Jody Rosen - White Christmas - The Story of a Song

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.

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