An Advent Calendar with Patrick Comerford: 10, 9 December 2025

‘If Jesus had wanted for any wee thing … He surely could have had it, ’cause he was the King!’ … small Christmas decorations on a shelf in the Swinfen Harris Church Hall, Stony Stratford (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

We are more than a third of the way through Advent this year and the week began with the Second Sunday of Advent (Advent II, 7 December 2025). At noon each day this Advent, I am offering one image as part of my ‘Advent Calendar’ for 2025, and one Advent or Christmas carol, hymn or song.

As I am speaking about the work of the architect Edward Swinfen Harris to the Wolverton and District Archaeological and Historical Society in Stony Stratford Library this afternoon (2:30, 9 December 2025), my choice of Advent Calendar images today come from the Swinfen Harris Church Hall, beside the Greek Orthodox Church in Stony Stratford. And my choice of an Advent hymn or carol today is ‘I Wonder as I Wander’, one of the carols or hymns the Choir in Saint Mary and Saint Giles Church in Stony Stratford is rehearsing this Advent.

This folk hymn that has its origins in a song fragment collected in 1933 by the American folklorist and singer John Jacob Niles (1892-1980). He was known as the ‘Dean of American Balladeers,’ and had an important influence on the American folk music revival in the 1950s and 1960s, with Odetta, Joan Baez, Burl Ives, Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan and many others recording his songs.

While Niles was in the town of Murphy in Appalachian North Carolina, he attended a fundraising meeting held by travelling evangelists who had been driven out of town by the police, and heard this song sung by Annie Morgan.

She repeated the fragment seven times in exchange for a quarter for each performance, and Niles left with ‘three lines of verse, a garbled fragment of melodic material – and a magnificent idea.’ Based on this fragment, Niles composed ‘I Wonder as I Wander’, and then extended the melody to four lines and the lyrics to three stanzas. He completed his composition on 4 October 1933 and first performed the song on 19 December 1933 in Brasstown, North Carolina. It was first published in 1934.

Barbra Streisand sang it on A Christmas Album (1967), and other recordings are by Mary Travers of Peter, Paul, and Mary, Vanessa Williams, the BBC Symphony Chorus, the Cambridge Singers and the Choir of Eton College.

Ian Bradley, Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at the University of St Andrews, the ‘clean, haunting melody … maintains the open-air atmosphere and sense of wistful wandering conjured up in the first line.’

Benjamin Britten published a setting of the song in 1934, and other arrangements have been written by Luciano Berio and by Carl Rütti for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. The choir in Saint Mary and Saint Giles in Stony Stratford is rehearsing the arrangement by John Rutter, first written for the Cambridge Singers.

‘If Jesus had wanted for any wee thing … He surely could have had it, ’cause he was the King!’ … Christmas decorations in the Swinfen Harris Church Hall at the Greek Orthodox Church in Stony Stratford (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

I wonder as I wander out under the sky,
How Jesus, the Saviour, did come for to die.
For poor ornery people like you and like I:
I wonder as I wander, Out under the sky.

When Mary birthed Jesus, ’twas in a cow’s stall,
With wise men and farmers and shepherd and all.
But high from God’s heaven a star’s light did fall,
And the promise of ages it did then recall.

If Jesus had wanted for any wee thing:
A star in the sky, or a bird on the wing;
Or all of God’s angels in heaven to sing,
He surely could have had it, ’cause he was the King!

I wonder as I wander out under the sky,
How Jesus, the Saviour, did come for to die.
For poor ornery people like you and like I:
I wonder as I wander Out under the sky.

‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ I have been singing your lyrics since the early 1970s

‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ … how did it become the English anthem? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

If England has an anthem, then it must be ‘Jerusalem.’

But for England’s rugby fans, for over 30 years, it has been ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.’ They continued to sing it with passion in Tokyo today, even though it never seemed there was a chance England could beat South Africa in the World Cup final.

I remember first singing this song not as a hymn but as a drinking game at Wexford rugby evenings as early as 1972-1974. It went with an elaborate set of mimes and gestures. If you got them wrong, it was your turn to buy the drinks.

But how did this 150-year old Gospel spiritual – and not ‘Jerusalem’ – become the rugby anthem of England?

