Photo by Classic Film on Flickr CC

I don’t know about you, but for me, the best thing about the holiday season is probably the music. There’s something for everybody, from choral to jazz to carols from all around the world. You might hear Kwanzaa chants or Chanukah songs for all ages. But, of course, in English-speaking countries, the most common songs are pop tunes written for Christmas. You can’t walk into a store or a mall without hearing variations of Christmas songs, many written decades ago.

The Christmas Standard

If you’ve ever wondered why almost every type of singer has a Christmas album, that’s why. Artists like The Pogues with Fairytale of New York and Wham! with Last Christmas have achieved a kind of immortality all because of the popularity of their singular Christmas songs. In fact, ask any popular recording artist in England, Canada, or the U.S. what kind of song they’d most like to have as a hit and, if they’re being honest, they likely will tell you that they want to create a Christmas standard. It is, at the very least, a guarantee of being heard every 11 months.

What’s a standard? It is a musical composition, usually with lyrics, which has been performed by many different artists, with many diverse arrangements, but remains familiar and identifiable to any who hear it. Many of these are part of what many call the great American songbook, the most important and influential songs of the first half of the 20^th century. Many were composed for movies and the stage, still others were composed initially for the specific talents of popular singers of the time.

But, if we’re being honest, there are only a handful of Christmas tunes which are so classic that they are heard and sung by everyone. Over the next three weeks, I’ll blog about the top three Christmas songs of the great American songbook, discussing the composers, their most famous versions, and some of the reasons that they have become the very epitome of a musical standard.

Irving Berlin

Many of the composers of the great American songbook wrote during the Great Depression and World War II. They largely composed songs which could make people feel good during those difficult times. They might be sentimental, or they could be upbeat and joyful. The songs offered hope, boosted morale, and unified a nation. The few composers who could accomplish this included Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, and Irving Berlin.

Irving Berlin was a Russian-born Jew who emigrated to New York City with his family in 1893 when he was 5. He had little schooling, and left home at the age of 13 to live in the city’s Bowery area, where he taught himself to play the piano to make money in local saloons. He soon became a regular in Tin Pan Alley, located between Sixth Avenue and Broadway in Manhattan, and named for all the cacophonous sounds that musicians made there. It was the center of the music publishing business beginning in the mid-nineteenth century to well into the twentieth century, and was where aspiring songwriters like Berlin came to sell their compositions.

By the age of 21, Irving Berlin was a major Tin Pan Alley success. In time he became famed for show tunes, love ballads, and patriotic songs during World War I. Later years found Berlin becoming a theater producer, film composer, and the composer of ever more patriotic songs during World War II. He is credited as the composer of as many as 1500 songs, many of them familiar standards. In 1942, for the movie Holiday Inn, Irving Berlin wrote perhaps his most famous song, White Christmas, one of the most recorded songs of all time.

White Christmas

Although the song debuted in the movie, Irving Berlin wrote it much earlier. In 1928, his infant son passed away on Christmas Day. Thereafter, every December 25^th, Berlin and his wife would visit the boy’s grave. But, in 1937, when Berlin was away for the holiday season working in Hollywood, his wife had to make the vigil alone, and the sorrow of that occasion prompted Berlin to pen the song.

Probably no one was more surprised by the success of White Christmas than Berlin. It is not a happy, toe-tapping song. It is a wistful, melancholic song in which the singer is stuck working in sunny California, as Berlin was himself, and he aches for the Christmas setting of his youth, with snow covered trees and the sounds of sleigh bells in the distance. In 1937, when it was composed, almost anyone with a car or a train ticket could get away for a white Christmas. However, when the song premiered in 1942, minus the first stanza, the world was at war. For many, it became a lament for homesick soldiers and lonely civilians stateside. As Berlin once said, people read many things into that song which he never intended.

Curiously, it was originally written to be sung by the actress Marjorie Reynolds. Reynolds turned out to be such a poor singer that it soon became a duet, sung by Bing Crosby and Reynolds’ voice dubbed in by singer Martha Mears. Eventually, it was Crosby’s solo version that everyone came to know. The 1947 single of White Christmas by Bing Crosby remains, 70 years later, the best selling single recording of all time.

I can cite versions by artists as diverse as Bob Marley, Placido Domingo, Willie Nelson, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift. However, the most definitive must remain Crosby’s.

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

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,
Just like the ones I used to know
Where the treetops glisten and children listen
To hear sleigh bells in the snow

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,
Just like the ones I used to know
Where the treetops glisten and children listen
To hear sleigh bells in the snow

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,
With every Christmas card I write
May your days be merry and bright,
And may all your Christmases be white

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,
Just like the ones I used to know
May your days be merry and bright,
And may all your Christmases be white

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,
With every Christmas card I write
May your days be merry and bright,
And may all your Christmases be white