Charleston P&C: History of liberatory Christmas spiritual from sea islands
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Beloved Christmas spiritual with an unusual backstory may have begun on a Lowcountry sea island
- By Tony Kukulich tkuk...@postandcourier.com
- Dec 25, 2025
Erin Hart plays one of the joys in a production of "The Nativity Scene" at the Penn Center on St. Helena Island, Dec. 21, 2025. Adapted from the Mystery Play, it has been performed at the Penn Center annually since 1971 and featured the Christmas spiritual “Mary Had a Baby.”
Tony Kukulich/Staff
ST. HELENA ISLAND — Believed to have originated here, the holiday spiritual “Mary Had a Baby” can be tied to the Penn School, an initiative to reduce infant mortality and hidden antebellum messages about escaping on the Underground Railroad, not to mention the story of Christmas.
“This was a way of telling the Christmas story itself. Using songs to tell important details of family life or community life or spiritual life was part of our West African tradition,” said Ron Daise, an interpreter of Gullah traditions.
It’s a lot of weight for a simple song to carry.
The beginning
The rise in popularity of Christmas songs about Mary had unusual roots on St. Helena. An article by the United Methodist Church noted that spirituals related to the birth of Jesus were rare at one time. Sometime in the late 19th century, that began to shift.
“What’s interesting, I think, is, in terms of the island itself, (“Mary Had a Baby”) became a favorite because of the ties to motherhood in general, especially with midwives” Eric Crawford, author of “Gullah Spirituals — The Sound of Freedom and Protest in the South Carolina Sea Islands,” told The Post and Courier.
In his book, Crawford argued that, before the Civil War, midwives servicing the sea island plantations were sent to Charleston for training. After the war, that training ended, and infant mortality began to rise. The Penn School developed a midwifery program, intending to reverse that trend, which it did quite successfully. Spirituals about Mary, the mother of Jesus in Christian traditions, became popular during this time because they reinforced the the ideals of motherhood associated with Mary.
Around the same time, Rossa B. Cooley, principal at the Penn School, introduced the Mystery Play. The play, which was staged every other year until the 1950s, told the story of Jesus’ birth and included three iterations of the song, including “Mary Had a Baby,” “Mary Had a Baby, Aye Lawd” and “Mary Had a Baby, Sing Hallelu.” A fourth version of song, “Mary Had a Leetle Baby,” also exists, though it’s not documented as having been part of the Mystery Play.
The Town of Bluffton Christmas tree in Martin Family Park, Dec. 18, 2025.
Tony Kukulich/Staff
Multiple versions of the song evolved as an outgrowth of the plantation system on the island. Each plantation had its own praise house, and in isolation songs could change.
“You would sometimes have differing versions, depending on who was singing it,” Crawford said, adding that in the case of “Mary Had a Baby,” the differently titled iterations remained quite similar in some respects, but not all.
One notable difference is that “Mary Had a Baby, Awe Lawd” contains the enigmatic line, “De people keep a comin’ and de train done gone.”
It was, Daise said, a coded message.
“It was a signal to those intent on escaping on the Underground Railroad that, whatever opportunity they were waiting on, it had been obstructed. It was to let them know that they needed to wait for another opportunity.”
Beyond St. Helena
It might be impossible to say for certain when awareness of the song began to spread beyond the Beaufort County sea island.
According to Daise, Charlotte Forten, the first African American teacher at the Penn School, included “Mary Had a Baby” in a list of spirituals that she provided to Atlantic Monthly magazine, though it was just a list of titles.
A 1919 article by Frances R. Grant and published in Musical America said the song “was heard at the Penn School in St. Helena, South Carolina, where the Negroes are perhaps less touched by white civilization than any other place in the United States.”
A set of fortuitous circumstances led to the song being transcribed into musical notation and published in a collection of spirituals from St. Helena.
Nicholas George Julius Ballanta-Taylor, a music student from Sierra Leone, traveled to New York City in 1921 and earned a scholarship to Julliard, which allowed him to further his studies. While there, he was encourage to travel into the Deep South to study the folk music of the region’s Black population.
“He’s from Sierra Leone, and he travels to the U.S. to learn more about the people who left there,” Crawford said.
With that, Ballanta-Taylor showed up at the door of the Penn Normal, Industrial and Agricultural School on St. Helena.
“The Nativity Scene” is performed at The Penn Center on St. Helena Island, Dec. 21, 2025. Performed annually since 1971, it featured the Christmas spiritual “Mary Had a Baby,” which is believed to have originated on the island.
Tony Kukulich/Staff
“While at Penn School this young man showed a peculiar facility in quickly and accurately recording the Spirituals as he heard them sung by the pupils, the Community Class connected with the School, and the St. Helena Quartet, which had done so much to preserve the remarkably beautiful Spirituals of the island,” wrote George Foster, chair of the Penn School Board of Trustees, in 1925.
Ballanta-Taylor, working in cooperation with the Penn School, published “St. Helena Island Spirituals” in 1925, which included transcriptions of more than 100 spirituals, often arranged for four voices, that he heard performed during his stay.
Four versions of “Mary Had a Baby” were included in the book.
“I can imagine that he heard these on different plantation with different singers,” Crawford noted about Ballanta-Taylor’s work. “Though they’re marked as different songs, they’re probably just one song done by different groups of singers on the island.”
The song became more widely known when it was included in the book “American Folk Songs for Children” by Ruth Crawford Seeger in 1948, and Pete Seeger subsequently recorded a version in 1967 for his record “Traditional Christmas Carols.” Since then, any number of versions have been recorded from a wide variety of artists including Wynton Marsalis, Odetta and Bruce Cockburn.
“Singing spirituals is something from my childhood,” Daise said. “Being a son of St. Helena Island, it is always a sense of grounding, who I am and who my people are, when I sing that spiritual, as well as others.”
Reach Tony Kukulich at 843-709-8929.
- St Helena Island
- Christmas
- Spiritual
- Gullah Culture
- Christmas Spiritual
- Mary Had A Baby
- Penn School
- Underground Railroad
- Gullah Traditions
Tony Kukulich is an editor/reporter working in the Beaufort County bureau. Turning to journalism as a second career, he started as a photojournalist in the San Francisco Bay Area. After moving to Bluffton in 2021, he wrote for several area publications before joining The Post and Courier the following year.