of Jewish acculturation matched perhaps only by another Berlin magnum opus, “God Bless America”: a symbol of the extraordinary way that the Jews who wrote pop songs, sang them on vaudeville stages, invented Broadway, and founded movie studios, turned themselves into Americans—and remade American pop culture in their own image.
Familiarity has made “White Christmas” remote: we know the song so well that we barely know it all. Bing Crosby begins singing, and we hum along, or flee the room; in any case, our ears are closed. But listen again: “White Christmas” is an oddity, whose melody meanders chromatically and is filled with unexpected moments, somber near-dissonances. Strangest of all is the song’s underlying sadness, its wistful ache for the bygone, which—in contrast to chirpy seasonal standards like “Jingle Bells” and “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town”—marks “White Christmas” as the darkest, bluest tune ever to masquerade as a Christmas carol.
“White Christmas” isn’t my favorite song; it isn’t even my favorite Irving Berlin song. I prefer “Blue Skies,” with its shades of exultation and melancholy, or the brooding “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.” Down the years, those songs have kept their streamlined gleam; with its mile-wide sentimental streak, “White Christmas” has come back in recording after recording as kitsch.
Berlin, of course, never shied from sentimentality—or anything else that pleased his audience. He journeyed far from his roots on old Tin Pan Alley, the nickname given in 1900 to the clangorous songwriters’ row along West Twenty-eighth Street in Manhattan; but where his younger songwriting colleagues styled themselves as artistes, Berlin clung to the Alley’s populist values: the public was the best judge of a song’s worth, a tune-smith was only as good as his latest hit. It was an ethos that sprang from a need for audience acceptance—a trace, perhaps, of Berlin’s roots as Bowery song busker—and above all, from a sense of duty. Berlin was a public songwriter, who pledged allegiance not to his muse but to “the mob.” “A good song embodies the feelings of the mob,” he said. “A songwriter is not much more than a mirror which reflects those feelings.”
This philosophy made Berlin the people’s choice and carved a special place for his songs in our national life. (The post—September 11 reemergence of “God Bless America” is just the most recent example of Berlin’s uncanny staying power.) But to his detractors, Berlin’s crowd-pleasing unmasked him as a cornball and a hack; despite the illustriousness of his songbook, he has never been as beloved by tastemakers as some of his harder-edged colleagues.
“White Christmas” is the ultimate Berlin tearjerker, and if there are more decorous songs, there are few deeper ones. We cringe at its mawkishness, but our embarrassment should arise from the shock of self-recognition: three-hankie schmaltz is, to a large degree, the American way of song. Berlin’s paean to long-gone white Christmases “just like the ones I used to know” distills a whole tradition: the hopeless lust for yesteryear that runs through a couple of centuries of popular song, from the homesick ballads of Stephen Foster to Victorian parlor-room plaints to the desolate nostalgia of the blues. “White Christmas” is about as good a summary as we have of the contradictions that make pop music fascinating: it is beautiful and grotesque, tacky and transcendent. Revisiting the song’s story, listening for the thousandth time to its maudlin, immemorial strains, we are reminded of a trick in which Berlin and Crosby both specialized: how, time and again, they proved that art and schlock could be one and the same.
The Best Song Anybody Ever Wrote
A simple melody will always linger—
I mean the kind you pick out with one finger.
—IRVING BERLIN,
“An Old-Fashioned Tune Is Always New”
WHITE CHRISTMAS” enters the written record on January 8, 1940, in the form of forty-eight measures of musical notation, jotted on a sheet of Irving Berlin Music Company manuscript paper, in the distinctive hand of Helmy Kresa, Berlin’s longtime musical secretary. This earliest transcription of the song finds Berlin still wavering about its verse; nine bars in, a rather stolid melodic passage has been crossed out and improved. But tellingly, the sixty-seven familiar notes of the song’s chorus are intact. Nearly three years before Bing Crosby introduced “White Christmas” to the world, Berlin brought this most famous and indelible of his melodies to Kresa as a fully formed creation.
Berlin has had many hagiographers. Perhaps the greatest of these was the songwriter himself, whose years in the rakish atmosphere of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood taught him the value of legend-building and tall tales. His varying reminiscences about the creation of “White Christmas” have a back-room-at-Lindy’s feel: it is hard to imagine Berlin telling the song’s “story” without a cloud of cigarette smoke above his head and a slab of pastrami on his plate. He told his friend Miles Kruger, a historian of the Hollywood musical, that the song was composed in Beverly Hills. On his 1954 promotional tour for Paramount Pictures’ White Christmas movie, Berlin unspooled a different version of the story nearly every day. The Los Angeles Mirror reported that Berlin had written “White Christmas” “for a Broadway show called Stars on My Shoulder … on an August afternoon in 1938 in his Beekman Place home in New York”—a home that he hadn’t in fact moved into until 1947. In an “exclusive interview” with The American Weekly, Berlin recalled that he had written the song in 1940, “for a revue.” “When I wrote ‘White Christmas’ in 1941,” he explained at a press junket in Philadelphia, “it was devised really to fit into a situation in the motion picture Holiday Inn.”
A more trustworthy recollection was that of Helmy Kresa, who joined Berlin’s staff in the mid-1920s and remained the songwriter’s trusted amanuensis for the better part of the next six decades. According to Kresa, Berlin strode into his publishing firm’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters with the freshly composed Christmas number first thing one Monday morning, a story that agrees with the evidence: January 8, 1940, the date that Kresa noted in the top right-hand corner of that first lead sheet, was a Monday. Berlin’s appearance at that hour would have startled his employees, who were unaccustomed to seeing their boss before one or two in the afternoon. His early arrival, they must have known, could mean only one thing: Berlin, who never learned musical notation, had written a new song that he was anxious to have Kresa fix on the staff.
All-night songwriting sessions were the norm for Berlin, a lifelong insomniac whose frenzied work habits were as celebrated as his songs. The newspaper stories that greeted Berlin’s early fame as the hitmaking phenom of the ragtime craze called him a “songwriting machine”—a bit of a back-handed compliment, linking the young star to the crude industry of Tin Pan Alley’s song mills. But there was something machinelike about Berlin: he was astoundingly prolific—at his productive peak he was writing a song a day—and no one who encountered him could help but be struck by the impression of a man in a state of whirring motion. (“He’s a buzz saw,” marveled a reporter who visited Berlin in 1942. “He’s Mr. Energy.”) He composed continually: jotting lyrics on shirt cuffs, on cocktail napkins, on hotel stationery, dreaming up new tunes on overnight train trips, in elevators, at poolsides, in front of the shaving mirror. He wrote “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in the middle of a clamorous vaudeville rehearsal and “Anything You Can Do” in a taxi marooned in Midtown traffic. When Queen Elizabeth congratulated Berlin on “My British Buddy,” his World War II-era ode to Anglo-American camaraderie, he replied: “Thank you, ma’am. I wrote the song in a bathtub.” In 1912, a month after he married for the first time, Berlin told reporters that his new bride had cured him of the “night-to-morning and morning-to-night” songwriting compulsion that had made him “a nervous wreck … all music, all songs, all the hope of song hits.” Five months later, his wife was dead, of typhoid fever; Berlin returned for good to his insomniac regime and became the nation’s pop-song poet laureate—America’s nervous wreck. All told, Berlin wrote thousands of songs and published 812 of them, an amazing 451 of which