THURSDAY'S CHILD The Origin of Jingle Bells

I think that basically. you can divide Christmas music into two categories. A Christmas carol sings God's praises. Christmas songs sing secular praises, often with religious undertones. But there are two things any Christmas music must never ever do. It must not promote depravity and it must not celebrate hate. Yet, according to Time Magazine, the 7^th most popular Christmas song in America is steeped in both those very things, and worse, racism and misogynistic arrogance.  And even worse, it was written by a deadbeat dad, with deep, deep daddy issues of his own.

James Lord Pierpont (above) was born on Thursday, 25 April, 1822 to 35 year old Mary Sheldon Lord and her fourth cousin and over achiever, 47 year old John Pierpont. 

The pater Pierpont  (above) started life as a merchant, then became a lawyer and then an educator before becoming a Professor of Divinity at Harvard College. But kneeling among the congregation did not suit John. He needed to stand out front, with the congregants looking up to him. He proved to be “a quaint, eloquent speaker”, but always for the twin revolutionary causes of abolition and temperance. John Pierpont  as one of the founders of Unitarianism in the United States. He achieved literary fame six years before James' birth with publication of his book length poem, “The Airs of Palestine” - a 48 page  retelling in rhyme of the Old Testament. Within a year public demand had driven it through three printings.

“What mine, exploding, rends that smoking ground?

What earthquake spreads those smouldering ruins round?

The sons of Levi, round the city, bear

The Ark of God, their consecrated care,

And, in rude concert, each returning morn,

Blow the long trump, and wind the curling horn.

No blackening thunder, smok'd along the wall:

No earthquake shook it; Music wrought its fall.”

The year James was born,  John was pastor of Boston's Hollis Street Unitarian Church (above). He was always busy but always in service of a cause. Many in the congregation found his never ending passion exhausting. And growing up in his shadow must have been intimidating for James. At the age of 10, either for his own good or because he was too much trouble, James was shipped off to a boarding school in New Hampshire. He was miserable and wrote home-sick letters recalling the warmth of being wedged between his parents on winter sleigh rides. It did no good, he had to stay at school.

Then, on 2 May, 1836 his eldest sister, 20 year old Juliet Pierpont (above, a later photo), married a partner in J.M. Beebe and Company, which ran one of the largest retail stores in Boston, and one the largest dry goods importers in the nation - 33 year old Junius Spencer Morgan. That snapped something  in the 14 year old, and James ran away from school, joined the crew of a whaling ship and spent the next nine years before the mast on the open sea.

The Prodigal Son returned in 1845, but to a new home. What the Reverend Pieront described as his “7 year's war” had ended in defeat, when the conservatives in the Boston congregation fired him. The passionate preacher found new employment at the First Unitarian Church in Troy, New York, at the southern terminus of the Erie Canal (above). 

Like so many young men, running away had not resolved James's search for self worth.  So the 24 year old now tried to meet his father's expectations head on. James found a “high tech” job in bustling Troy (above),  fell in love and married the faithful Millicent Cowee, and gave his father a namesake grandson – John - and a granddaughter, with the religious title of Mary.

By now the ever exercised reverend had begun composing temperance songs and plays, such as “The Drunkard, or The Fallen Saved” which had a successful run at Moses Kimball's Boston Museum - actually a theatre.  James followed suit, but his aesthetic was attracted to minstrel shows, which had been growing in popularity during the 1830's. These were a vaudeville performed by white actors in black face, usually playing crude racial stereotypes. During the 1840's, from the pen of white artists like composer Stephen Foster, they flirted briefly with broader issues, even the reality of slavery. But by 1850 reality had become so unpleasant to white audiences that they preferred the simpler and racially vulgar comedies like white performer Thomas Dartmouth Rice's “Jump, Jim Crow” (above), which gave it's name to an entire era..

Then in 1849, leaving Millicent and the children in the care of his parents, James again grabbed an opportunity to strike out on his own - the California Gold Rush. This was no desperate dig for instant wealth, but rather a calculated risk. James opened up a daguerreotype studio in San Francisco, making images of miners and bankers. 

And evidently James was reasonably successful – until just before Midnight, Saturday, 3 May, 1851, when a wind whipped fire destroyed 2000 buildings – including James' studio - in the first great San Francisco fire (above). Either James had no insurance, or more likely, his insurance company collapsed under the run on funds. The 32 year old James returned home in 1852, flat broke, to find Millicent had been stricken by tuberculosis. It was a real low point for the young man.

