The Seven Joys of Mary (carol)
traditional song
"The Seven Joys of Mary" (Roud # 278) is a traditional carol about Mary's happiness at moments in the life of Jesus, probably inspired by the trope of the Seven Joys of the Virgin in the devotional literature and art of Medieval Europe. Though not traditionally associated with Christmas, it has become so in the modern era.
Versions
The song has English and American versions referring to different acts by Jesus that gave joy to Mary:
Tune
The common music is sung thus:
Recordings
The Weavers – We Wish You A Merry Christmas (1951)
Burl Ives – Christmas Day in the Morning (1952)
Maddy Prior and June Tabor – Silly Sisters (1976)
Stephen Cleobury and the King's College Choir (1984, 1999)
Kate & Anna McGarrigle – The McGarrigle Christmas Hour (2005)
John Jacob Niles – An Evening with (remastered 2006)
Great Big Sea – RedEye Holiday Sampler 2008
Kate Rusby (under the title 'Seven Good Joys') – While Mortals Sleep (2011)
Loreena McKennitt – A Midwinter Night's Dream
See also
List of Christmas carols
References
Further reading
Hugh Keyte and Andrew Parrott. The New Oxford Book of Carols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Ian Bradley. The Penguin Book of Carols. London: Penguin, 1999.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Seven Joys of Mary (carol)” is traditional song. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Seven, Joys and Mary, not as a finished interpretation.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 13, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7763438. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1951, 1952, 1976 and 1984.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Seven Joys of Mary (carol)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.