Monday Morning’s Earworm №125

Jingle Bells by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters

What is an earworm?

It’s a snatch or a snippet, a captured fragment, a line or two, or maybe a bit more, from a cultural reference point, that stays in your head, that keeps bubbling up accompanying your day.

It’s part of the language of your landscape that stays in your mind, whether it’s one single line, a couplet or maybe a whole verse, from a poem or song, or a part of a speech from a play, or a quote from a book, or something you heard somebody say, that won’t let you go.

Sometimes it won’t involve what we call language in the everyday. It could be purely a musical phrase that plays on your time, on a loop that follows you through day and night.

That’s what an earworm is. And so is this…

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Jingle Bells by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters

UK Chart peak: NA US Chart peak: №19

Yes. AI WAS used in the making of this article.

What’re you gonna do about it? Let outrage overpower curiosity?

Don’t you know a hook when you see one?

This is also an example of syncopated sadism, as I present you with the C-word in July. No, not that one (In Scotland, we use that one all year round), the one with two syllables and nine letters. Christmas.

I was trying to think of a viable earworm candidate and how far back I could go. So I consulted the demon of our times, AI.

I typed into Google something like: “What’s a song from the 1930s that might be considered an earworm?” The first thing it came back with was this morning’s earworm.

Done, I thought. That’s perfect.

The Song of This Morning’s Moment

What’s in a Name?

Quite a lot, apparently. James Lord Pierpont’s seasonal standard was originally published in 1857 by Oliver Ditson & Co. of Boston as “The One Horse Open Sleigh”. As a title, it lacks the snappily memorable brevity of the name we know it by today, “Jingle Bells”.

It was two years before Ditson & Co republished the song with the updated and expanded title “Jingle Bells; or, The One Horse Open Sleigh”. When exactly the song shed its un-necessaries and became just “Jingle Bells” is unclear.

It was also originally intended as a song to celebrate Thanksgiving, not Christmas.

The Song’s Debut Performance

What does seem clear is the now-controversial nature of the song’s first public performance. “The One Horse Open Sleigh” was first performed on September 15, 1857, at Ordway Hall in Boston by blackface minstrel performer Johnny Pell.

Like his contemporary Stephen Foster, some of Pierpont’s work, such as “Jingle Bells”, is tied to the then-popular genre of ‘blackface’ where white men blacked up their faces with makeup to perform as if they were black. This practice was incredibly popular with white audiences, and some troupes of performers, such as Christy’s Minstrels, even toured Europe.

Both men also shared a liking for the bottle and were often desperate for money because of it. However, this is where the similarities end. Foster was the first songwriter to make a living purely from songwriting and was a superstar of his day. By contrast, Pierpont merely dabbled in the art, though arguably has given history the most memorable song of the two, in terms of mainstream contemporary awareness.

But Was Jingle Bells Original?

Researcher Kyna Hamil, in an article for BUToday, the Boston University online publication, argues not entirely:

“There were a number of popular minstrel songs involving sleighs, such as “The Merry Sleigh Ride” and “Buckley’s Sleighing Song,” and Hamill is not surprised that “Jingle Bells” bears more than a passing resemblance to them.

That’s not to say “Jingle Bells” was plagiarized, says Hamill, but “Everything about the song is churned out and copied from other people and lines from other songs — there’s nothing original about it. He’s making money.”

Bing Sings, Glenn Swings and the Andrews Sisters Do Too

The First-ever Recording of Jingle Bells

Wikipedia tells us that:

“Jingle Bells” was first recorded by banjoist Will Lyle on October 30, 1889 (attested A T E Wangemann Logbook, p. 114), on an Edison cylinder, but no surviving copies are known to exist.[

The earliest surviving vocal recording was made by the Edison Male Quartette in 1898, also on an Edison cylinder (and 1898 Columbia brown wax 4090), as part of a ‘Christmas’ medley titled “Sleigh Ride Party.

In 1902, the Hayden Quartet recorded “Jingle Bells”. The song became a Christmas favourite in the early twentieth century”.

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Into the Swing Era and the War Years

By the time the swing era of the big bands came around in the 1930’s, the standard Christmas song we know today was well established. “In 1935, Benny Goodman and His Orchestra reached №18 on the charts with their Swing or big band recording of “Jingle Bells”.

In 1941, Glenn Miller and His Orchestra with Tex Beneke, Marion Hutton, Ernie Caceres, and the Modernaires on vocals had a №5 hit on the Billboard pop singles chart with a big band arrangement of “Jingle Bells”.

According to the Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR), on RCA Victor”. Miller’s version was recorded at RCA’s Studio №2 in New York on the 20th of October, 1941. It would be released on the RCA subsidiary label Bluebird.

From DAHR and MusicBrainz, we can find out that Bing and the Andrews Sisters recorded their “Jingle Bells” at the Radio Recorders Studio, West Hollywood, California, on the 27th of September, 1943,

The song on the B-side was a youngster by comparison: “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”, written by Haven Gillespie with music by J Fred Coots in 1932. This Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters version would be released as a 10” shellac single in November 1943 on Decca Records.

Miller’s might have been the bigger hit in its day, but the better-known version from those war years arguably remains the 1943 №19 hit by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters.

And then of course, there’s this, perhaps most insidious version…

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Recommended Listening:

Their Complete Recordings Together, Bing Crosby And The Andrews Sisters, MCA, 1996

Sources:

BUToday DAHR (Discography of American Historical Recordings) Discogs MusicBrainz Wikipedia

As always, please tell me in the comments what you thought of today’s earworm

Next week, we leave the 1940’s behind, and come bang up to date again with a tune from the 1970s…