‘Jingle Bells’ dispute jangles on

SAVANNAH, Ga. — Dashing in the sun, through oaks and Spanish moss / Sleigh riding’s no fun, when there’s no snow to cross … .

Could “Jingle Bells” really be a song of the South?

It’s not hard to see why balmy Savannah has a tough time selling the Christmas carol as a native creation. Or why the claim makes folks in Medford, Mass. — hometown of the song’s composer — cry humbug.

This much is known for sure: James Pierpont was the organist at Savannah’s Unitarian Universalist Church in 1857 when he copyrighted the song “One Horse Open Sleigh,” a title later changed to “Jingle Bells.”

Arguably the most popular American Christmas song, “Jingle Bells” made Pierpont a pre-Civil War one-hit wonder. But did he write it here as a piece of homesick, holiday nostalgia? Or did he compose it years before in Medford, not seeing the tune as a moneymaker until he drifted south?

“No one really knows where he was when he wrote it — that’s the rub,” said Constance Turner, Pierpont’s great-granddaughter in Coronado, Calif. “Evidently, James was quite the free spirit, and he published some bad songs and one, at least, we know of that’s a very good song.”

Medford, just outside Boston, got to claim the carol without challenge until 1969, when Milton Rahn, a Savannah Unitarian, revealed he’d linked the song’s composer to coastal Georgia.

Mr. Rahn had been researching the church’s Savannah roots years earlier when the epiphany struck. Mr. Rahn was listening to his daughter play “Jingle Bells” at the piano when he glanced at the sheet music and noticed the composer’s name: J. Pierpont. He soon tracked down the writer’s full name.

Mr. Rahn already had found letters that John Pierpont Jr., the church’s pastor from 1852 to 1858, had written home to Medford saying his brother, James, had come to Savannah as an organist and music teacher. Further research found that the composer had married in Savannah in 1857, weeks before he copyrighted “Jingle Bells.”

“I said to my wife and daughter, ‘This is something that’s like pay dirt,’” Mr. Rahn said. “I saw this as something to help us get publicity for the church.”

Mr. Rahn dove into Pierpont’s past. His search took him from Pierpont’s grave in Savannah’s Laurel Grove Cemetery to the Pierpont-Morgan Library in New York. He went to the Library of Congress for a copy of the original sheet music and located the old church organ in Tallahassee, Fla.

Pierpont, who lived from 1822 to 1893, was said to be a wanderer who ran away to sea at 14 and later went to California during the Gold Rush. During the Civil War, Pierpont joined a Confederate cavalry regiment in Savannah, bucking the staunch abolitionist views of his family.

His other songs included several touting the Confederate cause, with titles such as “We Conquer Or Die” and “Strike for the South.” But none struck a chord like “Jingle Bells” did.

After Savannah erected a “Jingle Bells” marker in Troup Square across from the church in 1985, then-Mayor John Rousakis declared the tune a Savannah song.

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