Mary had a baby

Mary had a baby. African American spiritual*.  A variant of this spiritual appears with five stanzas in approximately ten hymnals in the United States:  1. Mary had a baby, my Lord. 2. What did she name him, my Lord? 3. She named him King Jesus, my Lord. 4. Where was he born, my Lord? 5. Born in a manger, my Lord.   Christmas in the antebellum South  With some exceptions, such as ‘Go tell it on the mountain’*, the nativity of Christ was not a common theme in African American spirituals. African American poet James Weldon Johnson* noted that spirituals ‘based on the birth or infancy of Jesus’ were ‘extremely rare’. He speculates that the ‘Negro preferred to think of Jesus as God, as...