Jingle Bells A Seasonal Song of the Week by James Pierpont November 24, 2013 Print Send RSS Share Share Last week, National Review held a fundraiser with me, Jonah Goldberg, Jay Nordlinger, Jim Geraghty and Kevin Williamson holding forth at Bostons terrific Harpoon Brewery. Alas, due to an ill-timed car accident and some pathetic concerns about internal bleeding, I never got to sample any of their fine brews, so I may have to head down to Harpoons other brewery at Windsor, Vermont, and hold a make-believe fundraiser for myself. At any rate, during the panel session, White Christmas came up, and Jay asked me if there were any Thanksgiving songs. I said yes - Jingle Bells. Because lets face it, anothing says Thanksgiving like a chorus of Jingle Bells. This essay is excerpted from my book A Song For The Season - and dont forget my own extra-jingly version of Jingle Bells with Miss Jessica Martin, one of 12 great tracks for your listening pleasure on our Christmas CD Making Spirits Bright. And Happy Thanksgiving! Dashing through the snow In a one horse open sleigh Oer the fields we go Laughing all the way... As well they might. Just in time for Thanksgiving, here comes, er, Jingle Bells - which was written not for the Yuletide season but, allegedly, for Thanksgiving. In Boston, in the fall of 1857, the citys leading music publisher, Oliver Ditson, introduced the world to a new song called The One-Horse Open Sleigh. Before White Christmas and Rudolph came along in the Forties, before Winter Wonderland and Santa Claus Is Coming To Town in the Thirties, the most popular secular seasonal song in the American catalogue was Jingle Bells, written before the Civil War but such a potent brand a century later that it was still spawning bizarre mutated progeny with every new musical trend - Jingle Bell Boogie, Jingle Bell Mambo and, of course, Jingle Bell Rock. I notice a lot of album sleeves credit the writing of Jingle Bells to Anon. And you can see why theyd think that. It doesnt seem the kind of song youd need a professional to write, and its hard to imagine, say, Rodgers and Hammerstein, sitting down to rattle it off: Okay, well start off with Jingle Bells. Great. And then for the second line, how about Jingle Bells? Same words, but different notes maybe? Nah, why knock yourself out? And then for the third line well go with... Let me guess. Jingle...? Right, but this time we pull the old switcheroo and go with Jingle all the way. Great. By the way, when we say Jingle Bells, is that a type of bell? Or is it an injunction - Jingle, comma, Bells? Yet the song is not the work of Anon. Unlikely as it sounds, a real live songwriter did sit down one day and write Jingle Bells. His name was James Lord Pierpont and he wrote and published many other songs in his lifetime, among them The Colored Coquette and others lost to posterity, but a few that have survived, such as Our Battle Flag, a paean not to Old Glory but to the banner of the Confederacy. Every song but Jingle Bells was a flop. But, if youre going to be a one-hit wonder, Jingle Bells is the one hit to have. That merry jingle you hear this time of year isnt sleighbells but cash registers ringing up Christmas albums from country to rap, almost all of which contain some version or other of James Pierponts 150-year-old hit. He didnt live to benefit from the recording age, and by the time of his death in 1893, he was more or less penniless. Instead, he came from a wealthy family, and worked his way down to impoverishment. Question: Whats the connection between Jingle Bells and I Cant Get Started, the 1936 song by Vernon Duke and Ira Gershwin, introduced by Bob Hope as a suitor who cant land Eve Arden despite his many accomplishments? Answer: This - Ive flown around the world in a plane Ive settled revolutions in Spain The North Pole I have charted But I Cant Get Started With you... When J P Morgan bows, I just nod Green Pastures wanted me to play God The Siamese twins Ive parted Still I Cant Get Started With you… J Pierpont Morgan, archetypal American plutocrat, was the nephew of the J Pierpont who wrote Jingle Bells. The Pierponts are an old family who can trace their roots back to 8th century France and Charlemagne. They came over to England with William the Conqueror in 1066, and by the 18th century were established in the American colonies. One Pierpont helped found Yale, another helped found the Unitarian Church. But James Lord Pierpont, born in Boston in 1822, was a different kind of Pierpont. At the age of ten he was sent to school in New Hampshire, from where he wrote his mom a letter about a sleigh ride through the northern snows, the first recorded glimmer of his brightest idea. Four years later he ran away to sea aboard a ship called the Shark, which took him way down south to Latin America, thence to Honolulu and on to Oregon. That was the first recorded