.htaccess redirect from static site to Wordpress

I’m trying to redirect pages from an old static site to new pages in WordPress. So, for example,

http://www.mysite.com/contact.htm

should redirect to:

http://www.mysite.com/contact

I’m using the following in the .htaccess file, but it’s not working:

redirect 301 /mysite/contact.htm http://www.mysite.com/contact

I ended up figuring this out myself and implemented as a series of rewrites along the lines of:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^jeffthomascobb.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.jeffthomascobb.com$
RewriteRule ^contact\.htm$ “http\:\/\/www\.jeffthomascobb\.com\/contact\/” [R=301,L]

etc.

Works fine now