White Christmas

“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 with estimated sales in excess of 50 million 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 copy of the recording from the radio program is owned by Crosby’s estate and was loaned to CBS News Sunday Morning for their December 25, 2011 program.   He subsequently recorded the song with the John Scott Trotter Orchestra and the Ken Darby Singers.  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.”   The song established that there could be commercially successful secular Christmas songs—in this case, written by a Jewish-American songwriter. 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 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. 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.” 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