Green Pinwheel

 

Think you know all there is to know about “Jingle Bells?” Think again. First, it isn’t a Christmas song. It never mentions any holiday, though it may have been first performed around Thanksgiving. It was actually written for a minstrel show, so it was probably first sung by white men wearing blackface.  The author, James Lord Pierpont, was son and brother of two Unitarian ministers and uncle to financier J. P. Morgan. When James wrote “Jingle Bells” – which he called “One-horsed Open Sleigh,” the lyrics were racy enough to make his whole family blush. But James was never what you’d call a family man. At 14, he ran away from boarding school to become a whaler. In 1849 he abandoned his wife and children to join the gold rush. The Pierponts were staunch abolitionists, but James supported the Confederacy. In 1965, astronaut Wally Schirra and played “Jingle Bells” on harmonica, making it the first music broadcast from space.