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The Story of an American Song
Scribner
November 2002
On Sale: November 19, 2002
224 pages
ISBN: 0743218752
EAN: 9780743218757
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Historical
When Irving Berlin first conceived the song "White
Christmas," he envisioned it as a "throwaway" -- a satirical
novelty number for a vaudeville-style stage revue. By the
time Bing Crosby introduced the tune in the winter of 1942,
it had evolved into something far grander: the stately
yuletide ballad that would become the world's all-time
top-selling and most widely recorded song. In this vividly written narrative, Jody Rosen provides both
the fascinating story behind the making of America's
favorite Christmas carol and a cultural history of the
nation that embraced it. Berlin, the Russian-Jewish
immigrant who became his adopted country's greatest pop
troubadour, had written his magnum opus -- what one
commentator has called a "holiday Moby-Dick" -- a timeless
song that resonates with some of the deepest themes in
American culture: yearning for a mythic New England past,
belief in the magic of the "merry and bright" Christmas
season, longing for the havens of home and hearth. Today,
the song endures not just as an icon of the national
Christmas celebration but as the artistic and commercial
peak of the golden age of popular song, a symbol of the
values and strivings of the World War II generation, and of
the saga of Jewish-American assimilation. With insight and
wit, Rosen probes the song's musical roots, uncovering its
surprising connections to the tradition of blackface
minstrelsy and exploring its unique place in popular culture
through six decades of recordings by everyone from Bing
Crosby to Elvis Presley to *NSYNC. White Christmas
chronicles the song's legacy from jaunty ragtime-era Tin Pan
Alley to the elegant world of midcentury Broadway and
Hollywood, from the hardscrabble streets where Irving Berlin
was reared to the battlefields of World War II where
American GIs made "White Christmas" their wartime anthem,
and from the Victorian American past that the song evokes to
the twenty-first-century present where Berlin's masterpiece
lives on as a kind of secular hymn.
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