![\"Unitarian](\"https:\/\/gpbookstore.org\/articles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/carols1.jpg\")
Savannah, Georgia <\/strong><\/span>\nJingle Bells<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n
I piled a suitcase, a still camera, a video camera and a tape recorder into my sturdy Volvo and headed from my home in North Cape May, New Jersey, to Savannah, Georgia, 13 hours and 760 miles south. My destination was the Unitarian Universalist Church of Savannah, known to just about every Savannan as the Jingle Bells Church.<\/p>\n
It was there in 1857, while serving as the church\u2019s musical director and organist, James Pierpont finally copyrighted One Horse Open Sleigh, <\/em>the Christmas carol now known as Jingle Bells, <\/em>which he had composed in Medford, Massachusetts, at least seven years earlier.<\/p>\n What a beautiful church, <\/em>I thought. The stately stone edifice was recently renovated. I tried to imagine Pierpont sitting at the organ, playing his spritely song to the congregants every Christmas Eve.<\/p>\n The man led a complicated life. He moved to the South and fought for the Confederacy, while his brother, John, served as a Union Army chaplain. He died impoverished though his nephew was the great financial titan, J. Pierpont Morgan, said to have more money than the U.S. Treasury.<\/p>\n I would like to have stayed in Savannah a few days more, but the road beckoned. I phoned Renate at the end of the day. \u201cHoney, I\u2019m in heaven,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n St. Helena Island, South Carolina<\/strong><\/span> \u201cYou\u2019re headed to South Carolina tomorrow, right?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n \u201cYes, to St. Helena Island,\u201d I said, \u201cjust fifty miles north.\u201d<\/p>\n St. Helena Island, one of South Carolina\u2019s sea islands, is home to one of Christmas\u2019s most precious treasures, the carol Mary Had a Baby<\/em>. Composed there somewhere in the early 19th century, it\u2019s one of the few surviving slave-written carols.<\/p>\n The line that never fails to move me is its last one\u2014\u201cPeople keep a-comin\u2019 an\u2019 the train done gone.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s no agreement on its meaning, but the interpretation I like best is this one: Trains represented an escape to freedom. And though this particular train had gone, with faith surely they\u2019d find another opportunity.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n No one knows for sure the plantation where it was written, and today the Coffin Point Plantation is the only one on the island that remains. At one time it occupied 1,120 acres and housed 63 slaves. I found the three-story manor house, white with red-roof shingles, down a quiet back road, near the sea.<\/p>\n Built in 1801, it\u2019s a private home now. No one was there. I backed off the veranda and stood on the ample lawn. I sang the song softly to myself and thought of what the peace of Christmas must have meant to a slave.<\/p>\n Murphy, North Carolina<\/span><\/strong> The next morning I drove six and a half hours, from St. Helena Island, to Murphy, North Carolina, in the Great Smoky Mountains.<\/p>\n After a full day of travel to All Saints Episcopal Church in Pontiac, Michigan, the source of inspiration for the Alfred Burt family carols, I headed east to Concord, Massachusetts, to visit Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where composer Katherine K. Davis is buried.<\/p>\n In 1941, Ms. Davis wrote The Carol of the Drum, <\/em>known today as The Little Drummer Boy. <\/em>Davis taught music at Wellesley College. She penned more than 600 songs. It is said she based her famous hymn on an old Czech carol. In a long-ago interview, she said the song \u201cpractically wrote itself.\u201d<\/p>\n But it wasn\u2019t an instant hit. In fact, 17 years passed before she got a phone call one day from a friend. \u201cKay, your carol is on the air, all the time, everywhere on the radio!\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat carol?\u201d she asked, surprised.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Harry Simeone and Henry Onorati had turned it into a top hit, with a new title and some minor changes. Simeone even had claimed authorship. Davis eventually proved she was, in fact, the songwriter.<\/p>\n The First Parish in Wayland, a Unitarian Universalist church in Wayland, Massachusetts, a scenic town outside of Boston, was my next stop. It was there Edmund Hamilton Sears, author of It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, <\/em>served as minister.<\/p>\n What I love so much about the carol is that Sears wrote it as a prayer for peace more than as a carol. The Mexican War had just ended and the Civil War was on the horizon when he penned it Christmas Eve 1849.<\/p>\n A year later, his friend, the soon-to-be New-York Tribune <\/em>music critic Richard Storrs Willis, set Sears\u2019s poem to music.<\/p>\n After a visit to the nearby Edmund Hamilton Sears Chapel, I set out for Cambridge. I had an appointment to see Dr. Jameson Marvin, director of choral activities at Harvard.<\/p>\n \u201cDid you know,\u201d I asked, \u201cthat a number of Harvard professors wrote carols? Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote Christmas Bells, <\/em>the basis for I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day. <\/em><\/p>\n “<\/em>Christmas Eve, 1863, he was grieving over the death of his wife in a home fire, and of his son, who had been wounded in battle. The professor was awake late, in a desperate mood, when he heard the peal of church bells. Christmas had come.<\/p>\n “He sat down and penned his now-famous poem. Its last lines, famously, were, \u2018With peace on earth, goodwill to men.\u2019 Longfellow\u2019s mood had changed.\u201d<\/p>\n From Cambridge I drove to Philadelphia, to The Church of the Holy Trinity on Rittenhouse Square. I wanted to pay homage to Rev. Phillips Brooks, the rector who wrote the poem O Little Town of Bethlehem, <\/em>after returning from the Holy Land in 1866.<\/p>\n Brooks had traveled there following President Lincoln\u2019s assassination, and the deaths of so many of his parishioners in the Civil War. He was struck by how peaceful it was in Bethlehem.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cThe hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight,\u201d went his lyric\u2014a message that he yearned for a similar peace in his homeland.<\/p>\n
\nMary Had a Baby<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n
\nI Wonder as I Wander<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n![\"John](\"https:\/\/gpbookstore.org\/articles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/carols3.jpg\")
Concord, Massachusetts
\nThe Little Drummer Boy <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/gpbookstore.org\/articles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/carols4.jpg\")
Wayland, Massachusetts<\/strong><\/span>
\nIt Came Upon a Midnight Clear <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n![\"Longfellow](\"https:\/\/gpbookstore.org\/articles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/carols5.jpg\")
Cambridge, Massachusetts<\/strong><\/span>
\nI Heard the Bells on Christmas Day<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/gpbookstore.org\/articles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/carols6.jpg\")
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania<\/strong><\/span>
\nO Little Town of Bethlehem <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/gpbookstore.org\/articles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/carols7.jpg\")
New York, New York<\/strong><\/span>