Intuiting that the poem should be religious, wine guy turned to the gospel of Luke. He tried to picture himself in the narrative; what would it have been like to be present at Jesus’ birth? Inspired, he quickly finished the piece and then, “moved by his own work”, he decided his words were not simply words; they were lyrics.
Not being musically gifted himself, wine guy tapped his pal Adolph, a brilliant and already famous composer. Music guy went to work and the result—a song called Cantique de Noel—became a smash hit in France…until wine guy threw his lot in with the Socialists (which did not sit well with the Catholics) and it was revealed that music guy was a Jew. Sensing a sticky situation, the church banned the song. Cantique de Noel was effectively cancelled.
Except that the French people loved it. And kept singing it. So much so that, a decade later, a reclusive American writer—a Harvard Divinity grad who would have been a minister but for the debilitating panic attacks that kept him out of the pulpit—discovered the song and translated it for an American audience. O Holy Night took off on our side of the pond and, in 1906, it became the first song ever broadcast on radio.
stephen R Harrison 
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