The Man Behind the Song: James Lord Pierpont
Pierpont’s Early Life and Family
James Lord Pierpont was born on April 25, 1822, in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of the Reverend John Pierpont, a prominent Unitarian minister, poet, and outspoken abolitionist. The elder Pierpont was well known in New England reform circles, which makes his son’s later life choices all the more striking.
The Pierpont family had powerful connections. James’s sister Juliet married Junius Spencer Morgan, a wealthy banker whose son — James’s nephew — was none other than John Pierpont Morgan, the financier who would reshape American industry. Despite this proximity to extraordinary wealth, James Pierpont spent most of his life pursuing it unsuccessfully.
California Gold Rush and Return to Boston
In 1849, like thousands of other young men, Pierpont headed west to seek his fortune in the California Gold Rush. He found little gold but managed some modest success as a daguerreotype photographer in San Francisco — until an 1851 fire destroyed his shop and left him broke once again. He returned to Boston empty-handed.
This biographical detail matters for the “Jingle Bells” story because it casts serious doubt on one of the most persistent claims about the song. A plaque at 19 High Street in Medford, Massachusetts, claims Pierpont wrote the song there in 1850. But in 1850, Pierpont was in California, not sitting in a Medford tavern. As Boston University researcher Kyna Hamill has noted, it also makes little sense that a songwriter who needed income would write a popular song and then wait seven years to publish it.
Back in Boston, Pierpont scraped together a living writing songs for minstrel performers. His first composition for John Ordway’s troupe was “The Returned Californian” (1852), a probably autobiographical song about a man who failed to find fortune out West.
Confederate Ties and Legacy
Pierpont’s life took a different direction during the Civil War. Despite his father’s passionate abolitionism, James moved to Savannah, Georgia, in late 1857, married a Southern woman, and became a committed supporter of the Confederacy. He composed songs for the Confederate cause, including “Strike for the South” and “We Conquer or Die!” He served as a company clerk in the Confederate army — his father, meanwhile, served the Union as a chaplain — and never returned north. He died in Winter Haven, Florida, on August 5, 1893, largely forgotten.
Where Was “Jingle Bells” Written? The Great Dispute
The question of where Pierpont actually composed “Jingle Bells” has sparked a rivalry that persists to this day. Two cities claim the song, a third has emerged from academic research, and none can prove its case definitively.
The Medford Claim
Medford, Massachusetts, has the most visible claim. The plaque at 19 High Street in Medford Square states that Pierpont wrote the song there in 1850, inspired by the lively sleigh races along Salem Street. The town hosts an annual Jingle Bell Walk/Run, and “Mrs. Otis Waterman” is named on the plaque as a witness to the composition.
The problems with this claim are significant. Pierpont was almost certainly in California in 1850, not Medford. The earliest photographic evidence of sleigh racing on Salem Street dates to the 1870s. And the claim itself appears to be a twentieth-century invention — the first assertion that the song was written in Medford appeared in a Boston Globe article in 1946, more than fifty years after Pierpont’s death.
The Savannah Claim
Savannah, Georgia, offers a competing narrative. The Unitarian Universalist Church of Savannah — where Pierpont’s brother, the Reverend John Pierpont Jr., served as pastor — calls itself “the Jingle Bells Church.” The Savannah claim holds that Pierpont wrote and first performed the song there in 1857, leading a singalong at the church.
The Savannah claim has its own difficulties. The song’s lyrics describe a New England winter landscape — dashing through snow, one-horse open sleighs — that has little to do with subtropical Georgia. Whatever memories Pierpont drew on, they were almost certainly Massachusetts memories.
What Research Actually Shows
Kyna Hamill, a senior lecturer at Boston University who has studied the song’s history extensively, has proposed a third possibility: that Pierpont was most likely living in a rooming house in downtown Boston, not far from the Old State House, in the early summer of 1857 — between careers and about to move south to Savannah. Hamill’s research, based on period directories and contemporary publications, makes the Boston hypothesis the most strongly supported of the three claims, though it remains a hypothesis rather than a documented fact.
What is not in dispute is that Pierpont drew on memories of New England sleigh rides when writing the song. The melody, the imagery, the jingle of harness bells on a winter road — these are Massachusetts scenes, regardless of which address he was sitting at when he put pen to paper. The song was copyrighted on September 16, 1857, with “J. Pierpont” listed as songwriter.
