The story behind Some Children See Him
Some Children See Him says that children picture the holy child with a face like the one they know. The lyric does not argue a treatise. It watches a child look, and it lets the look differ from child to child.
The music is Alfred Burt's, from the 1951 Christmas card of a Michigan clergy family. The words are by Wihla Hutson, a family friend and the organist at the Reverend Bates Burt's church. The song is under copyright. A short excerpt is enough to show the idea. The card story is the part worth telling at length.
History and origins
Bates G. Burt, an Episcopal priest in Michigan, began a family custom of sending an original Christmas carol as the yearly card. He wrote the early poems himself. His son Alfred, born in 1920, grew into a jazz trumpeter and arranger, and from the early 1940s the cards carried Alfred's music. The division of labor shifted again around 1950. Alfred's wife Anne was expecting their only child, and the family asked Wihla Hutson, organist at Bates Burt's church and an old friend, to write the year's lyric. Alfred then set what she wrote. That is the workshop behind the whole late series, not a one time accident.
Some Children See Him is the card for 1951. Hutson's text moves through complexions and features, lily white, bronzed and brown, almond eyed, and others, and lands on the claim that the child's love matters more than the pictured face. It is a mid century liberal Christian lyric, plain and pictorial, not a medieval poem newly found. Alfred's setting is gentle, modal in feeling, and built for voices around a piano or a small choir. He was a dance band musician, and the carol does not sound like a chart for the Alvino Rey orchestra he played in. It sounds like a gift meant to fit in an envelope.
The cards were famous inside a mailing list and almost unknown outside it until the early 1950s, when Alfred's singing of another carol at a Hollywood Christmas party started a wider interest. He was already ill with cancer. He died on February 7, 1954, at thirty three, after pushing to finish the last carols in the series. In time for Christmas 1954 a ten inch album, The Christmas Mood, gathered a set of the Burt carols for the public. Some Children See Him and Caroling, Caroling became the two titles later singers reached for most often. The path is family craft, then a small disc, then the standard choral folder.
Later recordings kept that path open without changing the authorship. Andy Williams sang it on his 1965 album Merry Christmas. Church choirs took it up as a thoughtful alternative to comic Santa songs. James Taylor and others recorded it in the next century. None of those covers make the song folk. It remains a 1951 composition with two named makers, sung because the card idea was strong enough to leave the envelope. When you hear it, you are hearing a parson's family custom that a young jazz musician turned into music people outside Michigan could keep.
Full lyrics
Verse 1
Some children see him lily white,
The baby Jesus born this night.
Some children see him lily white,
With tresses soft and fair.
Verse 2
Some children see him bronzed and brown,
The Lord of heaven to earth come down.
The lines above are a short excerpt for identification and study. The full lyric is still under copyright. Replace this block with a licensed copy if you have the right to print the complete text.
Lyrics presented for educational and personal use. Sing along responsibly this holiday season!
Meaning and symbolism
The lyric trusts children to do theology with faces. If the child in the manger can look like the child looking, then the story is not owned by one portrait tradition. Hutson does not say the historical particulars of first century Judea are unknowable. She says the imagination that love requires will resemble the lover. Adults who argue about images can overhear a simpler test: what face did you need when you were small, and did anyone tell you that need was allowed.
Alfred's tune agrees with that gentleness. It does not march and it does not sell a joke. The musical meaning is welcome. A card carol has to sound like something a household can sing once a year without a rehearsal budget. When a concert choir performs it, the original room is still the right reference: a priest's family, an organist lyricist, a composer son home in spirit if not always in the house, and a stack of envelopes.
Fun facts and statistics
- Wihla Hutson wrote the words, and Alfred Burt wrote the music, for the 1951 family Christmas card.
- Alfred's father, the Reverend Bates G. Burt, an Episcopal priest in Michigan, began the card carol custom.
- Hutson was organist at Bates Burt's church and took over the lyric writing around 1950.
- Alfred Burt was a jazz trumpeter and arranger, including work with the Alvino Rey orchestra.
- He died on February 7, 1954, at the age of thirty three.
- The 1954 album The Christmas Mood brought a group of the Burt carols to a wider public.
- The full lyric is under copyright. The central idea is that children picture the child with a familiar face.
Top 5 most popular renditions
The Christmas Mood
1954
The ten inch album issued for Christmas 1954 was the doorway out of the Burt family's address book. Listeners who had never received a Michigan card could finally hear the series as a set, with Some Children See Him among the carols Alfred had set in his last years. The singing is mid century and sincere, closer to a polished church ensemble than to a jazz band, which tells you how completely he changed languages when he wrote home. The disc is a historical object as well as a performance. It is how a private custom went public in the year of his death.
