It’s a song you’ve known ever since you were a child, and you hear every christmas. The chorus has a shape and a direction that is so simple and obvious, you think it could only go the way it does. Well think again. James Lord Pierpont, who composed The One Horse Open Sleigh in 1857 (as he called it), had quite different ideas about the chorus than the one we know today (though the verse has remained largely unchanged).
Here’s a link to a digitized copy of Pierpont’s 1857 version at the Library of Congress, and here’s how it goes (see below). It’s a curiously schoolmasterly, churchy kind of chorus, with none of the whipcracking fun of what superseded it.
What happened, I wonder? Did Pierpont himself change it? Or was it a bit like those dancers who change the steps when they know that the choreographer won’t be in that night – a publisher who waited til Pierpont’s back was turned to improve the chorus and make it more saleable. I’m sure the answer’s out there somewhere.
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Tags: advent 2009