“When A Child Is Born” — Johnny Mathis
I’d always thought “When A Child Is Born” was a traditional Christmas song Johnny Mathis had covered. But it’s nothing of the sort.
Although it might sound like a long time ago now, “When A Child Is Born” was written in the early 1970s, not a couple of hundred years earlier at least, as I used to imagine. The song came together in 1974 when lyricist Fred Jay added some lyrics to an pre-existing tune which had been written just a couple of years earlier by the Italian composer Zacar.
“When A Child Is Born” is also one of those anomalies — a song everyone thinks of as a Christmas song, but which doesn’t mention Christmas at all. There aren’t even sleigh bells or a Santa booming “ho, ho, ho” in there for a Christmassy feel.
Yet “When A Child Was Born” was the UK’s Christmas Number One in 1976.
For a singer who’d only occasionally troubled the very lower reaches of the singles charts since coming to the public’s attention in the late 1950s with songs like “Misty” and “The Twelfth Of Never”, “When A Child Was Born” was an unexpected late-career revival for Johnny Mathis.
While he’d maintained his popularity among the fans of easy-listening music in the meantime with albums of standards and covers, recording a song which reached Number One in the UK charts was, I suspect, as much of…
