The Soundtrack Of Our Lives

December 7, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Soundtrack Of Our Lives 

Every Sunday The Soundtrack of Our Lives looks back at some of the music that was popular and the performers who were influential forty years ago, around the time Richard Nixon was elected President.

During December the Soundtrack will consider some of the most popular Christmas songs and carols.

WHITE CHRISTMAS (IRVING BERLIN) performed by BING CROSBY

Irving Berlin (above) had been noodling a melody since 1935 when he hummed a few bars to Fred Astaire on the set of Top Hat. But he didn’t actually compose it until one afternoon in 1940 when he was basking in the sun beside a pool in Arizona (some stories say it was in California, but poolside that’s the same difference). And that’s how “White Christmas” was born.  (Berlin could neither read nor write music, so his method of composition was to dictate the song to a musical secretary — in this case, as for sixty years, a German-born graduate of the Milwaukee Conservatory, Helmy Kresa.)

The song was meant to be a novelty number, a mordantly comic reflection on the smug nostalgia for colder climes so comfortably expressed by people ensconced poolside. The familiar chorus was meant to be the vestigial —and ironic— appendage to the verse:

The sun is shining.
The grass is green.
The orange and palm trees sway.
There’s never been such a day
In Beverly Hills, L.A.
But it’s December the twenty-fourth,
And I’m longing to be up north.

But two years later the song was assigned to Bing Crosby in the movie Holiday Inn. Der Bingle’s voice —which Louis Armstrong said sounded like “gold being poured out of a cup”— projected many qualities but irony was not among them.

The verse was scrapped and the chorus now stood alone — a Berlin masterpiece of deceptively simple melody and disarmingly direct words:

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas
Just like the ones I used to know
Where the tree tops glisten
And children listen
To hear sleigh bells in the snow

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas
With every Christmas card I write
May your days be merry and bright
And may all your Christmases be white

Crosby introduced the song publicly on The Kraft Music Hall radio program on NBC on Christmas Day 1941. In May 1942 made a record (78 rpm) of the song (the recording session famously lasted eighteen minutes after which Bing adjourned to the golf course) that was released as part of a six record soundtrack album in advance of the movie opening, at the end of July.

At that point, although “White Christmas” had been stripped of its verse and was no longer considered to be a novelty song, there were no great expectations for it.   The hit song from the movie and the record album was still expected to be “Be Careful, It’s My Heart,”  in which Crosby sang while his co-star Fred Astaire danced with Marjorie Reynolds.

The rather lamely plotted but tuneful Holiday Inn tells the story a former singer who retires from show business and decides to run a country hotel that will only be open on holidays, for each of which he will produce an appropriate show. There were Berlin songs for Valentine’s Day (“Be Careful, It’s My Heart”), Lincoln’s Birthday (a blackface minstrel song called “Abraham” — which is now cut from most showings of the film), Easter (“Easter Parade” naturally), July 4th (a terrific Fred Astaire dance to and with “Let’s Say It With Firecrackers,” and “Song Of Freedom,” which Crosby sings against a montage of war production, ships and planes, and even FDR), etc., etc.

In the film, Crosby sang “White Christmas” as a duet with Marjorie Reynolds (in fact, her voice was dubbed by Martha Mears), who plays a florist’s clerk with ambitions of a show business career.

The film opened in August 1942 and “White Christmas” became a national sensation overnight.  Only four months later, when Christmas arrived, it was already established as a major it. This was America’s first real wartime Christmas, and the GIs in training and already fighting in the South Pacific and Europe, and their loved ones at home, were experiencing the nostalgia engendered by loss and longing for the first time. The iconic nature of Currier and Ives and Norman Rockwell-type Christmas scenes had suddenly acquired a bittersweet subtext.

As one commentator observed, Betty Grable’s legs and Bing Crosby’s voice became the embodiments of what Americans were fighting for. The film was a hit; “White Christmas” won the Academy Award for Best Song; and the Crosby recording sat on top of the Hit Parade for several weeks.

