“Jingle Bells” is one of the best-known and commonly sung American songs in the world. It was written by James Lord Pierpont (1822–1893) and published under the title “One Horse Open Sleigh” in the autumn of 1857. It has been claimed that it was originally written to be sung by a Sunday school choir, or as a drinking song. Although it has no original connection to Christmas, it became associated with Christmas music and the holiday season in general decades after it was first performed by blackface minstrel performer Johnny Pell in Ordway Hall on September 16, 1857. Some area choirs adopted it as part of their repertoire in the 1860s and 1870s, and it was featured in a variety of parlor song and college anthologies in the 1880s. It was first recorded in 1889 on an Edison cylinder; this recording, believed to be the first Christmas record, is lost, but an 1898 recording also from Edison Records survives. It is an unsettled question where and when Pierpont originally composed the song that would become known as “Jingle Bells”. A plaque at 19 High Street in the center of Medford Square in Medford, Massachusetts, commemorates the “birthplace” of “Jingle Bells”, and claims that Pierpont wrote the song there in 1850, at what was then the Simpson Tavern. Previous local history narratives claim the song was inspired by the town’s popular sleigh races during the 19th century. The date of the song’s copyright suggests that Pierpont wrote the song in Medford, since by that date he was the organist and music director of the Unitarian Church in Savannah, Georgia, where his brother, Rev. John Pierpont Jr. served as Minister. In August 1857, Pierpont married Eliza Jane Purse, the daughter of the mayor of Savannah. Pierpont remained in Savannah and never went back North. The double-meaning of “upsot” was thought humorous, and a sleigh ride gave an unescorted couple a rare chance to be together, unchaperoned, in distant woods or fields, with all the opportunities that afforded. This “upset,” a term Pierpont transposed to “upsot,” became the climactic component of a sleigh-ride outing within the sleigh narrative
Songs with Banjo from Harold Hagler
