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White Christmas (song)
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Everything about White Christmas Song totally explained

"White Christmas" is an Irving Berlin song whose lyrics reminisce about White Christmases. The morning after he wrote the song — Berlin usually stayed up all night writing — the songwriter went to his office and told his musical secretary, "Grab your pen and take down this song. I just wrote the best song I've ever written — hell, I just wrote the best song that anybody's ever written!" Berlin wrote the song in early 1940 while sitting poolside at the Arizona Biltmore Resort and Spa in Phoenix, Arizona. The original verse pokes fun at a well-off Los Angeleno who, amid orange and palm trees, longs for traditional Christmas "up north". Berlin later dropped the verse but kept the now-famous chorus.
   "White Christmas" was introduced by Bing Crosby in the 1942 musical Holiday Inn. In the film, he sings it in a duet with Marjorie Reynolds. The song went on to receive the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Though Marjorie Reynolds was the actress playing Linda Mason, her voice was dubbed by Martha Mears for the movie, and in the script as originally conceived, Reynolds, not Crosby, was to sing the song.
   The first public performance of the song was also by Crosby, on his top-rated NBC radio show The Kraft Music Hall on Christmas Day, 1941;
   The Crosby recording is the biggest selling single of all time, as confirmed by the 2008 Guinness Book of Records.
   In 1999, National Public Radio included it in the "NPR 100", in which NPR's music editors sought to compile the one hundred most important American musical works of the 20th century.
   The recording was broadcast on the radio as a pre-arranged signal during the U.S. evacuation of Saigon on April 30, 1975 (see Fall of Saigon).
   In 2002, the original 1942 version was one of 50 recordings chosen that year by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry. Clyde McPhatter's group, The Drifters, covered "White Christmas" late in 1954. For decades, this version was primarily heard on R & B radio stations, and got little exposure elsewhere. Beginning in the 1970s oldies stations also began playing this version in search for product within their core artists. In the early 1990s, after being heard on Home Alone (in the scene where Kevin is putting on his dad's aftershave and while doing that lip-sychs to the song), radio stations with formats as diverse as Adult Contemporary, Top 40, and Country, began playing this version. It was also heard on "The Santa Clause". The popularity of this version over the years has grown as a result. Today this version gets almost as much airplay as Bing Crosby's versions

Recording History

Notes and references


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