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Piano sheet music for kids · Carol · Level 2: Left-hand chords
Up on the Housetop
Free beginner piano sheet music: C major, 4/4, 16 bars. Press Play to hear it on a real piano, slow it down, or hear one hand at a time; click any note to start from there; print it for the music stand.
About this arrangement
Benjamin Hanby’s 1864 Santa Claus song, and the easiest carol in this set: the whole tune sits in C position, from middle C up to G with a stretch up to A. What is new is the bouncing rhythm, a crotchet and then two quavers on “up on the” and “down through the”, and the crotchet rest after “click, click, click” in bar 14. The left hand plays the oom-pah pattern in C with chords in F, G7 and D minor, and in bar 14 it changes chord on every beat.
Practice tip: Clap “Up on the house-top” before you play: long, short-short, long, short-short. In bar 14 play the three “clicks” with a chord under each one, then lift both hands off for the rest.
The words
Up on the housetop reindeer pause, out jumps good old Santa Claus. Down through the chimney with lots of toys, all for the little ones, Christmas joys. Ho, ho, ho! Who wouldn't go? Ho, ho, ho! Who wouldn't go? Up on the housetop, click, click, click, down through the chimney with good Saint Nick.
A short history
Benjamin Hanby, the son of an Ohio bishop in the United Brethren church, wrote Up on the Housetop in 1864, during the American Civil War. He had already had a national hit with the anti-slavery ballad Darling Nelly Gray in 1856, and he wrote this one for Sunday-school children, publishing it in a children’s song magazine he edited in Chicago.
It is one of the first American Christmas songs about Santa Claus rather than the Nativity, and only Jingle Bells (1857) is older among the secular Christmas songs still commonly sung. The picture of reindeer landing on the roof and Santa coming down the chimney comes straight from the 1823 poem A Visit from St. Nicholas, which fixed those details in the American imagination.
Hanby died of tuberculosis in 1867, aged 33, and his home in Westerville, Ohio, is now a museum.
Quick facts
- Tune
- Benjamin R. Hanby, 1864
- Key
- C major, C position
- Time signature
- 4/4
- Length
- 16 bars
- Tempo
- Merrily, crotchet = 120
- Difficulty
- Level 2: Left-hand chords (piece 17 of 201)
- Type
- Carol
- Hands
- Both: melody in the right hand, chords in the left
- Copyright
- Public domain tune; arrangement by Digital Greenhouse, free for personal and classroom use
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