Sometime in the early 1950s, songwriter and choral conductor Jester Hairston was asked to provide a new Christmas carol for a concert by Walter Schumann’s Hollywood Choir. Hairston thought back to a ...
“Baby of Bethlehem” (also known as “Singing in the Land”) is an African-American spiritual that was also included in the same 1953 volume of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s American Folk Songs for Christmas, ...