Peggy Lee / The Best of Christmas / 1960
I Like a Sleighride (Jingle Bells)
buoyant, playful, uncomplicated cheer
This is a swinging, call-and-response arrangement of the traditional "Jingle Bells," with Peggy Lee layering a repeated personal refrain over the familiar verses. The song doesn't reinterpret the material so much as animate it, turning a simple carol into a rhythmic, jazz-inflected vocal performance built on repetition and interjection.
festive pleasure simplicity and repetition nostalgia collective merriment
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addressing an unspecified listener or audience, essentially narrating her own enjoyment in real time; the voice is wholly sincere and not layered with irony.
What happens
There isn't a developing story here -- the song opens with the speaker's declaration of delight, moves through the traditional sleigh-ride verses, and closes by returning to that same declaration, creating a loop rather than a progression. Any 'narrative' is really just the accumulation of texture: call-and-response interjections thicken as the song goes on, building energy without changing the subject.
How it's built
The arrangement interpolates a new vocal hook (the speaker's personal exclamation) between and underneath the familiar carol lines, functioning almost like a gospel-style response to the lead melody. The classic verse-and-chorus shape of the original carol is preserved, but Lee's refrain acts as a connective tissue that turns it into a call-and-response performance rather than a straight recitation.
Section by section
Opening refrain
“I like the sleigh ride”
Before any of the traditional carol text appears, the speaker establishes her own voice and enthusiasm, effectively branding the track as her personal take rather than a straight cover.
First chorus with interjections
The familiar carol lines proceed largely unaltered, but the speaker's refrain is slotted into the gaps, creating a layered texture where the traditional melody and the new personal commentary coexist.
Verse (dashing through the snow)
This section echoes the first verse with the added device of vocal doubling on key phrases, suggesting a group or band response to the lead vocal and deepening the communal, celebratory feel.
Final choruses and outro
The song closes by stripping back to the personal refrain alone, bookending the track and confirming that its real emotional center is not the narrative of the sleigh ride itself but the speaker's unambiguous delight in it.
Craft
- call and response
- The bracketed interjections function as a second vocal part answering each line of the carol, a structure borrowed from gospel and jazz performance that turns the song into a shared, participatory event rather than a solitary recitation.
- repetition/refrain
- The personal catchphrase recurs so often that it becomes less a lyric than a rhythmic device, mimicking the circular motion of a sleigh ride and reinforcing the song's mood through sheer insistence rather than new information.
- onomatopoeia
- The bell-imitating syllables of the original carol are retained and get further emphasized by the arrangement's rhythmic treatment, keeping the sonic image of sleigh bells constantly present.
Reading it
The most straightforward reading is that this is a vehicle for vocal performance and arrangement rather than lyrical depth: Lee and her collaborators use the public-domain carol as scaffolding for a jazz-pop performance built on rhythm, repetition, and interplay between lead and response vocals. A secondary reading might frame the repeated personal refrain as a subtle act of ownership -- staking a claim to a very well-worn holiday standard by injecting a first-person voice into it -- but there's little textual complexity to support reading this as anything more than a joyful, surface-level holiday entertainment.
Context
"Jingle Bells" is a 19th-century American song, originally not written as a Christmas song at all, that became a holiday standard well before Lee's recording. Her version is part of a broader midcentury tradition of pop and jazz vocalists reworking traditional carols with swing arrangements and vocal embellishments for holiday albums; I don't have specific information about this recording's session details or chart history.
Listen for
- How the refrain is woven into the gaps between carol lines rather than replacing them
- The shift in vocal texture when doubled or echoed lines appear in the second verse
- The buildup of energy through repetition rather than through lyrical or harmonic change
- How the song opens and closes on the same personal exclamation, framing it as a loop
About Peggy Lee
Norma Deloris Egstrom, known professionally as Peggy Lee, was an American jazz and popular music singer, songwriter, and actress whose career spanned seven decades. From her beginning as a vocalist on local radio to singing with Benny Goodman's big band, Lee created a sophisticated persona, writing music for films, acting, and recording conceptual record albums combining poetry and music.
1920 - 2002 / United States
Full biography and catalogue