At the same time the father, John,  was more famous and successful than ever. John was a now a regular correspondent with the leading abolitionists of the day, and was pastor at the First Parish Unitarian Church, 3 ½ miles northwest of Boston in the Mystic River port town of Medford, Massachusetts (below). 

The job included a comfortable parsonage (above),  large enough for the entire family. During the 1840's John even had campaigned for Governor , and in 1850 for Congress. 

THe old warrior lost both elections, of course, but with the publication of his book, “Phrenology and the Scriptures”, the Reverend John Pierpont (above) became a sought after lecturer - not only on religion but now spiritualism and discerning sins by reading the bumps on the sinner's head.

Frustrated and needing money, James began writing songs for John Ordway's “Dandy Darkies”, who preformed minstrel shows at Ordway Hall, opposite the Old South Meeting House in downtown Boston. His first sale in 1852, seemed harmless enough - "The Returned Californian”. But the Reverend Pierpont could not have been impressed. The Minstrel shows were now even more commonly studded with sexual double entendres and demeaning images of drunk, lazy, stupid and over sexed blacks. James could not have picked a source of income more likely to insult his father's passion.

Oh, I'm going far away, but I don't know where I'll go,

I oughter travel homeward but they'll laugh at me I know.

For I told 'em when I started I was bound to make a pile.

But if they could only see me now, I rather guess they'd smile.

If of these United States I was the President,

No man that owed another would ever pay a cent.

And he who dunned another should be banished far away.

And attention to the pretty girls, is all a man should pay.

After little more than a year, in 1854, James sought escape again, this time to work for his older brother, the Reverend John Pierpont Junior. John Junior had been hired as the minister for the brand new Unitarian Church built on Oglethorpe Square in Savanna, Georgia (above). The salary was a handsome $1,500 a year, but it was combat pay.  The sect was preaching abolition in a bastion of slavery.  

The original church had been destroyed by fire in 1814. And there  had been 2 attempts to burn down the replacement.  John Junior had to write his father that “...everything in his church was at a standstill…sermon and lecture listeners remained a tiny, unsubstantial core.” It was in this tense environment that James worked as the church's organist and musical director. But he seems to have fallen in love with a young woman in Savannah, and made a meager living offering music lessons.

Then in 1856, the long suffering and twice abandoned Millicent Cowee Pierpont died of tuberculosis. There was not much delay in putting the infectious lady underground, but James made no attempt to return to Boston for her funeral, and showed no interest in his now orphaned children, who continued to live with his parents. And in August of 1857 James broke his last remaining ties to his family when he remarried, to 26 year old Eliza Jane Purse (above) , daughter of the superintendent of the Central Of Georgia Railroad and a past Savannah alderman, Thomas Purse senior.

Also that August, back in Boston, Oliver Ditson and Company, published the sheet music for yet another James Pierpont minstrel song. This one, dedicated to John Ordway, was titled “One Horse Open Sleigh” (above). 

And on 15 September of 1857 the song was performed by one of Ordway's Dandy Darkies, white man in black face, Mr. Johnny Pell  (above).

Dashing thro' the snow,

In a one-horse open sleigh,
O'er the hills we go,
Laughing all the way;
Bells on bob tail ring,
Making spirits bright,
Oh what sport to ride and sing
A sleighing song tonight.

Jingle bells, jingle bells,

Jingle all the way;
Oh! What joy it is to ride
In a one-horse open sleigh.

A sleigh pulled by a single horse was a speedy little carriage, favored by 19^th Century upper middle class men and women for the same purposes automobiles were used by couples in the 20^th Century.  Bells set to jingling by the horse's movements announced the sleigh's arrival on silent runners at intersections. A warm blanket spread across the passengers' laps provided privacy for displays of intimate affection. And should the sleigh be parked in some isolated corner of the woods, the jingles on the reigns set off by the passengers' movements announced progress of another kind. As the late music historian James J. Fuld suggested, “the word jingle in the title and opening phrase is apparently an imperative verb." It was an order, at least to reluctant inebriated young women facing an alternative long, cold walk home.

A day or two ago

I tho't I'd take a ride
And soon Miss Fannie Bright
Was seated by my side.
The horse was lean and lank
Misfortune seemed his lot
He got into a drifted bank
And we—we got upsot.

Jingle bells, jingle bells,

Jingle all the way;
Oh! What joy it is to ride
In a one-horse open sleigh.

“Upshot” was a mid-19^th Century slang for getting tipsy on alcohol. Oddly, the song was received in religiously conservative New England with little enthusiasm. 

But it was noticed by John (above) as yet another mocking of his life's work by his own son. This was capped in 1859, when the experiment in Savannah proved a failure. The church was closed. John Junior returned home. But James did not come with him. 

However, two years later, James did renew the copywrite on his song, changing the name to “Jingle Bells, or One Horse Open Sleigh”.

Now the ground is white

Go it while you’re young,
Take the girls to night
And sing this sleighing song;
Just get a bob tailed bay
Two forty as his speed.
Hitch him to an open sleigh
And crack, you’ll take the lead.

Jingle bells, jingle bells

Jingle all the way.

Oh what a joy it is to ride,

In a one horse open sleigh.

When open combat split the nation, the 76 year old John Pierpont senior (above) became regimental chaplain for the 22^nd Massachusetts Infantry.  But after just 2 weeks duty, sanity inspired someone to give the old minister a job as a clerk at the Treasury Department. Just how much work he actually preformed is doubtful, and when he died after the war, in 1866, he was back home in Medford, Massachusetts.  Harper's Weekly, said upon his death, "As an American poet he can not be ranked with the best; ...but some of his religious poetry has rarely been excelled for strength and simplicity."

The war also inspired the almost 40 year old James Lord Pierpont to enlist,  as private in a cavalry unit called Lamar's Rangers. After 2 hard years duty in Tennessee, during which the rangers were consolidated into the 5^th Georgia Cavalry,  James was made the company clerk. Evidently he found enough time to also compose patriotic songs, like “Strike for the South.” His unit surrendered to Federal forces in mid April of 1865.

After the war, James, Eliza and their 3 children – 16 year old Lillie, 8 year old Thomas and 5 year old Josiah - moved to the new railroad town of Valdosta, Georgia (above), where James taught music, and where his final child, Maynard Boardman Pierpont, was born. 

Then in 1869 there was a scandal. Whether it revolved around James – he was called by his nephew, the now famously wealthy banker James Pierpont Morgan, a “good for nothing” - or Eliza - she had evidently given birth to Lillie 3 years before she married James – it no longer matters. The family moved to nearby Quitman, Georgia, where James became the organist at the Presbyterian Church, and gave piano lessons. Eventually he secured a job teaching music at the Quitman Academy, and retired as head of their Musical Department.

In 1880, Jame's son, Dr. Josiah Pierpont, renewed the copywrite on “Jingle Bells”, fighting to ensure his father's name remained tied to the increasingly popular and rewritten song. However the family never enforced the copywrite and never made a dime off the music. 

James Lord Pierpont died on Saturday, 5 August, 1893, living with his son in Clearwater, Florida,  He was buried back in Savannah. Soon there after the copywrite was allowed to quitely die.  

The lack of royalties required must have played a part in why “Jingle Bells” was chosen by the skinflint Thomas Edison to be recorded by the Edison Male Quartet (above) on an Edison cylinder in 1898.

In 1902 it was recorded again by the Hayden Quartet. After that, it has never been “out of print” or out of press. At the moment there are almost 300 recorded English versions. The 1935 cover of “Jingle Bells” with rewritten and censured lyrics by Benny Goodman's Big Band reached number 18 on the “charts”, and Glen Miller's 1941 version hit number 5. 

In 1943 Bing Crosby and the Andrew's Sister's (above) sold over a million copies of their version. Guitarist Les Paul had a number 10 best selling record in 1951 with no words at all. And in 1955 dogs Pussy, Pearl, Dolly, King and Caesar, barked the tune and sold a million 45 rpm records. And a slightly insane laughing version was released by “The Hysterics” in 1981 and climbed all the way to number 44 in the United Kingdom.

“Jingle Bells” remains the most unusual Christmas song ever written, because it was never intended to be a Christmas song.  But it remains popular I think because hidden somewhere in the chords and melodies, if not the words - what ever version of the words you sing - is an angry spirit. As the old poem goes, "Monday's child is fair of face, Tuesday's child is full of grace Wednesday's child is full of woe, Thursday's child has far to go, (Friday's child is loving and giving, Saturday's child works hard for a living),”

And maybe, sometimes, because we are all, all of us, all of those children, we all need a little “ in your face”, “I'm going to have fun, damn-it” kind of Christmas. Because, sometimes, that's what real life gives you.  It's what life gave to James Pierpont. And listen to what he did with it.

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A LITTLE SOCIALISM Republicans Attacking Republicans

 

I can't think of a place in America that is more deceptive than North Dakota, 70,000 square miles of not what you thought.  It's most fertile land is the valley of the Red River of the North (above), except its not a valley. It's the bottom of a lake that's no longer there - usually. The river meanders back and forth across a prostrate terrain on its way to not the Pacific or the Atlantic, but the Arctic Ocean. Flowing north, every fall it freezes first at its mouth causing “the valley” below to flood. Every spring, when the rains come to Minnesota, the lake reappears again, until the ice melts at the mouth. But even then, only briefly, because in North Dakota the dominant long term weather pattern is reoccurring drought. And in the second decade of the 20^th century, with a population of little over half a million, most of whom were farmers and bred to be conservative and fiercely independent and Republican,  this state created openly socialistic industrial and economic institutions. Perhaps this was because North Dakota's raison d'être from its inception in 1889, was the business plan of two vertically integrated out-of-state corporations. 

Both the Northern Pacific railroad, created to benefit its shareholders, and the Great Northern Railroad, built by the megalomania of its owner, James J. Hill, sold land to European farmers, who bought their inexpensive new American farms sight unseen. The boat and train tickets, and the land itself were loss leaders for the corporations. Their profits came once the farmers were isolated on the Great Plains. They bought their food and supplies from corporate stores, financed their plantings through corporate banks, stored their harvests in corporate silos until it was transported on corporate railroads to be sold to corporate mills in Minnesota. In “bonanza” years the profits ended up in the corporate banks. And in the inevitable non-bonanza years, the farms were reposed by the banks, starting the cycle all over again. It was a very profitable business plan, as long as the customers did not get wise that North Dakota was a colony of the Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota capitalist- industrial complex.

Up to 1916 the great dividing force within North Dakota politics was race. In the 1870's the Red River Valley had been settled by snowy white Norwegians and Icelanders - mostly stern Lutherans. The west and center of the state was settled in the 1880's by creamy white Germans who had been living in Russia since the 16^th century. They called themselves the “volksdeutsch” and they were rigid Catholics all. But in 1916, the North Dakota normal was turned on its head by a political arsonist named Arthur Charles Townley, who split the rigid, stern conservative North Dakota Republican Party into kindling.

When he was a farmer along the Montana border, Townley  (above) was known as the “Flax King”. But an August snowstorm in 1913 cost him his farm and left him $80,000 in debt. He went into politics – Republican of course - there being only one real party in North Dakota - and he pushed for aid for farmers. He was confronted by his fellow Republican Treadwell Twitchell who told him to stop messing in state politics and “go home and slop the hogs”. Instead Arthur cranked up his model T Ford and went on a tour of the state, speaking to hundreds of small groups about the need for North Dakota's 78,000 farmers to organize in self defense. 

 Three thousand paid $6 each to join his Non-Partisan League, because he spoke their language. “If you put a banker, a lawyer, and an industrialist in a barrel and roll it down a hill,” he said, “you’ll always have a son-of-a-bitch on top.” In 1916 the Non-Partisan League had 40,000 members and elected Lynn Joseph Frazier as governor. And in 1918 they swallowed the Republican party whole and won every executive office in state government, control of the house and near control of the state Senate.

Governor Frazier (above, center) now became the head of the new Industrial Commission, a three man board running state owned businesses. Commissioner of Agriculture John Hagan (above, left) was entrusted to construct and run the state's Mill and Elevator Association in Grand Forks. It would buy wheat and barley from farmers at fair prices and sell the final products at a profit for the state. Attorney General William Lemke (above, right) oversaw operations of the BND, the Bank of North Dakota. All state and local tax revenues would be deposited in the bank, and used to offer low interest loans to farmers. When the farmers profited the bank would profit. And you know, it seemed like a good idea at the time. The day it opened the bank had two hundred applications for a total of $8 million in loans.