instance of another recurring activity in Pierponts life - running away. James was the son of the Reverend John Pierpont, Unitarian minister in Medford, Massachusetts, also poet, Abolitionist and Prohibitionist, and prone, on the last two subjects, to fulminate at length and at volume. James married a young lady from Troy, New York (hometown of the author of another 19th century seasonal blockbuster: Twas The Night Before Christmas). He tried his hand at the grocery business and at insurance, but without success and returned to Medford. In 1848, he ran away again, leaving his wife and children with the grandparents, and trying his luck in the California gold rush. His land deal disappeared with his pardnah, his dairy herd was sold out from under him, his photography business burned down. So back to Massachusetts, and his real interest: music. He began writing numbers in the genres of the day - polkas and minstrel songs - and they were professionally published in Boston. But it was time to run away again - this time to Georgia, where his brother had gone to be minister. As before, Millicent and the children stayed in Medford, and the Bostonian sheet music began identifying composer Pierpont as a gentleman of Savannah. How gentlemanly he was is a matter of speculation. Accepting a position as organist at his brothers church, James took up with a Southern belle who became his second wife. Unfortunately, hes believed to have taken up with her before his first wife had departed this mortal coil. At any rate, Millie passed on in 1856, and a year later James married Eliza Jane, an occasion followed very swiftly by the birth of a child and also by the birth of a new song: Jingle Bells Jingle Bells, Jingle all the way Oh, what joy it is to ride In a one horse open sleigh... In that first version, it was joy to be had in the sleigh. Fun came later. And heres where the story turns murky. Where was Jingle Bells written? Medford claims it as its own and has a ton of anecdotage to go with the song: One day, James Pierpont went to the Seccomb boardinghouse, whose landlady, Mrs Otis Waterman, kindly allowed him to play the neighborhoods only piano, which belonged to one of her tenants, a local music teacher called William Webber. James sat down and, after some fiddling with the tune here and there, plunked out: Dum-dum-dum Dum-dum-dum Dum-dum dum-dum-dum… Whereupon Mrs Waterman pronounced it a very merry jingle. At which point Pierpont got the idea to add words, and turn his jingle into a song about the jingly bells on the cutters - the one-horse open sleighs - that the local lads liked to race along Salem Street from Medford Square to Malden Square a century and a half ago. Hence: Just get a bobtailed bay Two forty as his speed Hitch him to an open sleigh And crack, youll take the lead... The Seccomb boardinghouse subsequently became the Simpson Tavern, outside of which for many years was an official plaque marking it as the birthplace of Jingle Bells. Alas, one winter some fellow came dashing through the snow on a one-blade open plow, and the plow blade damaged the plaque and it had to be removed. Still, plaque or not, Medford claims the song as its own. A couple of decades on, however, Savannah decided itd like to cut itself a piece of the jingle action. Savannah doesnt really need another native-son songwriter: its the birthplace of Johnny Mercer (see Song of the Week #89, #96 and #101), which is why Clint Eastwoods film of the Savannah-set Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil has an all-Mercer score. Nonetheless, Georgia jingle scholars pointed out that James Pierpont was certainly living down south at the time Jingle Bells was published. Big deal, says Medford. He spent summers back in Massachusetts, and in any case the towns position is that he wrote the song back in 1850. As to the first point, why would you write a sleighing song in summer? As to the second, why would a fellow perpetually short of cash and lurching from one failed business to another sit on what hed been told was a surefire hit for seven years? The Savannah musicologist Milton Rahn asserts the Medford claim to be obvious nonsense and says Jingle Bells was written in a house, since demolished, near Whitaker and Oglethorpe Streets. But why would a Northerner reinventing himself as a Southern gentleman (and so indifferent to his Bay State roots that hed all but abandoned his children) feel so nostalgic as to write a song for New England winters? Well never know for sure. But what I find oddest are the claims of Christmas Songs Made In America and many similar books that the song was written for his fathers Sunday School class on Thanksgiving 1857. Im willing to believe that at Thanksgiving a young mans fancy turns to snow, at least in those distant days before Al Gores global warming project sent the mercury rising. But no