These two items show up all over the place in Christmas music. This verse from the modern carol “In the Silence” by Craig Courtney with words incorporating an Appalachian folk song is particularly pointed, as it includes the symbolism quite plainly:
Have you ever in the silence wondered at the thought
Of how it came to pass the Wise Men chose the gifts they brought?
Frankincense for holy ones, and gold for kings, but myrrh?
Why a gift for tombs they brought on this, the Savior’s birth?
Why a gift for tombs they brought on this, the Savior’s birth?
Yes, it has. But that’s what always happens. If successive generations couldn’t put their own stamp on sources, we’d be pretty limited in what we could read, see and hear. There’s a theory that there are only around seven plots that show up in every piece of fiction ever written. I’m not sure that I quite buy that, but it’s certainly true that the same themes show up over and over again. We never tire of true love’s triumph, for instance. And I am especially fond of fairy tales, having devoured so many of them when I was in grade school. How exciting it always was to go to the bookmobile with my mom and see what new choices were there. If a book had the word “fairy” in the title, I was game.
So, last night we had the family over to watch the Broncos win over the Chargers (this post was originally written in October 2016), and I was telling my father-in-law about my choir’s upcoming Christmas concert with the Denver Brass, and how they’d be playing with us for the Rutter Gloria, among other pieces, and since he’s a former brass player himself he was quite interested. He looked through the copy I had sitting on the coffee table, taking note of the instrumentation, and then he read the intro material. “Guess where this was first performed?” he asked. “Somewhere in England,” I said. “Nope. Omaha, Nebraska.”
The simplified explanation of how black spirituals came about goes like this: slaves heard about Christianity after arriving in the US and, especially on the southern plantations, came up with sung versions of those teachings that gave them hope of a better life, expressed their longings for deliverance, and often served as rhythmic work songs. All of this is perfectly true but raises further questions: how did this “hearing about Christianity” come about? And why, if you think about it, would slaves adopt the religion of those who had enslaved them? Wouldn’t they see that religion as massive hypocrisy on the part of the slave owners? There’s also a tendency, which I have unfortunately shared, to think of spirituals as rather primitive. But that tendency is clearly mistaken: these are songs with deep meaning, displaying a breadth of Scriptural knowledge. To quote a modern African-American scholar and preacher, 
Several interesting (to me, anyway) questions to be answered about what the angels said to the shepherds on Christmas night.
