Songfacts®:

• This traditional Christmas carol is a simple account of Jesus' birth, as told in Luke 2:4-7, and describes the baby resting peacefully in a manger under a starry sky. But the origin of the enduring tune is anything but simple (long story short: no one really knows).
  
  When the first two verses started making the rounds in publications in the early 1880s, they were credited to the German Protestant reformer Martin Luther under the heading "Luther's Cradle Song." Luther's alleged authorship was eventually debunked, but not until several other publications perpetuated the false attribution. When James R. Murray included it in his 1887 collection Dainty Songs For Little Lads And Lasses, he noted that the hymn was "composed by Martin Luther for his children," accidentally giving Luther credit for his own melody.
  
  By the time the third stanza appeared in the 1892 collection Gabriel's Vineyard Songs, "Cradle Song," set to composer Charles H. Gabriel's melody, Luther was still being credited as the original lyricist and composer. Decades later, Bishop William F. Anderson claimed he knew the author of the third verse. While Anderson was serving as the Secretary of the Board of Education for the Methodist church from 1904 to 1908, he wanted to use "Away In A Manger" in a children's program and tasked Dr. John T. McFarland, the secretary of the Board of Sunday Schools, to write another verse involving embracing baby Jesus as the Christian savior.
  
  Bishop tells the story in Our hymnody; a manual of the Methodist hymnal (1937) by Robert Guy McCutchan: "He went to his office and within an hour brought me the third stanza beginning, 'Be near me, Lord Jesus, I ask Thee to stay.' I used it, which was the first time it was ever published. I am pleased to see that it is now being used very widely."
  
  The only problem with Bishop's story is that the third stanza had already appeared in Gabriel's Vineyard Songs many years before McFarland supposedly wrote it.
• In his 1945 essay on the history of "Away In A Manger," Richard Hill suggests the hymn's false attribution to Martin Luther may have come about because of a 400th anniversary celebration of his birth in 1883 when it could have been written as "a little play for children to act or a story about Luther celebrating Christmas with his children."
• After years of James R. Murray's melody being credited to Luther, it was yet again falsely attributed to another composer: Carl Mueller. As a result, Murray's melody, which is the most common version in the US, is called "Mueller." The UK favors an 1895 musical setting by William J. Kirkpatrick titled "Cradle Song."
• This was used on the TV series Mr. Bean in the 1992 episode "Merry Christmas, Mr. Bean." When a group of carolers arrive at the bumbling title character's door, Mr. Bean lets them sing the tune before he slams the door in their faces.
• The new age group Mannheim Steamroller, known for their rocked-out versions of Christmas tunes, recorded this in a gentle arrangement for their 2001 album, Christmas Extraordinaire.