When Crosby started making USO tours to sing for the troops, he observed the effect —always powerful and sometimes devastating— the song had on his audiences.  His instinct was to cut it from his shows, but when he did he was barraged by so many requests that he ended up restoring it.

In fact, “White Christmas” was the best-selling single record (“since records began” in the words of the Guinness Book of Records) until it was displaced in 1997 by Elton John’s “Candle In The Wind” tribute to Princess Diana. “White Christmas” still holds the record for the most total copies —singles and albums— in history.

Irving Berlin was not unaware of the irony that America’s favorite Christmas song was written by a Jewish immigrant — born Israel Isidore Baline (Beilin) in 1888 in what is now Belarus; his family arrived at Ellis Island in 1893.  Indeed, the Christmas season was always sad for him after his son, Irving Berlin Jr., only lived three weeks and died on December 26, 1928.

 

“White Christmas” immediately became a standard and before long became a classic.  The Crosby Ur-version was and remains the gold standard, but the song has been recorded —in many cases many times—  by every major artist.   Frank Sinatra’s several recordings began with this early 1944 version when he was still in his heartthrob phase.

 

“White Christmas’s” sadly and inadvertently-acquired wartime nostalgia was the starting-off point for the eponymous film made in 1954. It opened with an unabashedly exploitative all-stops-out tearjerking rendition (to the accompaniment of a music box no less, with bombs exploding off camera). The story was set during World War Two, but audiences were only just recovering from yet another war (a “conflict” by any other name) in Korea.

That same year, the Drifters, with the distinctive voice of lead singer by Clyde McPhatter, released their version of “White Christmas.” It reached Number Two on the 1954 R+B charts and entered the pop Hot 100 the next Christmas and again in 1960 and 1962.

Among the artists who had later success with the song were Elvis Presley (an interesting and undeniably Elvisy version in 1957, which Irving Berlin considered a desecration and fought a losing legal battle to prevent being released), Otis Redding (a soulful account that was released posthumously and reached Number Nine forty years ago in December 1968), and Johnny Mathis (on his characteristically lavishly produced 1972 Christmas album).

One of my favorites is a 1964 BBC radio archive recording of a live in studio performance by Jerry Lee Lewis. The Killer was in fine form, and his voice and piano serve the song very well in both parts of his sensitive and swinging arrangement.

My other hands down favorite is by Bob Marley and the Wailers — who sings about a White Christmas “not like the ones I used to know” and fashions Berlin’s lyrics to his purposes.

Other interesting recordings range from the conventional —Jim Reeves, Willie Nelson— to the unusual  —Queensryche, a surprisingly creditable version by Twisted Sister, a relatively restrained rendition by Flaming Lips, and an unrestrained one by Kurt Cobain and Nirvana that was cutting edge then and is now just sad— to the ridiculous bit charmiing — Alvin and the Chipmunks.

 

“White Christmas” played an unhappy part in another war.  In the spring of 1975, as the North Vietnamese armies were closing in on Saigon, plans were made the for helicopter evacuation of Americans from the roof of the US Embassy.  The signal to go to the Embassy because the end was imminent would be a radio announcement that the temperature in Saigon was “105 degrees and rising” followed by the playing of Bing Crosby’s record of “White Christmas.”

(The original master recording, made in May 1942, became damaged because it had been used so  much, so Bing Crosby returned to the studio on 18 March 1947.  The same arrangements and performers were used (John Scott Trotter and His Orchestra and the Kim Darby Singers), and the Crosby’s performances were noted for their remarkable consistency, but the version available today is the later recreation rather than the original.)

