Lyr/Chords: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen

Subject: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: GUEST,Dan Evergreen
Date: 14 Dec 00 - 04:49 PM

I think this is a good Christmas song for guitar. Can someone post the words and chords. I would appreciate it.

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Req: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: MMario
Date: 14 Dec 00 - 04:56 PM

lyrics and a midi are in the DT here

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Req: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: mousethief
Date: 14 Dec 00 - 04:59 PM

[Em]God rest you [B7]merry, gentle[Em]men
[Em]let nothing [C]you dis[B7]may
[Em]Remember [B7]Christ our Sav[Em]ior
[Em]was born on [C]Christmas [B7]Day
To [Am]save us all from [B7]Satan's pow'r
when [Em]we were gone a-[D]stray
[G]O [C]tidings of [G]com[B7]fort and joy,
[Em]comfort and [D]joy!
[G]O [C]tidings of [B7]comfort and [Em]joy

In Bethlehem, in Jewry, this blessed Babe was born,
and laid within a manger upon this blessed morn;
The which His Mother Mary did nothing take in scorn.

From God our heav'nly Father, a blessed angel came;
And unto certain shepherds brought tidings of the same;
How that in Bethlehem was born the Son of God by name.

-----

Note that I haven't tried out these chords so I don't know how good they are.

I found this at:

clicky

Alex

Alex

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Req: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: mousethief
Date: 14 Dec 00 - 05:06 PM

They left a verse out (at least one!):

Now to the Lord sing praises, all you[?] within this place,
And with true love and brotherhood each other now embrace;
This holy tide of Christmas all others doth efface

-----

I've found a bunch of different verses online, but don't know how many are original (this being an old hymn it probably had 30 verses -- sort of like a ballad!). These are the 4 I've always heard sung.

Note that it's correctly God Rest YOU not God Rest YE. Of course the original may have been God Rest Ye, since people who didn't know proper Elizabethan/King James English may have penned it originally. But gramatically it should be God Rest YOU.

Alex

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Req: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 14 Dec 00 - 05:47 PM

In the mid-17th century (a copy unknown to the editors of 'The New Oxford Book of English Carols', who knew of no version earlier than 1833) it was "Sit ye merry, gentleman" and was quite long. It's in the Scarce Songs 1 file on my website. www.erols.com/olsonw

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Req: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: Zebedee
Date: 14 Dec 00 - 07:34 PM

There's a nice guitar arrangement here

Ed

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Req: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: GUEST,M
Date: 15 Dec 00 - 09:12 AM

Only lyrics at this new site, but I'm sure that you will find it quite useful.

http://home.att.net/~basicbrian/index.html

Click on Nativity.

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Req: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: Jimmy C
Date: 15 Dec 00 - 09:20 AM

There was also a parody on this one about an asylum in Germany with the line " God Rest Ye Gerry Mentalmen" ?

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Req: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: GUEST
Date: 15 Dec 00 - 02:38 PM

The 'ye' of old english was actually pronounced 'thee'. The theta sound came from another language that had a character that represented the sound. This character, or equivalent, did not appear in the English alphabet. The English language character that was most similar visually to the foreign character was the 'y'. Hence, many places in old english the 'y' character is pronounced 'th' (I don't know if it's a soft or hard 'th' though.) So phonetically, the line would be "God rest thee, merry gentlemen"

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Req: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: catspaw49
Date: 15 Dec 00 - 04:47 PM

Just to offset this fine information, here's another version written for an incompetent tailor:

God damn you Harry Mendelson
These pants are much too short
The cuffs don't cover up my socks
I'm sorry to report
The belt loops they are all in back
The crotch is at my knees
What a miserable tailor are you
You sunnavabitch
What a miserable tailor are you!

God damn you Harry Mendelson
This vest's a total wreck
You've cut it wrong its plain to see
Now it buttons to my neck
The fourteen buttons don't line up
With eleven buttonholes
What a miserable tailor are you
You sunnavabitch
What a miserable tailor are you

God damn you Harry Mendelson
The coat is all wrong too
One lapel is bright red plaid
The other pinstripe blue
The left sleeve covers up my hand
The right one is not there
What a miserable tailor are you
You sunnavabitch
What a miserable tailor are you

Merry Christmas!

Spaw

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Req: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 15 Dec 00 - 09:21 PM

GUEST:

You've fallen into a popular trap. You said, "the line would be 'God rest thee, merry gentlemen'."

The comma goes after "merry", not after "ye" or "you" or "thee". "Merry" does not modify "gentlemen"; it is part of an phrase of times past, "rest ye(/you/thee) merry".

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Req: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: mousethief
Date: 15 Dec 00 - 10:59 PM

Besides it's God rest YOU merry. It takes the objective case, YE is the subjective.

"Y" in english came from anglo-saxon "G" not "TH". There are a hundred words and more which in German have a "G" and in English a "Y" -- gester/yester(day), tag/day, etc. "YE" was never pronounced "THEE" -- "THEE" is the 2nd person singular objective; "YE" is the 2nd person plural subjective.

Alex

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Req: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: catspaw49
Date: 15 Dec 00 - 11:07 PM

Why do I have the feeling that you have now told us more us more than we want to know Alex?

