Fum, Fum, Fum is a traditional Catalan Christmas carol. It was first documented by the folklorist Joaquim Pecanins in 1904, who had heard the song at the Christmas Eve midnight mass in Prats de Lluçanès. However, the song's origins stretch back to the 16th or 17th century, according to folklorist Joan Amades. In 1922, the musicologist Kurt Schindler first translated the song into English, publishing it in one of the largest musical publishing houses of the era, Oliver Ditson and Company in Boston. Spanish-language versions are also popular today, and it is included in many traditional Spanish Christmas carol collections.

Meaning

Before being written down in the early 20th century, the song was a typical example of a cançó de les mentides (English: "song of lies"), appropriate for the debaucherous way in which Christmas was celebrated in the 18th and 19th centuries. Lyrics were improvised each time it was sung, with each verse more absurd than the last. Some of this survives in the modern Catalan version, which in one verse asks qui dirà més gran mentida? (English: "who will tell a bigger lie?"), while a different verse references shepherds eating eggs and sausage—an explicit reference to fellatio. Indeed, the ethnomusicologist Jaume Ayats notes that the word "fum" is the imperative form of the verb "fúmer", which in a literal sense means "to fornicate" but can be used as a slang form of saying "to do". In fact, the original song was sung with "fot, fot, fot", from the verb "fotre" instead, a less polite verb with the same meaning. When Pecanins first documented the song, he changed the lyrics to "fum, fum, fum", thought to be more acceptable to a broader audience. Other sources have suggested a more innocent meaning to the lyrics. Since the word "fum" also means "smoke" in Catalan, it has been suggested the name may simply refer to the smoke rising from a chimney as seen from afar, or, as indicated in the New Oxford Book of Carols, "may imitate the sound of a drum (or perhaps the strumming of a guitar)". Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) defines "fum" as "to play upon a fiddle," quoting Ben Jonson, "Follow me, and fum as you go."

Lyrics

Foreign-language versions typically do not literally translate the original lyrics. For example, the typical English version of the carol, created by Alice Parker and Robert Shaw in 1953 does not take into account the satirical substratum of the original. It was this version that popularized the carol in the United States and other English-speaking areas, though there are several other versions in English as well.