Review
Irving Berlin, one of the most prolific of all the great songsmiths of the second half of the 20th century, wrote no more successful number than White Christmas. Made popular by Bing Crosby, it was almost immediately successful, and has sold in ever-increasing numbers over the subsequent 60 years. Now Jody Rosen attempts to determine the secret of its success, not only analysing it musically but looking at Berlin's methods of composition, at the 'Jewishness' of it and other popular songs of the period, and at its place in American popular music and culture. Though the book is somewhat uneasily poised between social history and modern mythology, it is scholarly in intention and entertaining in presentation. A perfect Christmas present for music lovers. (Kirkus UK)
Informative and thoughtful account of a song that became a wartime anthem, pioneered the evolution of holiday music, and "paved the way for the new music" sold on records rather than as sheet music. The story of the song is central here, but along with those pertinent details, freelance journalist Rosen describes the changes in music since the 1940s and examines the role of Jews in the promotion of Christmas culture, a role that was "more profound than entrepreneurial savvy." He suggests that Ira Berlin, a refugee from pogroms who with sheer chutzpah wrote "a Christmas anthem that buried all traces of the holiday's Christian origins beneath three feet of driven snow" illustrates greater subtleties at work. Born in 1888 in Siberia, Berlin came to the US with his family at age five and grew up in the tenements of Manhattan's Lower East Side. He dropped out of school and by 19 was working in the lower levels of Tin Pan Alley. His first song was published in 1907, but his career was launched in 1911 with "Alexander's Ragtime Band," which sold two million copies. Rosen records all the great Berlin hits and shows preceding "White Christmas" and its venue, the 1942 movie Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby. Its sales have topped 125 million copies, but Berlin originally intended it only as a revue song-a wry novelty tune set in Los Angeles, sung by sophisticated expat New Yorkers pining for a snowbound Christmas. Rosen describes how Crosby treated the song as a Christmas carol but also gave it an "erotic charge," adding to its popularity. The radios and jukeboxes carrying Crosby's recording to American troops made it a bestseller. Berlin, Rosen notes, always understood how powerful its yuletide associations were. Not just for the holidays, but for all who treasure American popular music: a perfect gift. (Kirkus Reviews)
Product Description
This is a biography of one of the most important records in the history of popular music. "White Christmas" is a musical phenomenon. Penned by Irving Berlin in 1942 and performed by Bing Crosby in the hit film "Holiday Inn", the original version of "White Christmas" has sold over 31 million copies. It's the world's all-time top-selling and most frequently recorded song - 500 versions have been recorded, from Latin to Swahili. But the power of "White Christmas" transcends its original commercial impact. Berlin's song not only speaks eloquently of a moment, it has come to define secular Christmas in the western world. As well as being a showbiz story starring Crosby, Berlin, Astaire, Sinatra, the Gershwins and Presley, this book is a window into American cultural history in the first half of the 20th century. It is a story that sweeps from the birth of popular music at the turn-of-the-century, through ragtime, jazz, blues, to Tin-Pan Alley pop and its swaggering stars - Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra - and on to the advent of rock-and-roll in the 1950s. The book also looks at the invention of the phonograph, at how radio play transformed the pop industry, and at the commercialisation of Christmas in the wake of Berlin's song.
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