records have topped 125 million copies.
Bing Crosby’s original version on Decca Records remains a music industry landmark. For over fifty years it stood as the best-selling record in history. Introduced in the 1942 film Holiday Inn (it won the Academy Award for Best Song), Crosby’s “White Christmas” held first place on the Hit Parade countdown for a record ten consecutive weeks; it would reenter the survey every December for the next twenty years (excepting 1953), spending thirty-eight weeks in the top spot and an unprecedented eighty-six weeks on the chart. All told, Crosby’s “White Christmas” has sold over 31 million copies; it was unseated from its place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the all-time top single only by Elton John’s Princess Diana tribute, “Candle in the Wind ’97.” (Crosby’s record reentered the British charts for two weeks the next year—forty-five years after its initial release.)
Popular culture is infatuated with novelty, and pop music is particularly unsentimental, ruthlessly turning today’s superstar into tomorrow’s one-hit wonder, forever seeking refreshment in new styles, new sounds, the next big thing. Once a year, though, the Christmas season brings songs from several centuries back to jostle for airtime with the latest hits. “White Christmas” is a newcomer to the Christmas canon—the composer of “Joy to the World!” beat Berlin to the punch by at least two hundred years—but in the decades since its appearance, it has become the most performed of all seasonal songs: the world’s favorite Christmas carol. To this day, it continues to generate tens of thousands of annual record and sheet music sales. The Muzak versions that fill the nation’s malls each December should alone be enough to pile-drive “White Christmas” into the consciousness of unnumbered future generations of shoppers.
Although Crosby’s remains the signature version, singers won’t leave “White Christmas” alone: every year brings new versions by performers that run the musical gamut, from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to the German heavy metal band Helloween. The list of “White Christmas” performers includes many of the most famous names in twentieth-century popular music: Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Charlie Parker, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, the Beach Boys, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Supremes, the Temptations, the Four Tops, the Jackson Five, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Al Green, U2. Berlin’s melody has been reimagined as a stuttering punk anthem; as Wagnerian Sturm und Drang with a chorus of thousands wailing in the background; as a loping country ballad; as a string of quicksilver bop improvisations; as a thudding house track—a carol for an Ibiza Christmas. Otis Redding wrung new pathos from the old song, recasting it as a Memphis soul ballad; Michael Bolton did a laughable Otis Redding imitation and recorded what may be the most overwrought “White Christmas” of them all (and consider the competition). Is there another song that Kenny G, Peggy Lee, Mantovani, Odetta, Loretta Lynn, the Flaming Lips, the Edwin Hawkins Singers, and the Backstreet Boys have in common? What other tune links Destiny’s Child, The Three Tenors, and Alvin and the Chipmunks; Perry Como, Garth Brooks, and Stiff Little Fingers; the Reverend James Cleveland, Doris Day, and Kiss?
But the song’s power transcends its sales figures and commercial ubiquity. With “White Christmas,” Berlin created an anthem that spoke eloquently to its historical moment, offering a comforting Christmastime vision to a nation frightened and bewildered by the Second World War. But it also resonated with some of the deepest strains in American culture: yearning for an idealized New England past, belief in the ecumenical magic of the “merry and bright” Christmas season, pining for the sanctuaries of home and hearth. Its dreamy scenery belongs to the same tradition as Currier and Ives’s landscapes and Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The song’s images of sleigh rides and falling snow and eager children capture the mythic essence of the American Christmas. “White Christmas” seems to have always existed, lurking, as one Berlin biographer has written, “just beneath the surface of national consciousness.” Indeed, in writing “White Christmas,” Berlin lit on a universal ideal: the longing for Christmas snowfall, now keenly felt everywhere from New Hampshire to New Guinea, seems to have originated with Berlin’s song. It can safely be said that London bookmakers didn’t offer odds on the possibility of a white Christmas prior to “White Christmas.”
From the beginning, the song has been a blank slate on which Americans have projected their varied views on race, religion, national identity, and other heady matters. In Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, “White Christmas” is an emblem of “Jewish genius,” in Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night, a wearisome reminder of the Second World War. In the early 1940s, at the height of its popularity, “White Christmas” was a huge hit among both white and black audiences. In the decades since, African-Americans have viewed Berlin’s anthem with increasing ambivalence, detecting in Crosby’s placid “white-bread” crooning a coded message excluding blacks from the national Christmas celebration. The song became a hit in the winter of 1942, when it was embraced by homesick American GIs as a symbol of the country to which they longed to return and the values they were fighting to defend. It was the war’s unlikely anthem: a “Why We Fight” song in which the fight was never mentioned. Some thirty years later “White Christmas” returned to play a role in a more troubled American war: the U.S. military used it as the secret signal instructing American soldiers to evacuate Saigon.
One of the most poignant “White Christmas” battles was waged by Berlin himself, when the songwriter launched a fierce (and fruitless) campaign to ban Elvis Presley’s recording of the tune. Today, Berlin’s rage at the rock ’n’ roll “desecration” of his song looks like nothing less than a lament over the sunset of an entire pop culture era: the period, roughly bounded by the two World Wars, that the songwriter had stood astride and whose passing plunged him into a depression that dogged the final forty years of his life.
We remember that interwar era as the Golden Age of American Song—the charmed period when Berlin, Jerome Kern, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Porter, Harold Arlen, and other titans of Broadway and Hollywood turned the pop song, once regarded as the crudest kind of mass entertainment, into a definitive national art form. In the twenty-first century, the song standards remain indelible; consecrated in the recordings of Sinatra and Fitzgerald and Armstrong and Billie Holiday, launching pads for the improvisations of successive generations of jazz greats—they are the bedrock of American pop. Their lush melodies and lyrical bon mots conjure a fairy-tale world of urbanity and romance, generating nostalgia even in those of us born decades after their heyday. They are supreme products of what historian Ann Douglas has called America’s postcolonial phase; listening to song standards—from “Tea for Two” to “I Get a Kick Out of You” to “Oyer the Rainbow”—we hear the optimism of the American empire at its giddy early height.
I grew up in a very different musical age, with ears conditioned by the urgency of rock and soul and hip-hop, and the song standards always struck me as exotic. In part, this book was inspired by my curiosity about the music—where it came from, why it blazed and disappeared. Historians hallow song standards as one of the United States’ great gifts to world culture; musicologists parse their structure with the same loving scrutiny they lavish on Schubert lieder. Yet the American Songbook remains misunderstood, distorted by the culture war that erupted when rock ’n’ roll remade American entertainment in the 1960s. In one corner is the they-don’t-write-’em-like-that-anymore crowd, who have mystified the song-standard era beyond reason and recognition. For those of us who love “Cheek to Cheek” and “Star Dust” and “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and “Don’t Believe the Hype” in equal measure, it can be galling to read history as told by champions of classic pop, who cling to the notion that all craft and charm drained from American music the day rock and soul’s barbarians stormed the gates. On the opposite side are rock critics who, steeped in rock’s rebel mythologies and cult of authenticity, have effectively read fifty years of pop—and George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, and Bing Crosby—out of musical history.
These competing mythologies remove the song standards from their historical context, and the story of “White