The story goes back to 1988, when Ireland and England were playing at Twickenham in the last match of what was then the Five Nations Championship.

Coming into that last match, England had lost 15 of their previous 23 matches in the Championship. The Twickenham fans had only seen one solitary England try in the previous two years and at half time England was down 3-0 against Ireland.

However, England snatching victory out of the jaws of defeat, scored six tries in the second half, and winning 35-3 win. Three of those tries came in quick succession from Chris Oti, who was making his Twickenham debut.

A group of schoolboys from Douai, the Benedictine-run public school in West Berkshire, sang ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ each time England crossed the line and scored a try. It was an old school tradition, but when Oti got his second try other spectators close to the Douai boys joined in the singing. When Oti scored his hat-trick, the song rang out throughout Twickenham.

However, the BBC recently reported that four rugby players from Leicestershire claim they set the trend.

Four members of Market Bosworth Rugby Club who were at Twickenham that day – Dave Hales, John Ward, Bruce Coleman and Paul Spencer – claim they started singing the song first.

Dave Hales told BBC Radio Leicester: ‘We were in the North Stand having a bit of a good time, a good day … All of a sudden I started singing ‘Swing Low’ and the next thing you know the crowd round us was singing it, then the whole North Stand seemed to be singing it, and then the whole ground seemed to be singing it.’

John Ward said: ‘As far as we are concerned it started after, I believe, Rory Underwood scored the first try in the second half.’

And so, ever since – no matter who takes the credit – ‘Swing Low,’ and not ‘Jerusalem,’ has been the song of English rugby fans at all matches.

The song was written by Wallis Willis, a Choctaw freedman in what is now Choctaw County in Oklahoma in the mid-1860s. He may have been inspired by the Red River, which reminded him of the Jordan River and of the story of the Prophet Elijah being taken to heaven in a chariot of fire (II Kings 2:11).

Some sources say the lyrics refer to the Underground Railroad, the freedom movement that helped black salves escape from the South slavery to the North and to Canada.

The Revd Alexander Reid, who heard Wallis Willis sing the song, transcribed the words and melodies and sent the music to the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. The Jubilee Singers popularised the song during a fundraising tour of the US and Europe.

The song was banned in Nazi Germany in 1939 when the Reich Music Examination Office decreed it was ‘undesired and harmful.’

The song enjoyed new popularity during the 1960s Civil Rights struggle and the folk revival. The best-known performance at this time may have been by Joan Baez at Woodstock in 1969. Perhaps it was at this time that it spread to rugby clubs across England and Ireland.

I was singing it rugby clubs in the early 1970s, and I remember singing it as a party piece when I was student on a fellowship in Tokyo in 1979 – 40 years before today’s World Cup final in Tokyo.

Swing low, sweet chariot
Coming for to carry me home,
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.

I looked over Jordan, and what did I see
Coming for to carry me home?
A band of angels coming after me,
Coming for to carry me home.

Sometimes I’m up, and sometimes I’m down,
(Coming for to carry me home)
But still my soul feels heavenly bound.
(Coming for to carry me home)

The brightest day that I can say,
(Coming for to carry me home)
When Jesus washed my sins away.
(Coming for to carry me home)

If I get there before you do,
(Coming for to carry me home)
I’ll cut a hole and pull you through.
(Coming for to carry me home)

If you get there before I do,
(Coming for to carry me home)
Tell all my friends I’m coming too.
(Coming for to carry me home)

Swing low, sweet chariot
Coming for to carry me home,
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.

‘I believe there’ll come a day when the lion and the lamb will lie down in peace together’

Buying ‘Popular Problems’ in Tower Records earlier this week (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)

Patrick Comerford

Culturally, the week was book-ended by Leonard Cohen and Joan Baez, so to speak.

I woke early on Sunday morning [21 September 2014] to listen to Cathal Murray’s two-hour programme on RTÉ, The Weekend on One, from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m., marking Leonard Cohen’s eightieth birthday.

He played classic numbers from many Leonard Cohen’s albums, with seven alone from The Essential Leonard Cohen: ‘So Long Marianne,’ ‘Tower of Song,’ ‘Take this Waltz,’ ‘Closing Time,’ ‘In my Secret Life,’ ‘Anthem,’ and ‘Suzanne.’

