1941 With words and music by Irving Berlin, Crosby’s recording of ‘White Christmas’ would go on to be the best-selling single of all time. Originally penned in Beverley Hills, California, in a fit of nostalgia for the old-fashioned winters of the American east coast (‘Where the treetops glisten, / And children listen / To hear sleigh bells in the snow’), the song was soon standing in for home – with nearly unbearable poignancy – for thousands of GIs in Guadalcanal, North Africa and other hot, dangerous places where they didn’t want to be.
There are at least three stories here. The first is about Berlin himself, who lived to be 101, his career running from the ragtime to the Kennedy eras (he wrote ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ and the score for the musical Mr President, which premiered in 1962 with the young president in the audience). He was the Jew who wrote the classic Christmas song; the immigrant who composed the country’s unofficial national anthem, ‘God Bless America’. So the second story is about America.
The third is about musical comedies, the usual vehicle for Berlin’s songs (even ‘White Christmas’ found its setting a year later in Holiday Inn). Possibly out of a lingering Puritanism, American intellectuals don’t treat musical comedy as seriously as they do the ‘straight’ theatre. And while literature courses will spend hours analysing Donne’s
Sweetest love, I do not goe,
For weariness of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show A fitter Love for me …
… they will pay scant attention to the lyrics of musical comedies, like Berlin’s own comic context between male and female sharpshooters in Annie Get Your Gun (1944):
Anything you can be
I can be greater.
Sooner or later,
I’m greater than you.
No, you’re not. Yes, I am.
No, you’re NOT! Yes, I am.
Yes, I am!
I can shoot a partridge
With a single cartridge.
I can get a sparrow
With a bow and arrow.
I can live on bread and cheese.
And only on that?
Yes.
So can a rat!
The joke lies in how the war of the sexes infantilises the combatants. Or what about Cole Porter’s words to ‘You’re the Top’ in Anything Goes (1934)?
You’re the top!
You’re Mahatma Gandhi.
You’re the top!
You’re Napoleon Brandy.
You’re the purple light
Of a summer night in Spain,
You’re the National Gallery
You’re Garbo’s salary,
You’re cellophane.
And so on, through 53 other supposed superlatives. It’s inventive (because it could go on for ever); it’s witty (because the references are comically scrambled between high and low commodities of travel and the market). Above all, like hundreds of show-tune lyrics, it’s in the plain style: accessible and memorable. Not as easy as it looks.