This text was written and first published with Katherine Davis’s arrangement of the tune in a two-part anthem, published by Galaxy Music Corporation, New York, 1942. It is based on Luke 2, verses 8-14.

A person well known to American choir singers, Katherine Kennicott Davis was born June 25, 1 892, in St, Joseph, Missouri. At Wellesley College in Massachusetts, she earned the B, A. degree, then did graduate study in music composition, theory, and piano before becoming a teacher at her alma mater. Following an eight-year period of teaching in private schools, she went into full-time work as a composer, editor, and arranger. Probably her most famous text is s ‘The Little Drummer Boy,” 1941. She sometimes used the pen names John Cowley and C. R, W. Robertson. Her published works, numbering more than 80(), include piano books; a folk operetta; a Christmas cantata,

“This Is Noel”; a one-act opera; and many choral pieces and arrangements. Acknowledging her creativity and accomplishments, Stetson University in Florida conferred on her an honorary doctorate. Failing eyesight forced her to stop composing in 1977, and her final days were spent in Concord, Massachusetts, where she died April 20, 198(). Her valuable personal library was given to the Choristers Guild, and is on permanent loan to the University of Lowell, Massachusetts.

The name PUER NOBIS NASCITUJR comes from the first phrase of a fifteenth-Century Latin carol, usually translated “Unto us a boy is born.” Many variants of the tune have been found, but in the present form it first appeared in Finland in Theodoricus Petri’s Piae Cantiones, 1582, a collection from which G. R. Woodward published in English his Cowley Carol Book in 1902. For another form of this tune, see SDAH 333, PUER NOBIS.

The music of the hymn in SDAH is just the first page of Geoffrey Shaw’s arrangement in Oxford Book of Carols, 1928, in which each of the five stanzas has a different treatment. The use of these varied harmonizations would add a spark to any performance of this carol.

Geoffrey Turton Shaw, born November 14, 1879, in Clapham, London, England, was a choral singer at St. Paul’s Cathedral. An organ scholar at Cambridge University, he studied under two great musicians, Charles V. Stanford (SDAH 32) and Charles Wood. He became inspector of music for the schools of London, and followed his brother, Martin Shaw (SDAH 28), in 1920 as organist at St. Mary’s, Primrose Hill. His hymn tunes and arrangements are found in the English books Songs of Praise, 193 1, and Congregational Praise, 1953. He assisted in the editing and publishing of a number of songbooks, and was keenly interested in preserving and using folk melodies. He retired in 1940 and died in London April 14, 1943.

-from Companion to the Seventh-day Adventist Hymnal by Wayne Hooper and Edward E. White