Irving Berlin - White Christmas

This song reminisces about an old-fashioned Xmas setting. The song was written for the 1942 musical film Holiday Inn. The composition won the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 15th Academy Awards. Bing Crosby's record topped the Billboard chart for 11 weeks in 1942 and returned to the #1 position again in Dec. 1943 and 1944. His vers. would return to the top 40 a dozen times in subsequent years. Since its release, White Christmas has been covered by many artists. The vers. sung by Crosby is the world's best-selling single (in terms of sales of physical media), with estimated sales in excess of 50M physical copies worldwide. When the figures for other versions of the song are added to Crosby's, sales of the song exceed 100M. Accounts vary as to when and where Berlin wrote the song. One story is that he wrote it in 1940, in warm La Quinta, California, while staying at the La Quinta Hotel, a frequent Hollywood retreat also favoured by writer-director-producer Frank Capra, although the Arizona Biltmore also claims the song was written there. He often stayed up all night writing. One day he told his secretary, "I want you to take down a song I wrote over the weekend. Not only is it the best song I ever wrote, it's the best song anybody ever wrote." In 1999, National Public Radio included it in the "NPR 100," which sought to compile the 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century. Crosby's vers. of the song also holds the distinction of being ranked #2 on the "Songs of the Century" list, behind only Judy Garland's Over the Rainbow, as voted by members of the RIAA. In 2002, the original 1942 vers. was 1 of 50 historically significant recordings chosen that year by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry. The recording was broadcast on Armed Forces Radio on Apr. 30, 1975, as a secret, pre-arranged signal precipitating the U.S. evacuation from Saigon. In 2004, it ranked #5 on AFI's 100 Years...100 Songs survey of top tunes in American cinema. In a UK poll in Dec. 2012, White Christmas was voted 4th (behind Fairytale of New York, I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday and Merry Xmas Everybody) on the ITV TV special The Nation's Favourite Christmas Song.
#music #christmasmusic #piano