Jingle Bells: A Song History

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James Lord Pierpont (1822–1893), son of the Unitarian minister and abolitionist John Pierpont, wrote both words and music.[1][2] Oliver Ditson of Boston published it in 1857 as The One Horse Open Sleigh, dedicated to John P. Ordway, and it was reissued in 1859 under the title “Jingle Bells, or the One Horse Open Sleigh.”[1][3] The tune sung today departs from Pierpont’s original, most of all in the chorus.[2] Where he wrote it is disputed: a plaque in Medford, Massachusetts, marks the spot where he supposedly composed it, while Savannah, Georgia, where Pierpont was music director of his brother’s Unitarian church in the 1850s, claims it too.[1][4][5]

Hand-colored lithograph of a horse pulling a sleigh with two riders and milk cans past snowy farm buildings

Currier & Ives, Winter Morning in the Country, hand-colored lithograph, 1873. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

Research by Kyna Hamill of Boston University found that the earliest known performance was on 15 September 1857 at Ordway Hall, a blackface minstrel hall in Boston, where Johnny Pell sang it; she rejects the story that it was written in Medford in 1850.[4][6] In Hamill’s view the blackface association had faded by the twentieth century, when the song was collected in college glee and Christmas anthologies.[6] Pierpont settled in Savannah, married the daughter of the city’s mayor, and served with a Confederate cavalry regiment during the Civil War.[1][4][5]

On 16 December 1965 the Gemini 6 astronauts Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford, after radioing a mock report of an unidentified satellite, played it on a small Hohner harmonica and a set of sleigh bells, which the Smithsonian calls “the first musical interlude from space”; both instruments are now in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.[7][8]

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Sources

  1. Hymns and Carols of Christmas: "James Lord Pierpont".
  2. Hymns and Carols of Christmas: "Jingle Bells".
  3. IMSLP: "The One Horse Open Sleigh (Pierpont, James)".
  4. Boston University: "History of Jingle Bells".
  5. Historical Marker Database: "‘Jingle Bells’ Historical Marker".
  6. NPR: "The ‘Jingle Bells’ Song Has Roots in Minstrelsy".
  7. Smithsonian Music: "Tom Stafford’s Jingle Bells and Wally Schirra’s Harmonica".
  8. National Air and Space Museum: "Bells, Gemini 6".