But there were interpretations of Leonard Cohen by other artists too, including Jeff Buckley (‘Hallelujah’), Rufus Wainwright (‘Chelsea Hotel No 2’), Antony (‘If It Be Your Will’), Trisha Yearwood (‘Coming Back to You’) and Jennifer Warnes (‘Bird on a Wire’).

He also played ‘You Got Me Singing,’ a track from Leonard Cohen’s new album, Popular Problems, which was released on Sunday.

Between the Cathedral Eucharist in Christ Church Cathedral on Sunday morning and the ordination of five deacons in the cathedral on Sunday afternoon, I was in Dawson Street at lunchtime, and bought Popular Problems in Tower Records.

Popular Problems is Leonard Cohen’s second album in the past two years, and follows the success of Old Ideas in 2012.

Behind Popular Problems are the perfect background voices of singers Charlean Carmon, Dana Glover and Donna Delroy, strings played by Joe Ayoub (bass) and Alexandru Bublitchi (violin), James Harrah on guitar, Brian Macleod on drums, and trumpets made of computer sounds.

Once again, Cohen has found his perfect way in his poetry and his voice, in filling sadness with triumph and filling triumph with sadness, in being weary while being optimistic, in suffering while renewed, in finding a light touch to conceal the deep and the serious. But he is at a more sedate pace this time, his gravitas underlined by his whispery baritone voice that at times slows from singing to talking.

The songs here – including ‘Almost Like the Blues,’ ‘Samson in New Orleans’ and ‘Born in Chains’ – deal again with the great Cohen themes of love pursued and love spurned, doubt and faith, war and genocide, his Judaism and his questioning engagement with Christianity, sensuality and spirituality, being naked before those he loved and being naked before God:

There is no G-d in heaven
And there is no Hell below
So says the great professor
Of all there is to know.
But I’ve had the invitation
That a sinner can’t refuse
And it’s almost like salvation
It’s almost like the blues.

The reverential spelling of the name of G-d in the sleeve notes for ‘Almost Like the Blues’ indicates his respect for the traditions of Orthodox Judaism. In ‘Born a Slave,’ he examines his Jewish roots:

I was born in chains
But I was taken out of Egypt
I was bound to a burden
But the burden it was raised
Lord I can no longer
Keep this secret
Blessed is the Name
The Name be praised

In ‘Nevermind,’ he shows his compassion for the plight of refugees and displaced people, and with a flourish of Arabic singing hints at his wider compassion.

Popular Problems is Leonard Cohen’s second album since his return to the stage in 2008. Since then, I have been at concerts on each of his return visits to Ireland. It is not clear yet whether or not he will support Popular Problems with a tour.

Although he has indicated that he will not be doing any shows in 2014, hopefully he is planning to be back in Ireland soon.

UFO at the Leonard Cohen birthday tribute in the Hot Spot Music Club in Greystones (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)

Later on Sunday evening, we were in the Hot Spot Music Club above the Beach House Pub at Greystones Harbour for a tribute evening marking Leonard Cohen’s eightieth birthday, when the UFO Band paid tribute to the Canadian poet and author, singer and songwriter.

Hot Spot is home to the Universal Funk Orchestra (UFO) who perform regular gigs there covering David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Fleetwood Mac. The first half of the show on Sunday included 12 numbers, mainly from the classic Best Of album from 1976, followed in the second half with eight other Cohen numbers – including ‘Slow,’ a track from Popular Problems, before closing to an encore, almost inevitably and predictably, with ‘Closing Time.’

Joan Baez on stage in Vicar Street on Thursday night (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2014)

If we don’t know when Leonard Cohen is returning to Ireland, then Joan Baez was back in Dublin later in the week for three intimate nights at Vicar Street on Wednesday, Thursday and tonight [24, 25 and September 2014].

Back in 2008-2009, she celebrated the fiftieth anniversaries of her debut residency in 1958 at Club 47 in Cambridge, and her debut appearance the following year at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959. She began her recoding career in 1960 at the age of 19, and it was she who introduced Bob Dylan to the world in 1963.

