Left, One of the only known photos of James Lord Pierpont. Morgan-to read a collection of letters between Pierpont, his father, and other family members, and to the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah. It has taken her to the Morgan Library in New York-Pierpont was the uncle of J.P. Over time, Hamill’s research into Pierpont’s story evolved from a volunteer project to serious research. “People who care about the truth thought it was interesting, and people who don’t just ignored it.” “It won’t change anything in the mind of the average Medfordian,” says John Anderson, president of the Historical Society & Museum. Last December, mildly concerned that messing with the song’s backstory could ruffle some Medford feathers, Hamill presented her initial findings to the local historical society. It has been recorded thousands of times-by everyone from the Beatles to Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops, and from Luciano Pavarotti to the Partridge Family to Pearl Jam. Today, “Jingle Bells” is one of the most recognizable American melodies. Soon after, he copyrighted the song, and in 1859 he re-copyrighted it as “Jingle Bells, or the One Horse Open Sleigh.” An American Classic It’s not known if the composer attended the debut performance, which was concurrent with his move to Savannah. “One Horse Open Sleigh” was presented regularly that fall, one of about a dozen songs that Pierpont wrote for Ordway’s performers. Then called “One Horse Open Sleigh,” it was performed by Johnny Pell, working with a troupe called Ordway’s Aeolians, who performed for half the show as “Dandy Darkies.” Ordway Hall, opposite the Old South Meeting House in Boston, was a hotspot for the then-popular entertainment of white men performing in blackface, offering a racist caricature of people of color as middle-class entertainment. “This was the playbill,” she says, handing over a copy from the Harvard Theater Collection at Houghton Library that puts the song’s first performance at impresario John Ordway’s Ordway Hall, on Washington Street in Boston, on September 15, 1857. “But-and this is where my town is going to be mad at me-it was absolutely not written in 1850 at the Simpson Tavern in Medford.” “I don’t have the definite answer to where he sat down and wrote the song,” Hamill says. He did enjoy some small measure of success as a daguerreotype artist, at least until an 1851 San Francisco fire burned down his shop. And no, Pierpont could not have written “Jingle Bells” in a Medford tavern in 1850, because in 1850, he was in California trying in vain to cash in on the Gold Rush. He was the son of a New England abolitionist but shunned his father and enlisted in the Confederate army, and his virtuous wintry verses were first performed in blackface in a minstrel show. Hamill unearthed a story that is stranger than fiction: it proposes that one of America’s most popular seasonal melodies was penned by a peripatetic, perennially broke ne’er-do-well. Courtesy Harvard University, Houghton Library, Harvard Theatre Collection, American Minstrel Show Collection 1823–1947, (MS THR 556) “I started digging.” Playbill for the first known performance of “The One Horse Open Sleigh” at Orway Hall on Washington Street in Boston, on Sept. “This really bothered me, that it had two narratives,” says Hamill, who has lived in Medford since earning a PhD in theatre history from Tufts. The southerners insist that Pierpont wrote the jaunty winter anthem in that city, in late 1857, and led the first “ Jingle Bells” singalong in a local church where his brother was pastor. Reporters also love conflict, and so they were thrilled to learn that the Medford tale is contested by people in Savannah, Georgia, where Pierpont is buried. Reporters loved that it was written in Medford.” “I would pull out the file, and it was a very easy story to tell.

“Every December, we’d get a call asking to do a story about ‘Jingle Bells,’” she says.

Hamill, an assistant director and senior lecturer in the CAS Core Curriculum who also teaches in the CFA School of Theatre, became interested in the “Jingle Bells” story while working as a volunteer with the Medford Historical Society & Museum. Kyna Hamill did not set out to debunk a cherished local myth about “Jingle Bells,” but the truth became a runaway sleigh.Īt 19 High Street in Medford, Massachusetts, a plaque commemorates the spot where James Lord Pierpont (1822–1893) supposedly wrote the popular holiday song, inspired by sleigh races on Salem Street, while sitting in a tavern in 1850.

Jingle bells recorder 2 part