to read: 'What great brightness did you see, What glad tidings did you hear?' And there endeth the changes with apologies to earlier translators of the carol."