From “One Horse Open Sleigh” to Christmas Standard
First Performance and Original Context
The first documented performance of the song took place on September 15, 1857, at Ordway Hall on Washington Street in Boston. The performer was Johnny Pell, a member of Ordway’s Aeolians, a minstrel troupe. The song was billed under its original title, “One Horse Open Sleigh,” and was one of about a dozen songs Pierpont wrote for Ordway’s performers.
It is important to acknowledge the context: Ordway Hall was a minstrel venue, and the troupe performed parts of their show in blackface, billed as “Dandy Darkies.” This was a common and widely popular form of entertainment in mid-nineteenth-century America, though it is rightly understood today as deeply racist. The first public performance of what would become one of the world’s most beloved songs took place in that setting.
Scholars like Hamill have explored what this context means for the song’s legacy. Some have argued that the connection to minstrelsy taints the song itself; others point out that the lyrics contain no racial content and that the song long ago transcended its original performance context. The song’s later cultural life does not erase its original performance context — it explains why modern audiences encounter “Jingle Bells” differently than nineteenth-century listeners did.
Two years later, in 1859, Oliver Ditson and Company republished the song under a new title: “Jingle Bells; or, The One Horse Open Sleigh.” The cover now featured a drawing of sleigh bells draped in snow around the title. It was this second publication that gave the song the name the world would come to know, though the subtitle preserved Pierpont’s original title. Over time, “The One Horse Open Sleigh” faded from use, and “Jingle Bells” became the song’s sole identity.
Not Originally a Christmas Song
Here is a fact that surprises most people: there is no mention of Christmas, December, the holidays, or gift-giving anywhere in “Jingle Bells.” The song is about sleigh riding — the speed, the cold air, the sound of bells on a harness, and (in the later verses) flirting and crashing into snowbanks.
A persistent claim holds that Pierpont wrote the song for a Thanksgiving church service. According to Snopes, this assertion began circulating in the mid-1980s through syndicated newspaper Christmas quizzes, but there is no demonstrable evidence linking the song to Thanksgiving specifically. What we can say is that the song was first performed in September 1857 and had no connection to any particular holiday.
The song also had a life in drinking establishments. Some historians have described it as a drinking song, noting that patrons would clink their glasses when the word “bells” appeared. The lyrics themselves — with their depiction of young men and women sleighing together, getting “upsot” (overturned) in snowdrifts, and racing their horses — describe the kind of boisterous winter outing that often involved alcohol.
“Jingle Bells” did not become a Christmas song until the 1860s and 1870s, when choirs began incorporating it into holiday repertoires. By the 1880s, it appeared in parlor-song and college anthologies. The transformation was gradual and probably had more to do with the song’s winter imagery than any intentional holiday marketing.
The Verses Most People Have Never Heard
Almost everyone can sing the chorus and first verse of “Jingle Bells.” Almost no one knows there are three more verses, and they tell a considerably wilder story than the cheerful dash through the snow.
The second verse introduces a young woman — “Miss Fanny Bright” — who joins the narrator for a sleigh ride. The horse is “lean and lank,” misfortune seems to be its lot, and predictably, the sleigh overturns in a snowdrift. The original 1857 text uses the word “upsot,” a dialectal past tense of “upset.”
The third verse finds the narrator sprawled on his back in the snow while another gentleman drives by in his own sleigh and laughs at the scene. The fourth verse shifts to a direct invitation: go grab a fast horse — “two forty as his speed,” a racing term — take the girls out, and sing this sleighing song.
The forgotten verses paint a livelier, more irreverent picture than the sanitized first verse suggests. They describe young people racing, flirting, crashing, and getting back up again — a winter scene that has more in common with a night out than a church service. This may be one reason the later verses faded from popular memory as the song became associated with family-friendly Christmas celebrations.
The Song That Conquered the World
Early Recordings and Rising Fame
The first known recording of “Jingle Bells” was made in 1889 on an Edison cylinder. That recording is now lost, but an 1898 recording by the Edison Male Quartette survives — a Christmas medley titled “Sleigh Ride Party” that includes the song. This 1898 recording is believed to be one of the earliest surviving Christmas records.
In the early twentieth century, “Jingle Bells” cemented its status as a Christmas standard. Bing Crosby recorded it with the Andrews Sisters in 1943, producing one of the song’s most iconic versions. Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Dean Martin, the Beatles, and hundreds of other artists followed. The song proved endlessly adaptable — it works as jazz, pop, country, rock, choral arrangement, or children’s singalong. Few compositions in any genre can claim that range.
The First Song Broadcast from Space
On December 16, 1965, astronauts Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford were aboard Gemini 6A, completing the first crewed rendezvous in orbit with Gemini 7. As the mission neared its end, Stafford radioed mission control with a deadpan report: he had spotted an unidentified flying object in a polar orbit, traveling north to south.
Then Schirra pulled out a Hohner “Little Lady” harmonica — just four inches long — and Stafford produced a set of small sleigh bells. They played “Jingle Bells,” making it the first song performed in space. The instruments, which the astronauts had smuggled aboard with dental floss and Velcro to keep them from floating away, were donated to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in 1967, where they remain on display today.
The prank perfectly captured the song’s essence: even in the most extraordinary circumstances, those few familiar notes can make people smile.
Parodies, Adaptations, and Enduring Influence
The cultural reach of “Jingle Bells” extends well beyond the original. Schoolyard parodies — most famously “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells” — have been passed down through generations of children with the kind of oral-tradition durability that folklorists find fascinating. “Aussie Jingle Bells” reimagines the song for a Southern Hemisphere summer Christmas, complete with kangaroos. Bobby Helms’s “Jingle Bell Rock” (1957), while a distinct composition, built its hook directly on the original’s melodic DNA.
The song has been recorded in virtually every genre and language. It has appeared in countless films, television specials, and advertisements. It is, by most measures, the single most recognizable secular Christmas song in the world — remarkable for a tune that its composer apparently dashed off for a Boston minstrel show and never intended for Christmas at all.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who wrote “Jingle Bells”?
James Lord Pierpont wrote the song, originally titled “The One Horse Open Sleigh.” It was copyrighted on September 16, 1857, and published by Oliver Ditson & Company of Boston.
Was “Jingle Bells” originally a Christmas song?
No. The lyrics make no mention of Christmas, December, or the holidays. The song describes winter sleigh riding and was first performed in September 1857. It became associated with Christmas gradually during the 1860s and 1870s, likely because of its winter imagery.
Was “Jingle Bells” written for Thanksgiving?
This is a popular claim, but according to Snopes, there is no demonstrable evidence linking the song to Thanksgiving. The claim appears to have originated in syndicated newspaper quizzes in the 1980s.
Where was “Jingle Bells” written?
This is genuinely disputed. Medford, Massachusetts, and Savannah, Georgia, both claim the song. Boston University researcher Kyna Hamill’s work suggests it was most likely written in Boston in the summer of 1857, drawing on Pierpont’s memories of New England sleigh rides.
When was “Jingle Bells” first performed?
The first documented performance was on September 15, 1857, at Ordway Hall in Boston, by minstrel performer Johnny Pell.
What are the lesser-known verses of “Jingle Bells”?
The original song has four verses, though most know only the first. The remaining verses describe a sleigh ride with a young woman named Fanny Bright, a crash into a snowdrift, and an invitation to go sleighing — a livelier and more irreverent story than the familiar first verse suggests.
Was “Jingle Bells” really the first song in space?
Yes. On December 16, 1965, astronauts Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford played “Jingle Bells” on a harmonica and sleigh bells during the Gemini 6A mission, making it the first song performed in space. The instruments are now at the Smithsonian.
A struggling songwriter scribbling verses in a Boston rooming house could not have imagined where those sleigh bells would carry his song. From a minstrel stage to parlor pianos, from Edison cylinders to astronauts’ flight suits, “Jingle Bells” has traveled farther than any melody of its era — and further than its author ever did. The song outlived its creator, outlived the sleigh-racing culture that inspired it, and shed every association except the one it was never written for: Christmas. That may be the most remarkable thing about it. What began as a brisk little tune about a fast horse and a cold night became the sound of the season itself — proof that some songs find their true purpose long after they leave the songwriter’s hands.