In the 1960s, she marched with Martin Luther King, inspired Vaclav Havel, played at Woodstock and sang on the first Amnesty Interna¬tional tour. She took to the fields with Cesar Chavez and marched against the Vietnam War.

Later she stood with Nelson Mandela at his 90th birthday in Hyde Park, London’s, and saluted the Dixie Chicks for their courageous protest against the Iraq war. Amnesty International honoured her in 2012 with the naming of the Joan Baez Award for Outstanding Inspirational Service in the Global Fight for Human Rights.

As she told us on Thursday night, she is still marching.

She is the daughter of pacifist parents: her father, Professor Albert Baez, was the son of a Mexican-born Methodist minister, her Scottish-born mother – Joan (Chandos Bridge) Baez, who died last year – was the daughter of an Anglican priest, the Revd William Henry Bridge, curate of Saint John’s Episcopal Church at Edinburgh’s West End (1910-1913), where she was baptised, before emigrating to Canada. They became Quakers, and although she was raised a Quaker she says today: “Living is my religion.”

The “Evening with Joan Baez” was a journey through her past and her interpretation of folk music and ballads over the past fifty years or more, with tributes to Bob Dylan as well as some of her long-time favourites, including ‘Farewell Angelina’, ‘Baby Blue,’ ‘Joe Hill,’ ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot,’ ‘The Night they drove Old Dixie down’ and ‘God is God.’

She recalled with emotion her tours of South America and her feelings for the people of Argentina and Nicaragua.

She paid tribute to Violeta Parra and Mercedes Sosa when she sang their hymn ‘Gracias a la Vida.’ And she sang ‘Mi Venganza Personal’ (‘My personal revenge’), written by a founding Sandinista, Tomás Borge in the 1980’s as his response to being asked what would be his personal vengeance on those who had tortured him in prison:

“After having been brutally tortured as a prisoner, after having a hood placed over my head for nine months, after having been handcuffed for seven months, I remember that when we captured these torturers I told them: ‘The hour of my revenge has come: we will not do you even the slightest harm. You did not believe us beforehand; now you will believe us.’ That is our philosophy, our way of being.”



Some of those themes that recur in Leonard Cohen albums were there too in her songs. But the living legacy of her mixed Quaker/Anglican upbringing was also to the fore in the lyrics of many of her songs.

I believe in prophecy

I believe in prophecy
Some folks see things not everybody can see
And once in a while they pass the secret along to you and me
And I believe in miracles
Something sacred burning in every bush and tree
We can all learn to sing the songs the angels sing
Yeah, I believe in God and God ain’t me.

I’ve travelled around the world
Stood on mighty mountains and gazed across the wilderness
Never seen a line in the sand or a diamond in the dust
And as our fate unfurls
Every day that passes I’m sure about a little bit less
Even my money keeps telling me it’s God I need to trust
And I believe in God but God ain’t us.

God, in my little understanding don’t care what name I call
Whether or not I believe doesn't matter at all
I receive the blessings
That every day on earth’s another chance to get it right
Let this little light of mine shine and rage against the night
Just another lesson
Maybe someone’s watching and wondering what I got
Maybe this is why I’m here on earth and maybe not
But I believe in God and God is God.

Jerusalem (by Steve Earle)

I woke up this mornin’ and none of the news was good
And death machines were rumblin’ ’cross the ground where Jesus stood
And the man on my TV told me that it had always been that way
And there was nothin’ anyone could do or say.

And I almost listened to him
Yeah, I almost lost my mind
Then I regained my senses again
And looked into my heart to find

That I believe that one fine day all the children of Abraham
Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem

Well maybe I'm only dreamin’ and maybe I’m just a fool
But I don’t remember learnin’ how to hate in Sunday school
But somewhere along the way I strayed and I never looked back again
But I still find some comfort now and then.

Then the storm comes rumblin’ in
And I can’t lay me down
And the drums are drummin’ again
And I can’t stand the sound.

But I believe there’ll come a day when the lion and the lamb
Will lie down in peace together in Jerusalem

And there’ll be no barricades then
There’ll be no wire or walls
And we can wash all this blood from our hands
And all this hatred from our souls.

And I believe that on that day all the children of Abraham
Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem.