This appropriately timed column is being reprinted.

•

Wrapping himself snugly in warm winter wear, James Pierpont tucked the sheets of hand-written musical scores under his arm and trudged a mile through the snow to Simpson Tavern and the only piano in the town of Medford, Mass.

The year was 1850, and 28-year-old Pierpont already had a number of popular compositions to his credit. He had spent a couple of days working out the words and music to this latest ditty, tapping out the 4-4 time with a pencil at his father’s desk in the study of the family’s pretentious stuccoed mansion just five miles from Boston. Now he would find out just how it sounded from a keyboard.

The hostess at the Simpson Tavern, Mrs. Otis Waterman, stood by while he played the new piece. Her approval was immediate: “Why, I think that’s a very merry little jingle!”

It’s doubtful that James Pierpont’s father was so complimentary. He had little patience with James, the next-to-the-youngest of the Rev. John Pierpont’s six children.

Stern and scholarly, the famous Unitarian minister was a poet, an attorney, a teacher, an acclaimed lecturer, an enthusiast of phrenology and spiritualism, an outspoken reformer who fought slavery and liquor, and a gentleman with degrees from both Harvard and Yale, the latter school having been founded by his great-grandfather.

But son James marched to a different drum. At 14, he had run away to sea, away from his father’s pious oratory and patriotic prattling. His adventurous bent led him to California three years ahead of the ’49ers, but what money he earned at a variety of jobs was wasted. By 1850, James and his wife were back at the family home where he spent his time writing songs.

Though under the same roof, father and son went their separate ways. While James was composing hits such as “The Colored Coquette,” “Kitty Crow,” “Poor Elsie,” “Ring the Bell for Fanny,” “Starlight Serenade” and “Oh, Let Me Not Neglected Die,” the patriarch of the family was busy in politics, first running for governor of Massachusetts for the Abolitionist Party and then for Congress on the Free Soil ticket.

Young James showed some political interest, too. He composed the “Know Nothing Polka” for the political enemies of the Free Soilers.

In 1856, James Pierpont’s wife died, and the grieving musician wandered south, first settling in Savannah and later moving inland to a small Georgia town. He soon married again and eventually reared five children.

When the guns sounded at Fort Sumter in the spring of 1861, the patriotic fever of both father and son was stirred. The Rev. John Pierpont, though 76 years of age, responded to President Lincoln’s call for troops to put down the rebellion and served as chaplain of a Massachusetts regiment. Son James again heard a different drum: the Massachusetts-born son of the abolitionist preacher penned his sentiments in a Confederate tune, “We Conquer or Die,” in which he made reference to “Northern bigots.” Later, he wrote another rallying song for the Confederates, “Strike for the South.”

He also joined a Georgia Confederate calvary unit.

After the War Between the States was concluded, James Pierpont remained in his adopted Southland. He subsidized his career by teaching music, giving concerts, bookkeeping — even house painting — and died at Winter Haven, Fla., in 1893.

Most of James Pierpont’s compositions have been forgotten. His patriotic airs died with the cause they supported, and though many of his other works were performed by light opera troupes and leading soloists of the American stage, none are familiar today, not even his most popular number, “The Little White Cottage of Gentle Nettie Moore.”

But that merry little jingle that James Pierpont tapped out with a pencil on that cold winter day in Boston 161 years ago, a song that remained unpublished for seven years and then appeared without the composer’s name on it, has become a Christmas standard that brings smiles, stirs imaginations and inspires artists.

James Pierpont called it “The One Horse Open Sleigh.”

We know it better as “Jingle Bells.”

•

Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.