Biography
Born on 25 April 1822 in Boston, Massachusetts, James Lord Pierpont died on 5 August 1893 in Winter Haven, Florida. One of six offspring born to Unitarian minister the Rev. John Pierpont and Mary Sheldon Lord, he attended boarding school in New Hampshire, where a letter to his mother described a sleigh ride through snow—an image that later resurfaced. He ran away to sea in 1836 yet, by the mid-1840s, had married and started a family. Near the close of the decade he left them to seek fortune in San Francisco during the gold rush, only to return after fire destroyed his business premises. In 1853 he took the post of organist and music director at a Unitarian church in Savannah, Georgia, where his brother, the Rev. John Pierpont Jr., served as minister, while his own wife and children remained in the Northeast. That same year saw the appearance of his earliest published songs: “Kitty Crowe,” “The Colored Coquette,” “Ring The Bell, Fanny,” “Quitman Town March,” and “Wait, Lady, Wait.” Widowed in 1856, he remarried the following year; his existing children stayed with their grandfather, while three more were born to the new couple. Also in 1857 his youthful sleigh-ride recollection found print as “One Horse Open Sleigh,” reissued in 1859 under the fuller title “Jingle Bells, Or The One Horse Open Sleigh.” Written without any Christmas intent, the number met with no success. When the Civil War erupted, Pierpont joined a Confederate unit that later formed part of the Fifth Georgia Cavalry; as company clerk he supplied inspirational songs such as “Our Battle Flag” and “We Conquer Or Die.” His aging father, ineligible for combat, served instead as a Union chaplain. After Appomattox, Pierpont remained in Georgia, giving music lessons in Valdosta before becoming organist at the Presbyterian Church in Quitman, Florida, and teaching at Quitman Academy, from which he eventually retired as head of the Musical Department. Financier J. Pierpont Morgan was his nephew. Only after Pierpont’s death did his best-known song gain widespread popularity and become permanently linked with Christmas.
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