The Great American Songbook: "White Christmas"

Written by: Irving Berlin

First recorded by: Bing Crosby, 1942

My Christmas present to readers is to commence my new blog project: commentary on some of the classic American songs of the twentieth century. These songs have withstood the test of time. (Though some artists find "Single Ladies" the best song of all time, it's not blog fodder yet.)

A week into December, what more appropriate song to open with than Irving Berlin's "White Christmas"? Berlin's holiday tune has sold more singles and more sheet music than any other song. The song was composed around 1940 and worked into Holiday Inn, still winning the Oscar for Best Song of 1942. Bing Crosby sings the ballad at the piano, teaching his protege what would become iconic music:

Apocryphal stories suggest that Berlin had more trouble writing a Christmas song than for the other holidays in the film (I wonder how easily "Abraham" came, performed in blackface on Lincoln's Birthday!). What we hear today on the radio was re-recorded by Crosby in 1947, with the original 1942 single lost. In 1954 he sang it again as a duet in White Christmas, designed around the song's popularity.

Berlin composed a simple 32-bar structure: one chorus, repeated with the same lyrics. The rhyme scheme changes between quatrains, from ABCB (and internal rhyme in the third line: "Where the treetops glisten and children listen") to ABBB. The nostalgic longing for the snow-blanched seasons of yesterday was a vital sentiment in World War II. The Christmas cards written could be letters sent to loved ones fighting in Europe. "White Christmas" combines a remembered dream with the wish, but not the certainty, that it will come true. Yet less melancholy runs through the lyrics and the gently unfolding chromatic melody than in other war-time singles like "I'll Be Home for Christmas" or "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas."

Barbra Streisand was one of the first to record, for her 1967 A Christmas Album, Berlin's verse:

The sun is shining, the grass is green,
The orange and palm trees sway.
There's never been such a day
In Beverly Hills, L.A.
But it's December the twenty-fourth
And I am longing to be up north.

Bred on Tin Pan Alley syncopations, Berlin doesn't write often about L.A. glamour, and for good reason. Few of the published verses to his songs are performed. Hard to see Streisand as a Beverly Hills shopgirl, but her fondness for offbeat story songs suits her here. Still, most popular versions - including The Drifters' bluesy take in 1954 - cut straight to the chorus.

"White Christmas" lasts, after all these years, because the song is hard to oversell. Berlin could have raised the octave at the end but scored the ending lower. And there's the musical break in "Christmases" during the final line, "And may all your Christmases be white," like a catch in the singer's throat. A emotional but unsentimental conclusion to a song that endures.

Read Roy J. Harris from the Dec. 5 Wall Street Journal for more on this very song.