'Cancel Culture' Or 'Liberalism Gone Amok'? School Tells Why It Silenced 'Jingle Bells'

BRIGHTON, NY — When she discovered “Jingle Bells” was performed publicly for the first time by white actors wearing blackface, Kyna Hamill had no idea her scholarly paper would be used to silence the holiday classic in an elementary school.

But it was.

And Hamill, a professor and director of Boston University’s Core Curriculum, can’t quite believe the dustup her work caused at Council Rock Primary School in Brighton, New York.

She told The Rochester Beacon in an email that she is “actually quite shocked” that her scholarly deep dive on the origin of “Jingle Bells” caused the school to “remove the song from the repertoire.”

“I, in no way, recommended that it stopped being sung by children,” she told the news outlet. “My article tried to tell the story of the first performance of the song, I do not connect this to the popular Christmas tradition of singing the song now.

“The very fact of (the song’s) popularity has to do (with) the very catchy melody of the song, and not to be only understood in terms of its origins in the minstrel tradition. … I would say it should very much be sung and enjoyed, and perhaps discussed.”

Kevin McGowan, the Brighton Central Schools superintendent, doesn’t think so.

His district has been besieged with complaints that removing “Jingle Bells” from the elementary music curriculum was “liberalism gone amok,” “cancel culture at its finest” or political indoctrination.

More to the point, he said in a closing salvo in an open letter published Tuesday on the school district’s website, “if there is ever a question as to whether or not something might be experienced differently by someone else, shouldn’t we be respectful of that?”

“Is singing the song ‘Jingle Bells’ so important that it outweighs the question about its past or its potential to not be inclusive in a variety of ways?” McGowan wrote. “If many, many songs are available to accomplish the same objective, then why wouldn’t we use those songs? I think our teachers answered that question very thoughtfully and I’m proud of their work.”

Why Origin Of Song Matters

There was never any discussion in elementary classrooms about whether it was appropriate for children to sing “Jingle Bells.” The tune came up for staff review after a member of the community asked if the music curriculum would be changed as part of the district’s ongoing work to develop culturally responsive policies, McGowan wrote.

Allison Rioux, the school district’s assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, said in an email to The Rochester Beacon that the holiday carol may be more deeply rooted in racism than suggested by its performance by white people wearing blackface.

It’s well-documented that slaves wore collars with bells to deter them from running away, and Rioux said “some suggest” the origin of the song may be connected to that practice.

“While we are not taking a stance as to whether that is true or not,” she wrote in the email to the online news site, “we do feel strongly that this line of thinking is not in agreement with our district beliefs to value all cultures and experiences of our students.”

Rioux said that with the choice of hundreds of five-note songs to teach singing techniques, there was no reason to include a song with questionable origins.

Dubunking Holiday Classic Never The Intent

Hamill’s intent was never to debunk the holiday favorite but rather to reconcile the truth and fiction of its origins, she explained to Boston University Today in 2016.

A plaque at 19 High St. in Medford, Massachusetts, proclaims that address as the exact spot where, inspired by the sleigh races taking place on Salem Street, James Lord Pierpoint sat in a tavern in 1850 and wrote the jaunty song about the fun to be had dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh.

Hamill became familiar with the local legend while volunteering for the Medford Historical Society & Museum.

“Every December, we’d get a call asking to do a story about ‘Jingle Bells,’ ” she told BU Today. “I would pull out the file, and it was a very easy story to tell. Reporters loved that it was written in Medford.”

But was it?

Southerners insist that Pierpoint, who is buried in Savannah, Georgia, wrote the song there in 1857, and that he led the first “Jingle Bells” singalong at a church where his brother was the pastor.

“This really bothered me, that it had two narratives,” Hamill told BU Today. “I started digging.”

According to her research, Pierpoint was what BU Today colorfully described as “a peripatetic, perennially broke ne’er-do-well” who shunned his New England abolitionist father, the Rev. John Pierpont, by joining the Confederate army.

Hamill isn’t sure where Pierpoint wrote the song but said it couldn’t have been in a tavern in Massachusetts in 1850. According to her research, he was in California trying to make his fortune during the Gold Rush. But that didn’t pan out. He found some success as a daguerreotype artist, but his shop in San Francisco was destroyed in a fire in 1851, and he returned to Boston as a pauper.

Blackface Actors 'Does Actually Matter'

In his letter on the Brighton schools website, McGowan said removing the song from the music curriculum “may seem silly to some,” but the fact that the song “was first performed in minstrel shows where white actors performed in blackface does actually matter when it comes to questions of what we use as material in school.”

“I’m glad that our staff paused when learning of this, reflected, and decided to use different material to accomplish the same objective in class,” he wrote. “It is also important to note that a song so closely related to a religious holiday that is not celebrated by everyone in our community was not likely a song that we would have wanted as part of the school curriculum in the first place.

“Our staff found that their simple objective could be accomplished by singing any one of many songs in class and therefore they chose to simply choose other songs.”

He added that Brighton families are free to sing “Jingle Bells” with their children, and no one at the school said they shouldn’t.

“I can assure you that this situation is not an attempt to push an agenda,” he wrote. “We were not and are not even discussing the song and its origins, whatever they may be. This was very simply a thoughtful shift made by thoughtful staff members who thought they could accomplish their instructional objective using different material.”