James Lord Pierpont

James Lord Pierpont went to sea as a young man, tried business in California and worked as a musician in the American South, after a Boston boyhood as the son of the Unitarian minister and poet John Pierpont. In 1857 he published The One Horse Open Sleigh: not a Christmas carol but a sleighing song of the kind then in fashion, full of winter travel, flirtation and comic mishap. The revised version of 1859 carried the title everyone now knows. Minstrel numbers and ballads made up much of the rest of his output. The Songwriters Hall of Fame admitted him in 1970. In Savannah he served as organist and music director of the Unitarian congregation, which closed in 1859 over its abolitionist stand; he stayed in Georgia, rode with the Lamar Rangers in the Fifth Georgia Cavalry and wrote songs for the Confederacy, among them Our Battle Flag and We Conquer or Die. Oliver Ditson of Boston issued the sleighing song with a dedication to John P. Ordway, and its earliest documented performance was given by Johnny Pell at Ordway Hall in Boston on 15 September 1857. Afterwards he taught in Valdosta and in Quitman, where he headed the music department of the academy, and he died in Winter Haven, Florida.