Mary's Boy Child

"Mary's Boy Child"
Song by Harry Belafonte from the album An Evening with Belafonte
Released	1956
Genre	Christmas
Writer(s)	Jester Hairston
Language	English

"Mary's Boy Child" is a 1956 Christmas song, written by Jester Hairston. It is widely performed as a Christmas carol.

The song had its genesis when Hairston was sharing a room with a friend. The friend asked him to write a song for a birthday party. Hairston wrote the song with a calypso rhythm because the people at the party would be mainly West Indians. The song's original title was "He Pone and Chocolate Tea", pone being a type of corn bread. It was never recorded in this form.

Some time later Walter Schumann, at the time conducting Schumann's Hollywood Choir, asked Hairston to write a new Christmas song for his choir. Hairston remembered the calypso rhythm from his old song and wrote new lyrics for it.

Harry Belafonte heard the song being performed by the choir and sought permission to record it. It was recorded in 1956 for his album An Evening with Belafonte. An edited version was subsequently released as a single, reaching No. 1 on the UK Singles Chart in November 1957. It was the first single to sell over one million copies in the UK alone. To date, Belafonte's version has sold over 1.19 million copes. In 1962. the full-length version was added to a re-issue of Belafonte's previously released album To Wish You a Merry Christmas.

The song was also recorded by Mahalia Jackson in 1956 but titled "Mary's Little Boy Child".

One of the best-known cover versions of the song is from the German-based disco-group Boney M. from 1978, "Mary's Boy Child – Oh My Lord." This version returned the song to the top of the UK chart. It is one of the best-selling singles of all time in the UK, and has sold 1.87 million copies as of November 2015.

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