 

RECOMMENDED READING

WHITE CHRISTMAS: THE STORY OF AN AMERICAN SONG, by Jody Rosen

In this excellent book, New York Times reporter Rosen writes a history of American popular music —and taste in popular music— as well as telling the story of this particular song.  Here’s an excerpt:   

We remember that interwar era as the Golden Age of American Song — the charmed period when Berlin, Jerome Kern, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Porter, Harold Arlen, and other titans of Broadway and Hollywood turned the pop song, once regarded as the crudest kind of mass entertainment, into a definitive national art form. In the twenty-first century, the song standards remain indelible; consecrated in the recordings of Sinatra and Fitzgerald and Armstrong and Billie Holiday, launching pads for the improvisations of successive generations of jazz greats — they are the bedrock of American pop. Their lush melodies and lyrical bon mots conjure a fairy-tale world of urbanity and romance, generating nostalgia even in those of us born decades after their heyday. They are supreme products of what historian Ann Douglas has called America’s postcolonial phase; listening to song standards — from “Tea for Two” to “I Get a Kick Out of You” to “Over the Rainbow” — we hear the optimism of the American empire at its giddy early height.

I grew up in a very different musical age, with ears conditioned by the urgency of rock and soul and hip-hop, and the song standards always struck me as exotic. In part, this book was inspired by my curiosity about the music — where it came from, why it blazed and disappeared. Historians hallow song standards as one of the United States’ great gifts to world culture; musicologists parse their structure with the same loving scrutiny they lavish on Schubert lieder. Yet the American Songbook remains misunderstood, distorted by the culture war that erupted when rock ‘n’ roll remade American entertainment in the 1960s. In one corner is the they-don’t-write-’em-like-that-anymore crowd, who have mystified the song-standard era beyond reason and recognition. For those of us who love “Cheek to Cheek” and “Star Dust” and “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and “Don’t Believe the Hype” in equal measure, it can be galling to read history as told by champions of classic pop, who cling to the notion that all craft and charm drained from American music the day rock and soul’s barbarians stormed the gates. On the opposite side are rock critics who, steeped in rock’s rebel mythologies and cult of authenticity, have effectively read fifty years of pop — and George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, and Bing Crosby — out of musical history.

These competing mythologies remove the song standards from their historical context, and the story of “White Christmas” — the era’s commercial zenith, the signature collaboration of its most famous songwriter and singer — brings that context into sharper focus. It was a time before rock ‘n’ roll introduced a musical generation gap and put the voices of blacks and Southern whites at the forefront, before Vietnam and the social ruptures of the 1960s, when pop songs seemed to embody cultural consensus — when the American middle class sought charm and reassurance in mass entertainment. Today, our longing for that musical era grades into a larger nostalgia for the mystical heyday of the “Greatest Generation,” that allegedly happier period of stalwart American values and national unity. If any song represents mid-century consensus, it is “White Christmas”: a celebration of the de facto national holiday, introduced by a multimedia father figure in the midst of a World War, when circumstances encouraged an unprecedented uniformity of thought and feeling. Song-standard aficionados might argue that music was simply better in the good old days. But one can’t help suspecting that they are also longing for a simpler time, when pop songs spoke almost exclusively in the voice of the white middle class and hadn’t yet begun to reflect the difficult questions and moral ambiguities of American life.

Nevertheless, if the songs of that pre­civil rights, prefeminist period strike us today as blithely ethnocentric, it should be remembered that they were the result of a social struggle in many ways as significant as those that have inflected rock’s history. The pop-song industry was dominated in both its creative and commercial spheres by Jews — many of them, like Berlin, recent immigrants — and the music it gave to the world was the music of assimilation, a distinctly New World concoction: the result of a people’s striving for social acceptance and a piece of the American pie. Much of twentieth-century pop culture is a kind of Yankee Doodle Yiddishkeit: All-Americanism as imagined by Lower East Siders, intoxicated by showbiz and its fast track out of the ghetto. “White Christmas” — a Russian-born cantor’s son’s ode to a Christian American holiday — is a milestone of Jewish acculturation matched perhaps only by another Berlin magnum opus, “God Bless America”: a symbol of the extraordinary way that the Jews who wrote pop songs, sang them on vaudeville stages, invented Broadway, and founded movie studios, turned themselves into Americans — and remade American pop culture in their own image.

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