Like many people of a certain age, perhaps you learned to sing The Little Drummer Boy at school. When the nuns taught us the carol, babies were on my mind as one of my fellow pupils had just acquired a new baby brother. Maybe that’s why the song never made sense to me.
From what we’d learned in hushed whispers from our classmate, new babies brought lots of roaring and crying into the house. Why, then, would a boy with a drum decide that this was the optimal time for a visit?
The lyrics – “Come, they told me, pa rum pum pum pum” – seem to suggest the visit was not his initial idea. Surely Joseph wasn’t issuing invitations to all and sundry to come and see the baby while poor Mary longed for just five minutes’ sleep?
By all accounts, the stable in Bethlehem was busier than Heuston Station following Jesus’s birth. History is silent on the order of visitors but we know there was a menagerie of animals, there were angels and shepherds and, of course, the three wise men turned up for their 15 minutes of fame. Given their lack of thought for the new mother’s welfare, I suspect it was they who encouraged the little musician to tag along.
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A cursory look at the gifts they brought would make you wonder just how wise the three wise men really were. They clearly didn’t have a great insight into the overwhelming exhaustion that comes with a newborn baby, even if the baby was God’s only son.
If they had been wiser in their present-picking, they might have come up with more useful presents than gold, frankincense and myrrh. We’ll allow the gold, as that could come in useful when baby Jesus outgrew his swaddling clothes. But what was Mary going to do with frankincense – a resin used in perfume – and myrrh, best known for its embalming and anointing properties?
Did they even consider the logistics of carting away these impractical presents on the back of a donkey while holding on to a newborn baby?
But, back to the drummer, who was a poor boy and had no gifts for the new baby. “Shall I play for you?” he asked Mary.
I think we can all identify with Mary’s predicament here. When an enthusiastic child approaches you with their recorder or guitar under their oxter and offers to play a new tune, it’s difficult to say no. According to the lyrics of the carol, Mary nodded, but I’d imagine it was a very weak nod, accompanied by an exhausted smile.
He then claims that the ox and the lamb kept time while he played for Jesus, which introduces a pertinent question: Is the little drummer boy the original unreliable narrator? It’s a few thousand years since Jesus was born and we are still waiting for evidence that cows or sheep can tap their hooves in a rhythmic fashion.
“I played my best for him,” the drummer maintains, but all children think they are virtuosos as soon as they pick up a new instrument, so I wouldn’t place much value on that assertion.
Adding to the suspicion that the drummer’s account cannot be trusted, he claims that Jesus smiled at him when he had finished his tune. As we all know, babies can’t smile until they are about six weeks old. Anything that vaguely resembles a smile before that is probably just wind.
One of the Irish versions of the song, An Drumadóirín, has the drummer claiming “Gháir sé liom fé rún”, suggesting the newborn baby had smiled or laughed secretly at the drummer. So, even a newborn baby thought it was ridiculous that this child had chosen this moment to bang his drum in a stable in Bethlehem.
Westlife opted for the English version of the carol when the band was asked to sing for Pope John Paul II at a Christmas concert at the Vatican in 2001. When the singers arrived to rehearse with the orchestra, they realised the song was pitched in a key that was too high. Westlife member Nicky Byrne recalled afterwards that the musical director didn’t speak English and they had less than an hour before the live performance, so panic set in.
However, luck was on their side. The late Dolores O’Riordan was also performing at the concert. With very little advance warning, the Cranberries singer agreed to take the lead and gave one of the finest renditions of The Little Drummer Boy you are ever likely to hear.
The former choir girl was regularly invited back to perform in the Vatican’s Christmas concert series in the years that followed. She didn’t sing The Little Drummer Boy again, though, perhaps because you cannot improve on perfection.
