"Bright Morning Stars are Rising" is a traditional American folk song/hymn from the Appalachian region. I don't know the history of this. In a lot of Internet discussions, no one can come up with a source older than the 20th century. It is not included in any of the shape-note hymnals in my collection. "Bright Morning Stars" appears in Ruth Crawford Seeger's American Folk Songs for Christmas (1953), where she credits it to "AAFS 1379 A1", that is, from the Archive of American Folksong at the Library of Congress. "1379 A1" identifies the original field recording where the source is identified as "Kentucky". The song also appears on the Folkways LP of the same title (FC 7553), sung and played by her daughters Peggy, Barbara and Penny, assisted by a group of children from the South Boston Music School. Even though Seeger included it in a book of Christmas songs, there is nothing in it that is actually about Christmas and I have, therefore, included it here in Hymns. Some people find a similarity to "Watch the Stars", a song from St. Helena Island, South Carolina, one of the Sea Islands of Georgia and Sourth Carolina where slaves (and later, the descendants of slaves) kept alive a strong tradition of song and story going back to African styles. Except for the repetitions, the melody and lyrics are quite different from "Bright Morning Stars". In 1968, Robin Christenson rediscovered the song in the Seeger book and arranged it for four voices. Robin & Ellen Christenson and Tony & Irene Saletan sang it at the 1968 Fox Hollow Festival, where it was picked up by many other singers. It rapidly entered the common repertoire and, within a few years, was recorded by The Pennywhistlers, The Young Tradition, Pentangle and on Tony & Irene's Folk Legacy LP. It has also been widely sung in Kentucky. It was recorded by the Stanley Brothers and also by the Kentucky singer George Tucker.