Bing Crosby's White Christmas hit has devastating backstory and played important role in wartime
ok.co.ukIt’s the most famous Christmas song of all time. White Christmas, first performed by Bing Crosby in 1941, has now sold over 50 million copies, and has also been recorded by artists including Michael Buble, Shania Twain, Gwen Stefani, Frank Sinatra, The Drifters, Bette Midler, Lady Gaga and Meghan Trainor.
It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, having featured in the 1942 movie Holiday Inn, and was also the inspiration for the 1954 movie White Christmas.
Acclaimed composer Irving Berlin reportedly wrote the song in 1940, although it is believed he may have been working on the tune as far back as 1935.
He was Jewish and didn’t celebrate Christmas, but his son Irving Jr died on Christmas Day in 1928 when he was just three weeks old, and each year Irving and his wife Ellin would visit their baby’s grave. “The kind of deep secret of the song may be that it was Berlin responding in some way to his melancholy about the death of his son,” says Jody Roslin, author of White Christmas: The Story of an American song.
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