The Christmas Mood
Andy Williams
1965
Williams included the carol on Merry Christmas, the 1965 album that also carried his brighter seasonal hits. He sings Hutson's pictures in a clear television baritone, with an arrangement that stays tender instead of swinging. The performance put the card carol on the same shelf as much more famous repertoire, which is what a standard needs in order to be found by accident. He does not dramatize the theology. He lets the changing faces be a list you can follow, which is what the lyric is.
Andy Williams
Tennessee Ernie Ford
late 1950s
Ford recorded Burt material, including this song, on his album The Star Carol, bringing a country and gospel warmth to the card series. His lower voice makes the welcome sound pastoral in the church sense, a parson's lyric sung by a man listeners already trusted with hymns. The late 1950s timing matters. It shows the carols did not wait a generation to leave the classical choir lane. They moved at once into popular religious records, which is part of why church soloists still feel free to program them.
Tennessee Ernie Ford
James Taylor
2006
Taylor's recording, on the widely released James Taylor At Christmas, treats the melody as a quiet American art song. Guitar and a restrained band leave the sentences bare. His familiar voice carries none of the 1950s choir manners, and the text does not need them. The performance proves the card can survive a singer associated with confession and calm rather than with Christmas spectacle. Listeners who discover Hutson's idea through him are still hearing 1951. The production is only the new envelope.
James Taylor
George Winston
1982
On the solo piano album December, Winston plays the carol without words, and the tune still communicates a rocking gentleness. An instrumental rendition cannot state the faces, so it depends on listeners who know the title or will look it up. That is a fair use of a famous lyric song. The piano also reveals Alfred Burt's craft apart from Hutson's images: the line has its own consolation. Heard after a choral verse in concert, the piano can repeat the welcome without repeating the words, which are still under copyright and do not need to be read aloud in full.
George Winston
Sheet music
A placeholder stands in the frame below. Swap the image for a licensed page of the score, and point the link at the download you want singers to use.
Notes for singers
If you place Some Children See Him in a December service, a school program, or a living room sing, teach Some Children See Him before you add harmony. A confident melody lets guests enter on the refrain. Say the names when you introduce it. The words are credited to Wihla Hutson, and the music to Alfred Burt. The year to remember is 1951, and the place to name is Michigan.
This sits in the library as a sacred carol. Let that tradition set the tempo. A lullaby loses its point if it is hurried. A dance carol loses its point if every syllable is precious. Leave a breath at the end of the verse so the next line feels chosen rather than chased.
Wihla Hutson wrote the words, and Alfred Burt wrote the music, for the 1951 family Christmas card. Hold that fact in the introduction you speak, not only in a program note. Alfred's father, the Reverend Bates G. Burt, an Episcopal priest in Michigan, began the card carol custom. Those two details give a listener a reason to hear the song as a made thing, not as wallpaper.
When the group is small, one voice can carry the verse and everyone can take the refrain. When the group is a choir, decide in advance whether you are telling a story or painting a picture. Story songs want clear words. Picture songs can bloom. Some Children See Him will tell you which it is after a single unaccompanied read through.
Questions readers ask
Wihla Hutson wrote the lyric, and Alfred Burt composed the music, for the Burt family's 1951 Christmas card. Alfred's father, the Reverend Bates G. Burt, had started the custom of an original carol each year. Hutson, organist at his Michigan church, supplied words once Alfred was writing all the music. It is a collaboration with a household history, not an anonymous folk carol.
They see the infant with a face like their own, and the lyric walks through more than one complexion and feature so that no single portrait wins. The love, not the painted face, is what Hutson finally ranks first. The idea is pictorial on purpose. It was written for a card, to be understood at a glance, and it still teaches without a footnote.
For years the carols lived inside a mailing list. In the early 1950s Hollywood friends began to hear them, helped by Alfred's own singing at a Christmas party. He died in February 1954. That Christmas, the album The Christmas Mood gathered the series for a general audience. Later singers such as Andy Williams and James Taylor kept individual titles, especially this one and Caroling, Caroling, in circulation.
The song is under copyright. A few lines can show the pattern, one child seeing one face, another child seeing another. The rest of the poem should be heard from a licensed recording or a legal score. The history of the Burt cards can be told fully without reprinting every verse Hutson wrote for that envelope.
Why this song endures
The song endures because the idea keeps arriving as news to someone. A child who has only seen one illustrated Bible hears, perhaps for the first time, that another child sees another face. The lyric is simple enough for that moment and serious enough that adults do not have to condescend when they sing along. Choir directors return to it when they want tenderness without a lullaby's sleepiness.
It also endures as a model of private art that escaped. A Christmas card is a small commission. Bates Burt's habit, Hutson's words, and Alfred's tunes produced a stack of carols now sung in rooms that never knew the address list. Some Children See Him is the one that states the family's hospitality most clearly. The envelope is gone. The welcome is the text.