Jingle Bells Notes in Letters: Piano & Kalimba Guide

Jingle Bells looks like the easiest song on any beginner list, and on paper it is: five notes, no black keys, no hand movement. Yet it easily comes out as a shapeless string of Es. The notes are trivial; the counting is the skill. So this page gives you the notes with lyrics, then spends most of its time on how the repeats should feel.

Want to hear it before reading on? Play Jingle Bells in your browser. It's a sound demo from the echoPi website. Each click or push plays the next note, so the pitches take care of themselves and the rhythm is all yours, which is exactly the part to practise. echoPi is a fidget slider that's still in development.

Jingle Bells notes with numbers

How to read it: letter names are shown without octave numbers. In the number column C is 1, and a dot below or above a number would mean an octave down or up; this tune doesn't need either. Everything sits between C4 (middle C) and G4.

The words, one syllable per note:

• Line 1: Jin-gle bells, jin-gle bells, jin-gle all the way
• Line 2: Oh what fun it is to ride in a one horse o-pen sleigh, hey
• Line 3: Jin-gle bells, jin-gle bells, jin-gle all the way
• Line 4: Oh what fun it is to ride in a one horse o-pen sleigh

Line 1 opens with seven Es in a row. Lines 2 and 4 both open with five Fs and then a run of Es. Line 3 is line 1 again. So the only real difference is how lines 2 and 4 finish. Line 2 wobbles between D and E and jumps up to G on "hey", leaving the tune hanging. Line 4 goes G G F D and walks down to C to close it out. If you can remember "hey ends high, sleigh ends low", you won't mix them up.

The rhythm: counting the repeats

With so many repeated notes, timing is the only thing that tells the listener where they are in the song. Here's the shape, line by line, in plain words:

1. "Jingle bells, jingle bells": short, short, long. The first two Es are one beat each; the third, on "bells", is held for two. Then the same again. That's six of the seven Es, grouped 3 + 3, and the grouping is what makes it sound like Jingle Bells.
2. "Jingle all the way": E G C D E. The E and G are one beat each. C is held a little longer and D is quick, then the last E on "way" is held for four full beats, the longest note in the song. It's easy to cut it short. Let it ring.
3. "Oh what fun it is to ride": steady beats. The five Fs and the two Es on "to ride" move evenly, one per beat. Then "in a" is two quick Es squeezed into a single beat.
4. "One horse open sleigh, hey". The notes even out again, D and G at the end are each held for two beats. In line 4 the last C on "sleigh" gets the long four-beat hold, like "way" in line 1.

A good self-check: say the words while you play. The lyrics carry the rhythm almost perfectly. On the browser demo, push in time with the words under your breath.

Playing Jingle Bells on piano

Find middle C, the white key just left of the two black keys in the middle of the keyboard, and set your right hand in five-finger C position: thumb on C, then D, E, F and G under fingers 2 to 5. That's every note in the chorus, so the hand never moves.

The challenges are different from a melody that moves by step:

• Repeated keys. Seven Es in a row means pressing the same key with the same finger (3) seven times. Let the key come all the way up between presses, or the repeats blur into each other. A loose wrist helps more than a strong finger.
• The skip from G to C. In "jingle all the way", finger 5 plays G and then the thumb plays C. It's the widest move in the song, but nothing shifts; your fingers are already there.
• Line 4's G G F D C. F to D jumps over E, so the fingering is 5 5 4 2 1 and your middle finger, busy for the whole song, sits this one out. Playing 3 by habit here is an easy wrong note.

For a left hand, the simplest accompaniment is a C held under lines 1 and 3, an F under the five-F openings of lines 2 and 4, and a G under the "hey". Keep it optional; the tune works fine alone.

Playing Jingle Bells on a kalimba

A kalimba in C is laid out from the middle outward: the long center tine is 1, and the scale climbs by alternating sides, 2 on one side, 3 on the other, 4 back on the first side, 5 on the second, and so on toward the short tines at the edges.

Jingle Bells only needs 1 through 5, the five tines closest to the center, so it fits on any kalimba tuned to C, from small keychain ones to full 17-key instruments. It feels very different from a stepwise tune like Ode to Joy. Because so many notes repeat, one thumb does most of the work: the 3 tine for the opening seven Es and the 4 tine for the five Fs. Each repeat is a fresh flick of the same tine, so it's a good exercise in making every pluck equally loud.

The interesting moment is 5 1 2 3, "jin-gle all the". On the usual layout 3 and 5 sit on the same side of the center, 1 is the center and 2 is on the other side, so the line swings out to one edge, back across the middle and over again. Go slowly the first few times.

Where Jingle Bells came from

The song was written by James Lord Pierpont and published in September 1857 by Oliver Ditson & Co. of Boston under the title The One Horse Open Sleigh. Ditson republished it in 1859 with the new title Jingle Bells; or, The One Horse Open Sleigh. It had no original connection to Christmas. It became associated with winter and Christmas during the 1860s and 1870s.

Where it was written is disputed. A plaque at 19 High Street in Medford, Massachusetts, marks the town as its birthplace and claims an 1850 date. Boston University lecturer Kyna Hamill's research puts its first performance on 15 September 1857 at Ordway Hall in Boston, sung by Johnny Pell with Ordway's Aeolians in a blackface minstrel show. She says it was not written in 1850 in Medford, noting that Pierpont was in California that year.

The chorus you know isn't quite the one Pierpont published. The original 1857 version had a substantially different chorus, and nobody knows where the simpler modern refrain came from. That's the melody in the table above.

In December 1965, aboard Gemini 6, astronauts Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford played Jingle Bells on a harmonica and a set of bells they had carried on board, and pretended to report a UFO called Santa Claus. It's one of the first songs broadcast from space. The bells are on display at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.

If you get stuck

• You lose count of the Es. Think "three, three, then the rest" rather than seven separate notes.
• Line 2 drags. You're probably giving "in a" two full beats. Squeeze them into one.
• The ending feels abrupt. Hold the final C for four beats.

When the counting is solid, try Ode to Joy next: same hand position, but a melody that walks step by step instead of repeating. Or go back and play Jingle Bells again in the browser demo, saying the words in your head. To hear when echoPi is ready, join the list.