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1.
The Best Song Anybody Ever Wrote
God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then
He gave Irving Berlin … “White Christmas.”
—PHILIP ROTH,
Operation Shylock
They say a hanging man hears gorgeous music. Too bad that I, like my father, unlike my musical mother, am tone-deaf. All the same, I hope that the tune I am about to hear is not Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” … Goodbye, cruel world!
—KURT VONNEGUT,
Mother Night
IRVING BERLIN was born in the nineteenth century and nearly outlived the twentieth. During the last several of his 101 years, Berlin faced a peculiar indignity: watching the copyrights expire on his earliest published songs. His ownership of those songs had been as tightfisted as the law would permit; he frostily refused permission to reprint his lyrics even to friends working on fawning tributes. Now the songs were leaving him: in 1982, “Marie from Sunny Italy,” his first published number, written when Irving Berlin was still Izzy Baline, a nineteen-year-old singing waiter in a Chinatown saloon; in 1984, “My Wife’s Gone to the Country (Hurrah! Hurrah!),” his first hit; in 1986, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” his career-making smash, whose clarion opening line—“Come on and hear”—announced not just the arrival of a national troubadour but a young country’s liberation from Victorianism and swaggering emergence into the century it would claim as its own.
The old man may have grieved the loss of his songs to the public domain, but much of his catalog had made that journey years before, migrating from Tin Pan Alley straight into national lore. He was born in Siberia, yet seemed to have a direct channel to the American imagination, yanking song after song out of the collective unconscious and returning them to his adopted country as beguiling reflections of its hopes, myths, and passing fancies. He strove to write, he said, “in the simplest way … as simple as writing a telegram.” In so doing, he filled the American Songbook with pop standards that sound as inevitable as folk songs; his songs are definitively twentieth-century things—“a Berlin ballad” appears in Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top” alongside a Waldorf salad and Mickey Mouse—yet they strike us as timeless, anonymous. We recognize George Gershwin’s musical signature in the bluesy grandeur of “Summertime” and “The Man I Love”; the droll, debonair voice of “Too Darn Hot” and “Miss Otis Regrets” is unmistakably Porter’s own. But in Berlin’s most celebrated songs—“Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” “Always,” “Blue Skies,” “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” “How Deep Is the Ocean?” “Easter Parade,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” “God Bless America,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business”—Berlin is invisible. It was not an insult when Alec Wilder, in his landmark study of American popular song, declared himself at a loss to describe stylistic common denominators in the songwriter’s vast output.
Berlin’s most famous song, by far the most valuable copyright in his (or anyone else’s) catalog, is “White Christmas.” But as I discovered in writing this book, it may be the Berlin hit least associated with him. Everyone I spoke to about “White Christmas” knew the song; everyone had Bing Crosby’s dulcet, definitive recording lodged in his mind’s ear. Yet few knew who composed it. This wasn’t true just of my contemporaries, who like me had grown up with hip-hop and rock ’n’ roll and whose only exposure to Irving Berlin may have been Taco’s synth-pop travesty of “Puttin’ On the Ritz.” I met avowed Berlin fans who not only were unaware that the man had written the tune, but could hardly comprehend that it had been written at all. They assumed “White Christmas” was as old as the hills, its creator as ancient and unknown as the composer of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.”
But “White Christmas” is a pop song: you could call it the pop song. Berlin liked to brag that the number “was a publishing business in itself,” a rare instance of the songwriter—no slouch at trumpeting his successes—selling himself short. “White Christmas” is the biggest pop tune of all time, the top-selling and most frequently recorded song: the hit of hits. It is a quintessentially American