Spaw (:<))

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Req: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: John Hardly
Date: 16 Dec 00 - 07:46 AM

One thing I do when playing GRYMG is to sing it while accompanying myself with the guitar part from "Asolin'". If you'll remember, there's a little part in the song (Asolin')where PPM do just that--I just carry it a step further.

It's also easier to play as an accompanyment if you transpose to Am (from Em).

John

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Req: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 16 Dec 00 - 03:51 PM

I shouldn't have said "Sit ye merry gentlemen" above. In the copy of our song on my website, much the earliest known version, the word is 'yo^w'.

>

I used to believe the explanation of GUEST above on the 'ye', which I've seen elsewhere, but no longer. [Yoghs were gone by 1600, but thorns can be found in manuscripts to about 1665-70.] In manuscripts 'you' was often given as y^o, however, in the common 'Secretary Hand' for script, it's often impossible to tell the difference between script 'e' and script 'o', so y^o looked very much like y^e. There are lots of reprinted old texts where 'shee' has been misread as 'shoo', and God help you if the word was 'shoe'. [Without context many texts would be unreadable.]

The Folger Shakespeare Library put out a little booklet on reading 'Secretary Hand', but in their in-house index of manuscript poetry I found that even they had misread an 'o' for an 'e' in the name of the author of "Jerusalem my happy home".

I once got a mental block in thinking I couldn't have two thorns so close together (in a manuscript of 1623) and kept trying to change one or the other to a 'p' or something else (since 'piper' didn't make sense), but couldn't make sense with anything until I happened to read it literally, and it then turned out that þiþer was just 'thither'.

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Req: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: GUEST
Date: 16 Dec 00 - 04:59 PM

"Ye" also used to mean "the" as in all the "ye olde [touristy] shoppe[s]" . I've also seen "ye" used as "the" on several old gravestones, for what that's worth.

In addition to the comma in GRYMG, a common error is thinking Will'm Shakespeare's play is "A Midsummer's Night Dream" when it is in fact "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Of course, both can be avoided by calling them "God Rest" and "Midsummer" respectively. :)

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Req: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: rabbitrunning
Date: 16 Dec 00 - 05:02 PM

Mousethief, I think Bruce isn't talking about the phoneme (sound) we spell with the character "y" (which does have a relationship to the sound we spell with "g") but about a character not used in modern orthography called a thorn, which when hand written sort of looks like a "closed y" and which represented the one of the two phonemes we spell as "th" today. The "th" sound is related to the "D" in modern germanic languages.

Thee and thou would have both been spelt with thorns. Like the long s, so often mistaken for an "f" by modern readers, it wasn't used universally, and the most similar letter was substituted as time went on.

Now -- you may be quite right about how "thee" is used grammatically! I've never looked at that closely. My closes familiarity with it is the difference between the Norwegian "De" and "du", which is a difference in the degree of formality rather than subjective/objective.

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Req: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: Snuffy
Date: 16 Dec 00 - 06:21 PM

rabbitrunning

Subjective/objective (as near as I can remember):- thee = du, thou = dig, ye = I, you = jer. English has never had a form like Scandinavian 'De' or German 'Sie', where you address a person as "They".

And you're right about "ye olde shoppe" - the 'thorn' character may have looked like a 'y', but was always pronounced 'th'.

Wassail! V

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Req: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: Snuffy
Date: 16 Dec 00 - 06:26 PM

Nope - thou = du, and thee = dig. Having a senior moment then

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Req: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: DaveRo
Date: 23 Dec 22 - 09:18 AM

Today's Grammarphobia Blog entry is about this carol:

Gentlemen, God rest you merry!

Q: Which is the more traditional version of this Christmas carol: “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen” or “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen”? I see it both ways, but the one with “you” looks better to me.

A: You’re right—“you” makes more sense than “ye” in this case, as we’ll explain later. In fact, the original pronoun in that early 18th-century carol was “you.”

But that isn’t the only misunderstanding associated with the song. There’s that wayward comma too. Here’s the story.

God rest y...     Keep well folks!

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Req: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: GUEST
Date: 23 Dec 22 - 11:01 AM

Phew, just in time DaveRo. Now all together .....! :-)

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords Req: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: Tattie Bogle
Date: 24 Dec 22 - 07:16 PM

22 years ago, the OP asked for guitar chords, and these were kindly provided based on Em. FAR too high for your average female alto like me. Am or Bm suits me much better, whether I’m singing the original or The Kipper family’s parody, “Arrest these merry gentlemen”.
Merry Christmas all: it is just Christmas Day here in Scotland!

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: GUEST,Peter Cripps
Date: 25 Dec 22 - 04:38 AM

We used to play the carol for a retired Chief Inspector at one of our regular care home venues - we used to introduce it as the Police Carol!

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: Tattie Bogle
Date: 25 Dec 22 - 10:03 AM

Was the retired Chief Inspector’s surname Joy by any chance?

Subject: RE: Lyr/Chords: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
From: Pete from seven stars link
Date: 31 Dec 22 - 06:20 PM

Really enjoyed the version by rock band Boston , which I discovered recently