[On July 30, 1942, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” was released. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Crosby’s classic and other Christmas and holiday songs, for a little flavor of the season here in mid-summer!]
On a
couple reasons for the enduring success of one of history’s biggest songs.
You could
probably win a lot of trivia contests with this knowledge (I certainly didn’t
know it before researching this post), but Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” is the
best-selling single of all time, having sold more than 50 million copies
worldwide (and again, that’s just of Crosby’s version; when you add in the many
covers over the subsequent eight decades the song has sold well above 100 million).
Written by one of the 20th century’s greatest songwriters,
Irving Berlin, for the 1942 musical film Holiday Inn (starring Crosby and
Fred Astaire), the song was first performed live by Crosby
on an NBC radio show on Christmas Day, 1941, recorded by Crosby and the Ken
Darby Singers in May 1942, and then officially released
on July 30, 1942 as part of six records’ worth of music from the film (with
“White Christmas” eventually winning an Academy Award for Best Original Song). Berlin
seems to have known he had something special from the jump, supposedly
telling his secretary after penning the song in 1940, “I want you to take
down a song I wrote over the weekend. Not only is it the best song I ever
wrote, it’s the best song anybody ever wrote.”
I don’t
want to disagree with the great Irving B., and I certainly think “White
Christmas” is an excellent song; but to my mind, there have to be other
explanations besides simple quality for what made and has continued to make
this particular Christmas tune so stunningly popular. Here I’ll consider two,
one textual and one contextual. Textually, I think “White Christmas” offers a
particularly succinct, unique, and potent expression of an emotion
about which I’ve written many
times before in this space: nostalgia.
From its opening lines, “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas/Just like the ones I
used to know,” the song taps into that kind of nostalgia for childhood ideals (to
which of course Christmas
and all holidays always already connect). In that same verse Berlin implicitly
connects that nostalgia to other Christmas carols like the ones I wrote about
on Tuesday, with the lines “and children listen/To hear sleigh bells in the snow.”
But at the same time, much of the rest of the song is overtly forward-looking
and hopeful, linking the act of writing Christmas cards to a holiday wish that “all”
the audience’s (for those cards and of the song alike) “days” will “be merry
and bright.” That hopeful nostalgia, that forward-looking wistfulness, is to my
mind quite unique, and makes this Christmas classic stand out in that crowded
field to be sure.
Since “White
Christmas” has remained so enduringly popular for 80 years, and across so many
covers, clearly there is something in those lyrics (as well as the tune) that
has hit audiences from many different periods and places. But of course it had
to get popular initially as well, and on that note I would say that there’s a
particular early 1940s in America context that helps explain why “White
Christmas” hit so hard: World War II. When Crosby first performed the song on
Christmas Day 1941, it was less than 3 weeks after the Pearl Harbor bombings;
when the song and film formally debuted in 1942, the US had entered the war in
both the Pacific and European fronts. Neither the film nor the song makes any
overt reference to the war, although since filming was ongoing when Pearl
Harbor was attacked a July
4th scene in the movie was expanded to include a more overt
tribute to the military. But in such a fraught and threatened historical
moment, I’d say that the aforementioned emotional combination at the heart of “White
Christmas”—nostalgia for better and more peaceful days, and a hope for a
brighter future that can echo them—offered a potent salve to American audiences
indeed. In any case, a good reminder that Christmas and holiday songs are never
limited in their effects and meanings to that season.
July Recap
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other holiday songs you’d analyze?
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