Jingle Bells

James Lord Pierpont copyrighted this on 16 September 1857 and Oliver Ditson and Company published it in Boston that month, under the title The One Horse Open Sleigh. It was not written as a Christmas song. It is a sleigh racing song, and nothing in the verses mentions Christmas at all.

Where he wrote it is argued about. A plaque in Medford, Massachusetts says 1850 and credits the town's sleigh races. Pierpont later moved to Savannah, Georgia, where he was organist and music director at the Unitarian church and where he stayed, and Savannah claims the song too. The researcher Kyna Hamil makes the case that it was composed in Boston, before the move south in the fall of 1857. Nobody has settled it.

The chorus everybody sings is not the chorus he printed. Pierpont's 1857 refrain has a substantially different melody, and where the simpler one came from is unknown. It is on record by 1898, which is the oldest surviving recording of the song. This page carries the sung chorus, because that is the tune a room joins in on. Both are long out of copyright.

In 1965 it became the first song broadcast from space, when the Gemini VI astronauts Tom Stafford and Wally Schirra pulled out a smuggled harmonica and a set of sleigh bells and played it to mission control as a Christmas prank.

It is thirty two bars, which is long for a carol, and it is easier than it looks because the chorus says the same eight bars twice with a different last two. The verse is the harder half. It opens on a leap from the open D course up to the B at the second fret of the A course, comes back around three more times, and the changes underneath it move more than a carol usually does: the A minor in the fifth bar and the A seventh in the chorus are what make it sound like a nineteenth century parlor piece instead of a nursery rhyme. Those are also why the Jam has no chart for this one, since the band plays plain boom-chuck in three chords.

On a mandolin the whole song is in first position and the only stretch is the F sharp at the fourth fret of the D course under the held note in the sixth bar. The place to slow down is the dotted quarter in the chorus, on the word ride and again in the bar that answers it: give the long note its full length and clip the eighth after it, because that little limp is the whole rhythm of the refrain.