Go Tell It On The Mountain

Tenth Avenue North's "Go Tell It on the Mountain" keeps the spiritual's original text intact, letting a children's choir carry much of the repeated refrain — a fitting choice for a song about news too good to keep to just the shepherds who first heard it. "While shepherds kept their watchin' over silent flocks by night, behold throughout the heavens there shone a holy light" narrates the same scene Luke records almost word for word.

"Down in a lowly manger, our humble Christ was born, and God sent us salvation that blessed Christmas morn" keeps the setting deliberately small — a manger, not a palace — even as the announcement itself gets as large as possible, meant to reach "over the hills and everywhere."

Letting children's voices carry the final repetitions of "Jesus Christ is born" does something the original spiritual was already built for — news this good doesn't stay confined to the people who first received it, it gets handed down and shouted louder by whoever hears it next, mountain to mountain, voice to voice.