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Medford at center of ‘Jingle Bell Wars’

Stephanie Muccini Burke, mayor of Medford, sang Jingle Bells with the Key Club from Medford High School at Medford City Hall. Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe

By The Boston Globe

December 22, 2016

1 minute to read

MEDFORD — It’s a jaunty little Christmas number that works well at both kindergarten recitals and boozy holiday parties. And the story behind its creation was just so darn charming that decades ago the elders of Medford put the tale on a plaque right there in the city square, at the site of the bar where it all supposedly went down in 1850.

Medford, you see, was where James Pierpont is said to have written the quaint little carol we know as “Jingle Bells.”

There are some old problems with this claim, the ones at the center of the “Jingle Bell Wars” that have been going on for years with Savannah, Ga., which makes a similar claim and has its own plaque. But some new problems have come up — issues of social context as well as provenance, based on new research that answers some questions and raises others.

The latest controversy started when Kyna Hamill, a theater historian at Boston University and a research volunteer at the Medford Historical Society, got tired of the annual December calls from reporters asking about the Jingle Bell Wars. The conflicting stories made her want to know more: Where was the song first performed? And how?

Her hunt last year led her to a playbill deep in the Harvard archives, and some findings that are not quite as quaint as the story on the plaque, which has Pierpont writing the number in the Simpson Tavern while a Mrs. Otis Waterman looked on, inspired by the sleigh races that took place on Salem Street.