White Christmas • Bing Crosby
Christmas Song of the Day: White Christmas
White Christmas is # 1. It is actually the # 1 selling record of all time. All time.
Just to be clear, it’s not just the # 1 Christmas record of all time, but the # 1 selling record. Period. Of any music category or genre (this matters after all for our purposes, since this happens to be a music blog dealing with music in popular culture). (Sorry to belabor)
So it is appropriate that we start on December 1st with the most popular Christmas record (by virtue of commercial sales) ever created. My goal is to highlight one Christmas song every day this month, starting today — hope you’ll tune in & join us.
So this historic Christmas song by Bing Crosby is for sure one of my lifelong favorite Christmas songs. I grew up with his songs - I couldn’t have named one of his non-holiday hit songs. To me he was the Christmas music guy. And this song also is obviously a favorite of millions around the world, and has been for 80 years.
White Christmas is an Irving Berlin song reminiscing about an old-fashioned Christmas setting, released in 1942. The version sung by Bing Crosby is the world's best-selling single ever with sales in excess of 50 million copies. When the figures for other versions of the song, including albums, are added to the single, sales of the song exceed an estimated 100 million. Listen on Spotify:
Here is his version & other Christmas favs:
White Christmas • Bing
Bing Crosby in the Movies:
Here is Bing Crosby performing the song White Christmas in the movie Holiday Inn:
When I first heard Karen Carpenter do her version of White Christmas in the 70s, I was puzzled that she’d added another verse at the beginning. Here’s 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 24th
And I am longing to be up north….
I’m dreaming of a white Christmas…
Here is her version on Spotify
(and below that the great Christmas Portrait)
White Christmas • Carpenters
Carpenters • Christmas Portrait
Here is Karen Carpenter performing her version of the song White Christmas on a 1978 television special, including the L.A. verse:
A California Song
Nina Thorsen, writing several years ago in her column, observed that White Christmas is really a California song:
“Many people don’t realize it, but Irving Berlin’s White Christmas – the most recorded holiday song of all time, because it’s also the most recorded song of all time – is written from the point of view of a Californian. The part of the song that we all know is the chorus; but the verse, which sets it up, goes like this:
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 24th
And I am longing to be up north….
I’m dreaming of a white Christmas…
For a child like me growing up in the upper Midwest, singing “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas” was much like saying “I’m dreaming of a peanut butter sandwich in my lunchbox.” You might welcome it, but whether you did or not you were pretty certain that nine times out of ten that's what you were going to get. But the verse isn’t heard very often, and when it is it’s frequently performed by someone steeped in twentieth-century popular song.
“Crosby didn't sing the verse until a TV show in the late 1960s, which I remember watching. "And he starts singing, 'The sun is shining, the grass is green, the orange and palm trees sway...', and I didn't know what the heck he was singing about. This is Christmastime, why is he singing about these palm trees? Then he suddenly goes into White Christmas, and I thought, that's interesting, I never heard that before.”
Accounts vary as to when and where Irving 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.” It was White Christmas.
The Sad Back Story
The first public performance of the song was by Bing Crosby on his NBC radio show on Christmas Day, 1941. 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."
Then-host, Bing Crosby, crooned the carol, which is soulful, longing, and sad anyway, but especially so at the time. Pearl Harbor had been attacked just a few weeks before.
Crosby's rendition quickly became an American favorite. It was constantly requested by troops during Bing's USO appearances overseas, which gave the singer some mixed feelings.
"I hesitated about doing it because invariably it caused such a nostalgic yearning among the men, that it made them sad," Crosby said in an interview. "Heaven knows, I didn't come that far to make them sad. For this reason, several times I tried to cut it out of the show, but these guys just hollered for it."
Also, as It turns out, even the writing of the song has another sad back story. It was written by Irving Berlin (the same composer behind "Cheek to Cheek,” “God Bless America,” and many others) a Russian-born immigrant who, interestingly enough, did not celebrate Christmas, as he was Jewish.
Irving Berlin
Berlin's three-week-old son had died on Christmas day in 1928, so every year on December 25, he and his wife visited their baby's grave. The kind of deep secret of the song may be that it was Berlin responding in some way to his melancholy about the death of his son.
He wrote White Christmas for a musical that eventually morphed into the movie Holiday Inn and ended up winning an Academy Award for the song. In 1954, it was the title track of another Bing Crosby Christmas musical, White Christmas.
The legacy of the Song
The song established that there could be commercially successful secular Christmas songs — in this case, written by a Jewish-American songwriter of all things. Ronald D. Lankford, Jr., wrote, "During the 1940s, 'White Christmas' would set the stage for a number of classic American holiday songs steeped in a misty longing for yesteryear." Before 1942, Christmas songs and films had come out sporadically, and many were popular. However, "the popular culture industry had not viewed the themes of home and hearth, centered on the Christmas holiday, as a unique market" until after the success of "White Christmas" and the film where it appeared, Holiday Inn. Dave Marsh and Steve Propes wrote, "'White Christmas' changed Christmas music forever, both by revealing the huge potential market for Christmas songs and by establishing the themes of home and nostalgia that would run through Christmas music evermore."
In 1942 alone, Crosby's recording spent eleven weeks on top of the Billboard charts. Re-released by Decca, the single returned to the No. 1 spot during the holiday seasons of 1945 and 1946 (on the chart dated January 4, 1947), thus becoming the only single with three separate runs at the top of the U.S. charts. The recording became a chart perennial, reappearing annually on the pop chart twenty times before Billboard magazine finally created a distinct Christmas chart for seasonal releases.
What are you dreaming of this year? Maybe it’s a White Christmas. Maybe something else.
There’s never been such a day,
In Beverly Hills, L. A.
But wherever you are, I hope you have a wonderful Christmas season, and that you are with those who help you see and pursue your dreams.
Join us tomorrow for Christmas Songs Day 2.
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Special Footnote regarding White Christmas holding the # 1 Record Status
Candle In The Wind 97 (by Elton John) is often mistakenly reported as having become the biggest selling single of all time. This is incorrect however - because that distinction still belongs to the late great Bing Crosby with this song White Christmas, which as of 1954 had already sold in excess of 50 million copies (Elton’s song has sold an estimated 33 million to date). (Still, Candle In The Wind 97 is an amazing song and a wonderfully fitting tribute to Diana, the Princess of Wales). But White Christmas holds the title. The Guinness Book of World Records 2009 Edition lists the song as a 100-million seller, encompassing all versions of the song, including albums. Crosby's holiday collection Merry Christmas was first released as an LP in 1949, and has never been out of print since.
There was some confusion on whether Crosby's record is the best-selling single, due to a lack of information on sales of White Christmas, because Crosby's recording was released before the advent of the modern-day US and UK singles charts. However, an update in the 2009 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records decided to further help settle the controversy amicably by naming both John's and Crosby's songs to be "winners" so to speak, by affirming that John's recording is the "best-selling single since UK and US singles charts began in the 1950s," while maintaining however that "the best-selling single of all time was released before the first pop charts," and that this distinction belongs to White Christmas, which it says "was listed as the world's best-selling single in the first-ever version of the Guinness Book of World Records (published in 1955) and — remarkably — still retains the title more than 60 years later."
