Christmas carols
you either love them or hate them
and there's no Christmas carol
quite like Jingle Bells
It's being covered by the stars,
parodied and satirised
and even has its own jokey lyrics
"Jingle Bells, Batman smells,"
"Robin laid an egg."
But Jingle Bells actually has
the most surprising story
of any Christmas carol.
Originally it wasn’t called Jingle Bells
and it had nothing to do with
Christmas, at all.
‘One Horse Open Sleigh’,
a jaunty melody for the
American holiday of Thanksgiving
was written by James Lord Pierpont
in 1857.
He was a songwriter
best otherwise known for being
the uncle of John Pierpont Morgan,
the founder of JP Morgan,
the massive investment bank,
and for sadly supporting slavery
and the South
during the American Civil War.
It was originally a drinking song!
Given the content of the song’s lyrics,
historians think it’s unlikely that it was
intended to be a song for family-friendly occasions.
The original Jingle Bells sure has some lyrics
ranging from a verse about a ‘lean and lank’ horse having a crash,
to the need to go out with girls ‘while you're young’
to this amazing verse where the narrator falls over in the snow and
Because as we all know, laughing at injured people
in the snow sure is the spirit of Christmas.
*Generous laughter at somebody's expense*
Jingle Bells has even changed its tune over the years.
Originally, the song’s chorus was a bit more complicated than it is today
even melancholic.
"Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells"
"Jingle all the way;"
"Oh! what joy it is to ride"
"In a one horse open sleigh."
"Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells"
"Jingle all the way;"
"Oh! what joy it is to ride"
"In a one horse open sleigh."
So you can how over time the kinks have been hammered out.
Today, the chorus is just super simple major chords like:
one, fours and fives.
"Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells"
"Jingle all the way;"
the basic building blocks of pop harmony,
which makes it that bright,
almost-too joyous carol we all know and…
listen to.
So to recap ...
Jingle Bells originally wasn’t called Jingle Bells,
didn’t have anything to do with Christmas,
and it didn’t really sound like it does today
and it still became one of the most popular songs on planet earth.
It was even the first song performed in space, by two Gemini 6 astronauts in 1965,
who smuggled a harmonica and sleigh bells into space to play the song.
Which just goes to show for all those budding songwriters out there,
that if you don’t get it right the first time,
just give it a little over a hundred years of near-legally enforced playing
during the holiday season,
and you too
might just write that song
that jingles all the way.