December 3: "Pat-a-Pan"

Dijon, capital of Burgundy, the Kingdom of Mustard

Since I started strong with two American-born Christmas songs, today I thought I'd venture across the pond for some European culture. After all, the majority of the traditional and religious carols we know today came out of Europe, many of them during the Age of Enlightenment (roughly from the late 17th century til the early 19th century), when a resurgence in philosophical thought spawned some of the greatest minds of the human race to date: Locke, Rousseau, Descartes... Bacon. With this society of academia and pontification as my backdrop, today I give you a carol reflective of those times, whose title... is an onomatopoeia for a kid playing a drum. Today we examine the Burgundian carol "Pat-a-Pan."

First, where the hell is Burgundy? I'm glad you asked, instead of doing a cursory Google search! Burgundy is a region in east-central France that is known for its fine wines, mustards, ancestral anchormen, and lighthearted Christmas songs.

Thanks, Burgundy!

You can read about the settling of the region by the Burgundians, a Germanic tribe from modern day Poland who decided to test the limits of the Roman Empire, until your head explodes, but I'm not going into any great detail about it here. Suffice it to say, it's a nice area along the Rhine full of old churches and plenty of out-of-our-context history. What it does have, however, is its own quirky dialect of French that's a mish-mash of French and Germanic elements, brought by the Burgundians during the Dark Ages. Referred to as Oïl, it is a "dead" language in the same way as Latin, in that it only exists in written form, and even then it's not used in much modern writing. The only surviving uses of it are in centuries-old songs and poems, the most recent from the 19th century. "Pat-a-Pan" is one such song. 

Unfortunately, like I said, the language is written and not so much spoken, so I can't seem to come up with a modern recording of it in the Burgundian dialect, but it's not terribly far off from your run-of-the-mill French, which David Archuleta sings in for the first verse. But rest easy knowing that it was written in Oïl, largely for the purposes of keeping the language alive. The person responsible is Bernard de La Monnoye, who first published the carol in his 1720 Noël bourguignons ("Burgundian Christmas"). It's pretty evident that de La Monnoye didn't just publish the carol, but in fact wrote it himself, despite it having all the elements you'd expect from a traditional folk song. Here are the words as written in Oïl (not that any of us can read it):

Guillô, pran ton tamborin;
Toi, pran tai fleúte, Rôbin!
Au son de cé instruman,
Turelurelu, patapatapan,
Au son de cé instruman
Je diron Noei gaiman

Yes, that was a flagrant use of copy/paste. On version of the adapted English lyrics read:

Willie, take your little drum, 

Robin take your flute and come

And be merry while you play 

Tu-re-lu-re-lu, pat-a-pat-a-pan

We will listen as you play 

for a joyous Christmas day

The theme isn't too different from that of "The Little Drummer Boy," in that it describes the shepherds (presumably) bringing their instruments to play for Jesus, and then using an onomatopoeia to describe the sound of their fifes and drums: "Tu-re-lu-re-lu, pat-a-pat-apan." Lyrically it's pretty straight forward as Christmas songs go, and doesn't employ much of anything in the way of religious praise, except that the shepherds are playing joyfully for Jesus. 

Personally, I wonder about the tune. This is a really lighthearted carol, especially compared to most coming out of Europe at this time and in the centuries before. So why is it in a minor key? De La Monnoye apparently composed the original sheet music in D minor, so I guess it was just a matter of preference for him. It works, but it's not what you'd expect lyrically from a song in a minor key. That's really neither here nor there, just a thought. While variations on the tune are almost nonexistent there are plenty of English adaptations of the lyrics that some simple Google digging will yield. But the central theme remains the same; it'd be pretty hard to totally rewrite the lyrics and still call the song "Pat-a-Pan" in reference to the drumming.

One last version for the road: Mannheim Steamroller's arrangement. This was my introduction to the song thanks to my dad owning most if not all of their Christmas albums. They're hardly obscure if you listen to Christmas music radio this time of year, but still worth a listen: