This is an IHeart podcast.

This is our American stories, and we continue with our special Christmas season special.

Our next story comes to us for a man who's simply known as the History Guy.

His videos are watched by hundreds of thousands of people of all ages on YouTube.

The History Guy is also heard here at Our American Stories.

From its humble beginnings at an Austrian chapel in 1818,

Silent Night has become one of the most popular Christmas

hymns in the world.

Here's the history guy with the story of Silent Night.

Yosefus Francis Morr was born in the Prince Archbishop Brook of Salisbury, December 11th of 1792,

the son of an embroiderer and a mercenary soldier who abandoned the family before Yosef was born.

Born into poverty, a vicar at Salzburg Cathedral sought to his education and encouraged him in music,

where he became a singer and a violinist.

In 1811, Yosef joined the seminary, and in 1815 he was ordained a Roman Catholic priest.

In 1816, he was serving as assistant priest in the small town of Marifar, south of Salzburg,

where he penned a short six-stance of poem.

There is no record of him ever explaining what

inspired that poem exactly, but it might have been the beautiful still countryside around

mountainous mariafar, and the fourth stanza might have been referring to the difficult period of

the Napoleonic Wars. In 1818, two years later, that poem was set to music and played at midnight mass on Christmas,

in the Church of St. Nicholas, in the small town of Oberndorf, north of Salzburg.

Today that song is one of the world's most popular songs.

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