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KF5JRV > TODAY 25.12.18 18:49l 48 Lines 2500 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Today in History - Dec 25
Path: IW8PGT<CX2SA<ZL2BAU<W9ABA<KE0GB<KF5JRV
Sent: 181225/1640Z 27818@KF5JRV.#NWAR.AR.USA.NA BPQ6.0.17
“White Christmas,ö written by the formidable composer and lyricist
Irving Berlin receives its world premiere on this day in 1941 on Bing
Crosby’s weekly NBC radio program, The Kraft Music Hall. It went on to
become one of the most commercially successful singles of all time, and
the top-selling single ever until being surpassed by Elton John’s
“Candle in the Wind 1997.ö
“White Christmasö took its first steps toward becoming a bedrock
standard in the American songbook when Crosby first performed it
publicly on Christmas Day, 1941. The song’s success couldn’t have
surprised Berlin, who despite having already written such songs as
“Alexander’s Ragtime Band,ö “Cheek To Cheekö and “God Bless America,ö
had raced into his Manhattan office in January 1940 and asked his
musical secretary to transcribe “The best song I ever wrote…the best
song anybody ever wrote.ö It was nearly two years later, however, that
Crosby finally premiered the song on live radio, and a year after that
that Crosby’s recording of “White Christmasö became a smash pop hit.
Crosby’s October 1942 recording of “White Christmasö received heavy
airplay on Armed Forces Radio as well as on commercial radio during its
first Christmas season, becoming an instant #1 pop hit. It also returned
to the Hit Parade pop chart in every subsequent Christmas season for the
next 20 years. Unlike other perennial holiday hits, however, “White
Christmasö strikes a mood that isn’t necessarily jolly. As Jody Rosen,
author of the 2002 book White Christmas: The Story of an American Song,
told National Public Radio, “It’s very melancholy….And I think this
really makes it stand out amongst kind of chirpy seasonal standards
[like] ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ or ‘Let It Snow.’….I think
that’s one of the reasons why people keep responding to it, because our
feelings over the holiday season are ambivalent.ö
This was certainly true of the immigrant Russian Jewish songwriter
Irving Berlin. Though he did not celebrate Christmas, it was a day that
held special meaning to Berlin, who had spent each Christmas Day
visiting the grave of his late son, Irving Berlin, Jr., who died at just
3 weeks old on December 25, 1928. As Jody Rosen has suggested about a
beloved song of great emotional complexity, “The kind of deep secret of
[“White Christmasö] may be that it was Berlin responding in some way to
his melancholy about the death of his son.ö
73 de Scott KF5JRV
Pmail: KF5JRV@KF5JRV.#NWAR.AR.USA.NA
email: KF5JRV@ICLOUD.COM
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