December 20, 2024 —– Chart #277
Hello Music Friends,
Hey folks, welcome to another edition of Chart of the Week. Folks, it’s Christmas time so I just had to get into the spirit of the season and give you a Christmas song today. “White Christmas” is a song reminiscing about an old-fashioned Christmas setting. Written by Irving Berlin for the 1942 musical film Holiday Inn, the song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 15th Academy Awards. Originally sung by Bing Crosby, it topped the Billboard chart for 11 weeks and returned to the number one position again in December 1943 and 1944. His version would return to the top 40 a dozen times in subsequent years.
Since its release, “White Christmas” has been covered by many artists. Crosby’s version is the world’s best-selling single (in terms of sales of physical media), with estimated sales in excess of 50 million physical copies worldwide. When the figures for other versions of the song are added to Crosby’s, sales of the song exceed 100 million.
Accounts vary as to when and where Berlin wrote the song. One story is that he wrote it in 1940, in warm La Quinta, California, while staying at the La Quinta Hotel, a frequent Hollywood retreat also favored by writer-director-producer Frank Capra, although the Arizona Biltmore also claims the song was written there. He often stayed up all night writing. One day he told his secretary, “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.”
The first public performance of the song was by Bing Crosby, on his NBC radio show The Kraft Music Hall on Christmas Day, 1941, a few weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Crosby subsequently recorded the song with the John Scott Trotter Orchestra and the Ken Darby Singers at Radio Recorders for Decca Records in 18 minutes on May 29, 1942, and it was released on July 30 as part of an album of six 78-rpm discs from the musical film Holiday Inn. At first, Crosby did not see anything special about the song. He just said “I don’t think we have any problems with that one, Irving.”
In Holiday Inn, the composition won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1942. In the film, Crosby sings “White Christmas” as a duet with actress Marjorie Reynolds, though her voice was dubbed by Martha Mears. This now-familiar scene was not the moviemakers’ initial plan. In the script as originally conceived, Reynolds, not Crosby, would sing the song. The song would feature in another Crosby film, the 1954 musical White Christmas, which became the highest-grossing film of 1954. (Crosby made yet another studio recording of the song, accompanied by Joseph J. Lilley’s orchestra and chorus, for the film’s soundtrack album.)
And just to prove that my sense of humor remains intact, try this version on for size. This video looks as if it was directed by Dave Byrne and the Talking Heads: https://youtu.be/Cne3GAB4W5I?si=bbI6BfdakWJQ3NCM
According to Crosby’s nephew, Howard Crosby, “I once asked Uncle Bing about the most difficult thing he ever had to do during his entertainment career… He said in December, 1944, he was in a USO show with Bob Hope and the Andrews Sisters. They did an outdoor show in northern France… he had to stand there and sing ‘White Christmas’ with 100,000 G.I.s in tears without breaking down himself. Of course, a lot of those boys were killed in the Battle of the Bulge a few days later.”
The version most often heard today on the radio during the Christmas season is the 1947 re-recording. The 1942 master was damaged due to frequent use. Crosby re-recorded the track on March 19, 1947, accompanied again by the Trotter Orchestra and the Darby Singers, with every effort made to reproduce the original recording session. The re-recording is recognizable by the addition of flutes and celesta in the beginning.
Although Crosby dismissed his role in the song’s success, saying later that “a jackdaw with a cleft palate could have sung it successfully“, he was associated with it for the rest of his career. Okay, I will admit that I had no idea what a jackdaw was when I first found this fact. Turns out a jackdaw is a bird, so now the comment makes a little sense. Oh well, play this song and sing it around your tree. It’s a winner.
Keep Rockin’,
Stan Bradshaw