Hark, Those Jingle Bells
Are Smokin'

Grade 4
arranged by Julie Giroux

This arrangement is a combination of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!” and “Jingle Bells”.

  “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!” lyrics were written by Charles Wesley in 1739. The music is by Felix Mendelssohn from the second chorus of his cantata “Festgesang” celebrating the invention of the printing press. In 1855 Dr. William Cummings put the words and music together creating the Christmas carol we know today.
  “Jingle Bells” is the most recognizable of all Christmas music and is one of the top twenty-five most recorded songs in history. Composed by the son of an abolitionist minister and a runaway at the age of 14, James Pierpont composed the song sometime during the late 1840s or early 1850s. Though he grew up in New England, his free spirit travels took him overseas to the Pacific then to the California Gold Rush. Eventually Pierpont made it back to Massachusetts, married and had children and upon the death of his wife, moved to Georgia where he remarried and had more children. He fought on the Confederate side of the Civil War and eventually was buried in Savannah, Georgia. He never made any money off his copyright of “Jingle Bells” and the original lyrics are housed in The Library of Congress.  J.G.