Massachusetts Sunday School is going to teach its charges a song whose lyrical preoccupations are racing, gambling and courting: A day or two ago I thought Id take a ride And soon Miss Fannie Bright Was seated by my side... Now the ground is white Go it while youre young Take the girls tonight… Thats good advice, but not the kind youre likely to hear from your Sunday School teacher. It seems easier to take James Pierpont at his word. He wrote Jingle Bells not as a Sunday School song but as a sleighing song: Take the girls tonight And sing this sleighing song… That was almost a genre in itself back then, though nobody seemed to need any others after Jingle Bells established itself, after which all the others seemed to melt away like April snow. Incidentally, isnt Miss Fannie Bright the perfect evocative 19th century name for a courting song? Not to be confused with Miss Fannie Brice of Funny Girl fame, although The Barbra Streisand Christmas Album comes perilously close. On that album, Miss Streisand sings some songs painfully slowly and others so fast theyre reduced to gibberish. Silent Night falls into the former category, Jingle Bells the latter, and the Fannie Bright verse comes off particularly badly: The horse was lean and lank Misfortune seemed his lot He got into a drifted bank And then we got upsot... Upsot? queries Barbra in best Brooklynese. In fact, Pierpont wrote it as upset, which is the kind of non-rhyme poets of the day favored. Im not sure I entirely get the point of the Streisand version. I dig Sammy Davis nightclubby take and over the years Ive warmed up to Sinatras arrangement with a goofy Gordon Jenkins background spellalong shoehorned in - I love those j-i-n-g-le bells - but, Rat Pack-wise, I reckon Dino has the edge. And so a song for a very particular north-eastern 19th century activity which most folks have never tried and never will has managed to remain the secular Christmas song most sung by Americans - and Canadians, Britons, and even French (Vive le temps dhiver). The best part of a century later, Leroy Anderson and Mitchell Parish were still getting mileage out of a kind of son-of-Jingle Bells: Just hear those sleigh bells jing-a-ling Ring-ting-ting-a-ling, too Come on, its lovely weather For a Sleigh Ride together With you... But ask not for whom the bell jingles, it jingles for thee. In 1859, the same year Oliver Ditson republished The One-Horse Open Sleigh as Jingle Bells, the Unitarian Church in Savannah closed. James Pierponts brother, like his father, was an ardent Abolitionist and, as the country headed toward war, the Reverend Pierpont found fewer takers for his message in Georgia. He returned to Massachusetts to join his pa. James, on the other hand, remained down south, and, when war came, not only joined the Confederate army but endeavored to provide it with an entire catalogue of marching songs, including Strike For The South and We Conquer Or Die. His father, the Reverend John Pierpont, was by then working for the Treasury Department, and had taken his grandchildren - James children by his first marriage - to Washington with him. Years later, Mary Pierpont recalled how kindly shed been treated by President Lincoln on her visits to the White House as the granddaughter of a celebrated Abolitionist and daughter of a secessionist in the Confederate cavalry. The Civil War marked James Pierponts final break with the New England hed hymned in his sleighing song. Afterwards, he worked at this, he worked at that, and carried on writing songs that went nowhere: I like the sound of The Know-Nothing Polka, which may rank as his best title aside from Jingle Bells. But its also a not inaccurate summation of his business acumen. Pierpont died in 1893 in Winter Haven, Florida, and asked to be buried in Savannah, where his grave at Laurel Grove Cemetery is decorated with a Confederate veterans marker. The signs directing you to it, however, all bear the words Jingle Bells, and his brothers old church in Savannah is now the Jingle Bell Church. I love sleigh rides, though it helps if the one-horse open sleigh is a real sleigh and not, as it often is in my part of New Hampshire, a large crate on runners. But James Pierponts advice still holds: Go it while youre young. You may not have Miss Fannie Bright seated by your side, but oer the fields youll go, just as that ten-year old boy did at his school in the Granite State all those years ago. Happy Thanksgiving - and go it while youre young: Bells on bobtail ring Making spirits bright What fun it is to ride and sing A sleighing song tonight! Excerpted from Marks book A Song For The Season - and dont forget: Mark & Jessicas brand new recording of Jingle Bells is available not only at the Steyn Store but also at iTunes, Amazon and CD Baby
Posted on: Fri, 29 Nov 2013 13:23:45 +0000
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