Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The coolest Christmas film cameo of all time occurs in Scrooged, Richard Donner’s 1988 reworking of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol starring Bill Murray as a ruthless TV executive. Striding down a New York street, the 1980s Ebenezer shoves his way through a small crowd listening to a group of buskers. “Why don’t the cops do something about this?” he demands. Then he snarls at the man playing trumpet: “Did you learn this song yesterday?” The trumpeter is, of course, Miles Davis. And the carol getting a kind of blue, kind of groovy treatment from the jazz legend is “We Three Kings of Orient Are”.The first American carol to achieve global success, “We Three Kings” was written by John Henry Hopkins Jr for a New York City pageant in the late 1850s. A journalist-turned-clergyman and ecclesiologist, born in Pittsburgh in 1820, Hopkins was the son of a German mother and an Irish father who became the Bishop of Vermont. He was ordained in 1850 and was teaching church music at New York’s General Theological Seminary at the time he composed the carol. Unusually for the period, he wrote both words and music. But Hopkins was quite the Renaissance man: he also studied law, edited the Church Journal and designed stained-glass windows, wrought-iron tombs and ecclesiastical seals. But in the UK the carol is most enjoyed by schoolchildren who love singing their own rather naughty playground versions — which have varied across decades and regions. Most begin by placing the three kings “one in a taxi, one in a car” with the third “on a scooter, blowing his hooter/Smoking a big cigar”. In Birmingham they were “heading for Perry Barr” (a city suburb). But in the 1960s and ’70s northern kids sang: “We four Beatles of Liverpool are/John in a taxi, Paul in a car/George on his scooter tooting his hooter/Following Ringo Starr.” Londoners sniggered over a version that ran: “We three kings of Leicester Square/Selling ladies’ underwear/It’s fantastic, no elastic/Falling down everywhere.”In 1993 the spoof rock band Spinal Tap recorded a fractious version which recounted how the kings’ rubber cigar “was loaded/it exploded”. During the Covid pandemic, three baritones from Devana Parish Church of Scotland, Aberdeen, raised spirits with a quarantine version beginning: “We three kings are six feet apart/We’ll hand gel before we depart.”Today my own teenage son, raised in Essex, rejoices each Christmas in a version which ends with the Magi “necking Stella Artois”. Let us know your memories of ‘We Three Kings’ in the comments section belowThe paperback edition of ‘The Life of a Song: The stories behind 100 of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by ChambersMusic credits: King’s College, Cambridge; Capitol; Elektra; A&M; Decca; Asthmatic Kitty; Heinz; The Verve/Universal
