Joseph Mohr and Franz Xaver Gruber · Key of G · Public domain
Opens in the Chord Sheet Maker: transpose to your key, change chords, add strumming patterns, or print a clean copy. No account needed to start.
Silent Night is the rare carol with a birth certificate, and the story belongs to guitar players. On Christmas Eve 1818, in the Austrian village of Oberndorf near Salzburg, the young priest Joseph Mohr brought a poem he had written two years earlier to Franz Xaver Gruber, the schoolteacher and organist in the next town, and asked for a melody for two voices and guitar. Gruber composed it in a few hours, and the two men premiered "Stille Nacht" at midnight mass that same evening, Mohr singing and playing the guitar. Tradition says the church organ was out of commission, which is why the world's most famous carol was written for our instrument.
The song traveled with Tyrolean folk singers across Europe and to America, where the New York clergyman John Freeman Young published the standard three-verse English translation in 1859. It has been sung across the trenches in the spontaneous Christmas truce of 1914, declared an intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO in 2011, and translated into more than 300 languages. Words and melody are both long in the public domain.
Three chords, G, C, and D7, in a slow 3/4. Count "one-two-three" like a lullaby and keep everything gentle: this is a song written to be played quietly at midnight. A simple bass-strum-strum works, and fingerpickers can echo the 1818 premiere by arpeggiating each chord (thumb on the bass, fingers rolling the treble strings). Capo up if G sits low for your singers, or open the chart in the Chord Sheet Maker and transpose it in one click.
Playing for Christmas? Greensleeves (What Child Is This) guitar tab with audio
Further reading: The Silent Night Association, Salzburg (history of the song)