Then the First World War ended on 11 November, 1918. In a flash every industrialized nation slashed their budgets and stopped buying American wheat. Farm prices collapsed. The 650, 000 citizens of North Dakota were hurting, and in order to cover its loan requests, the BND was forced to offer $10 million in bonds for sale. The Minneapolis-St. Paul bankers, who had just lost their best customers to the BND, turned up their noses. They were determined the bank should fail. Faced with impending disaster, the Industrial Commission decided on a bookkeeping slight of hand. They ordered various state agencies and city governments, which were already required to have their money deposited in the bank, to loan the BND $10 million. The cash was never actually withdrawn, so nobody was actually out the money. But cash was available to make loans to the strapped farmers. And the bank of North Dakota had been saved.  It was the kind of economics big corporations employed all the time.

But it was a bridge too far for the old school Republicans. On April Fools day, 1919, three major players in state politics, Attorney General “Wild Bill” Langer, state Auditor Carl Kositizksy and Secretary of State Thomas Hall all resigned their membership in the NPL in protest. Publicly they blamed Townley's influence. Langer even called the father of the Non-Partisan League a liar. Resistance to the League solidified around The Independent Voters Association - except the IVA was anything but independent. Most of its money came the Minnesota capitalist-industrial complex. So much money poured in that in November of 1919 the first issue of a 40 page monthly magazine appeared, “The Red Flame”, pounding home the message that the NPL were communists, intent on subverting capitalism in North Dakota. Newspapers took sides, and it became clear that the further west within the state, the stronger the NPL became, and feeding off the anti-German sentiment left over from the war, the further east you went the stronger the IVA became.

The IVA tried suing to invalidate the legislation which had created the Industrial Commission, claiming it violated the 14^th amendment. A North Dakota judge tossed the suit, and the State Supreme Court upheld that decision, saying it was an issue of taxation and thus a matter for the the elected officials, not judges. The IVA then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court which heard the case in April of 1920.  And in June the court admitted that things in North Dakota were getting pretty odd, but again, they refused to stick their noses into a taxation issue.

The primary campaign in 1920 was nasty, and vicious. There were charges that the IVA was bribing politicians, and the IVA managed to put a measure on the ballot to weaken the bank by allowing city or county governments to withdraw their money. Month after month, “The Red Flame” spewed out accusations against Frazier and the Non-Partisan League, charging incompetence and fraud in running the BND. In the October Republican primaries Frazier beat “Wild Bill” Langer for Governor, but the NPL lost control of the House to the IVA, and the bank lost capital when the ballot measure passed. Come November, the wounded Frazier defeated the Democratic candidate for Governor by a mere 5,000 votes.

Governor Frazier responded in December, during a special session of the legislature, when he introduced the “anti-liars” bill, making it a felony for a state employee to publish false statements about the bank. IVA politician Theodore “Two Bit” Nelson went hyperbolic to the Bismark North Star Dakotan, “This is the end of democracy. Nothing is sacred,” he pronounced What it was, was civil war within the Republican Party. Politics in North Dakota ground to a halt. Fist fights erupted periodically in the legislature between NPL and IVA Republicans. But the IVA had managed to turn one of the NPL's political reforms against it, collecting 73,000 signatures and forcing an October recall election on the three freshly re-elected members of the Industrial Commission; Frazier, Lemke and Hagen. At the same time a half dozen ballot measures were offered, any one of which would neuter or destroy the bank of North Dakota.

The vote was held on Friday, 28 October, and all three NPL members of the Industrial Commission were ousted.  Frazier became the first Governor every recalled, by a margin of just 1%, barely 4,000 votes in total.  But the Bank of North Dakota survived, as every ballot measure meant to destroy it was defeated. Wrote the Dakotan, “It seems that the people want the bank and the mill but think that the IVA can do a better job of running them.”  In 1921, the IVA tried again to dismantle “Socialism” in North Dakota, and again every ballot measure intended to overturn the bank and the state run flour mill, went down to defeat. They never tried again. Both institutions are still very much alive and healthy today, if reduced in size and goals. But they remain a recognition that when corporations seek to exploit and dominate the people, the people have no choice but to incorporate themselves.

The year after being recalled as governor, the people of North Dakota elected Lynn Frazier to the United States Senate, where he served for 17 years. Arthur Charles Townley the man who splinted the Republican party, served a 90 day prison sentence in 1922 for discouraging enlistments in World War One. He resigned from the NPL, but he never stopped fighting for things he believed in. Without him, his Non-Partisan League remained a thorn in the side of the Republican Party until 1956. Since then they have annoyed the Democratic Party of the North Dakota, which remains a minority party in a state still filled with farmers and still dominated economically from Minnesota.

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