‘White Christmas’ - an all-time favourite
By Tom Gillespie
‘WHITE Christmas’ is an Irving Berlin song reminiscing about an old-fashioned Christmas setting, released in 1942.
The version sung by Bing Crosby was recorded on May 29 of that year, and 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.
I have to say it is my all-time favourite Christmas song and the lyrics tear at your heart strings.
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 favoured by writer-director-producer Frank Capra, although the Arizona Biltmore also claims the song was written there.
Berlin 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 on his NBC radio show The Kraft Music Hall on Christmas Day, 1941. A copy of the recording from the radio programme is owned by Crosby's estate and was loaned to CBS News Sunday Morning for their December 25, 2011, programme. He subsequently recorded the song with the John Scott Trotter Orchestra and the Ken Darby Singers and for Decca Records in 18 minutes, 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.”
The song established that there could be commercially successful secular Christmas songs - in this case, written by a Jewish-American songwriter.
The song initially performed poorly and was overshadowed by Holiday Inn's first hit song ‘Be Careful, It's My Heart'. By the end of October 1942, ‘White Christmas' topped the Your Hit Parade chart. It remained in that position until well into the new year.
It has often been noted that the mix of melancholy - ‘just like the ones I used to know’ - with comforting images of home - ‘where the treetops glisten’ - resonated especially strongly with listeners during World War II.
A few weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbour, Crosby introduced ‘White Christmas’ on a Christmas Day broadcast. The Armed Forces Network was flooded with requests for the song.
The recording is noted for Crosby's whistling during the second chorus.
In 1942 alone, Crosby's recording spent 11 weeks on top of the Billboard charts. The original version also hit number one on the Harlem Hit Parade for three weeks, Crosby's first-ever appearance on the black-oriented chart.
Re-released by Decca, the single returned to the number one 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 US charts.
The recording became a chart perennial, reappearing annually on the pop chart 20 times before Billboard magazine created a distinct Christmas chart for seasonal releases.
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.
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 recognisable by the addition of flutes and celesta in the beginning.
Crosby dismissed his role in the song's success, saying later that ‘a jackdaw with a cleft palate could have sung it successfully’.
There has been confusion and debate 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, after careful research, Guinness World Records in 2007 concluded that, worldwide, Crosby's recording of ‘White Christmas’ has sold at least 50 million copies, and that Elton John’s recording of ‘Candle in the Wind 1997’ has sold 33 million.
However, an update in the 2009 edition of the book decided to further help settle the controversy amicably by naming both John's and Crosby's songs to be ‘winners’ by stating that John's recording is the ‘best-selling single since UK and US singles charts began in the 1950s’, while maintaining 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 Guinness Book of Records (published in 1955) and, remarkably, still retains the title 67 years later.’