White Christmas by Bing Crosby ... the biggest selling record of all time
| "White Christmas" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Picture sleeve of 1959 reissue by Decca Records (9-23778) | ||||
| Single by Bing Crosby | ||||
| from the album Merry Christmas | ||||
| B-side | "Let's Start the New Year Right" "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" | |||
| Released | 1942, 1946, 1947, 1950, 1955, 1983 | |||
| Format | 7-inch, 10-inch | |||
| Recorded | May 29, 1942 March 19, 1947 | |||
| Genre | Christmas, Pop | |||
| Length | 3:02 (1942 recording) 3:04 (1947 recording) | |||
| Label | Decca (1942-1973 issues) MCA (1983-1985 issues) | |||
| Writer(s) | Irving Berlin | |||
| Bing Crosby singles chronology | ||||
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"White Christmas" is an Irving Berlin song reminiscing about an old-fashioned Christmas setting. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the version sung by Bing Crosby is the best-selling single of all time, with estimated sales in excess of 50 million copies worldwide.[1][2][3][4]
Accounts vary as to when and where Berlin wrote the song.[4] 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 favored by writer-producer Frank Capra. He often stayed up all night writing — he told his secretary, "Grab your pen and take down this song. I just wrote the best song I've ever written — heck, I just wrote the best song that anybody's ever written!"[5]
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[edit] Bing Crosby version
The first public performance of the song was by Bing Crosby, on his NBC radio show The Kraft Music Hall on Christmas Day, 1941; the recording is not believed to have survived.[4][6] He subsequently recorded the song with the John Scott Trotter Orchestra and the Ken Darby Singers for Decca Records in just 18 minutes on May 29, 1942, and it was released on July 30 as part of an album of six 78-rpm songs from the film Holiday Inn.[4][6] At first, Crosby did not see anything special about the song. He just said "I don't think we have any problems with that one, Irving."The song initially performed poorly and was overshadowed by the film's first hit song: "Be Careful, It's my Heart".[6] By the end of October 1942, however, "White Christmas" topped the "Your Hit Parade" chart. It remained in that position until well into the new year.[6] (It has often been noted that the mix of melancholy — "just like the ones I used to know" — with comforting images of home — "where the treetops glisten" — resonated especially strongly with listeners during World War II. The Armed Forces Network was flooded with requests for the song.[6])
In 1942 alone, Crosby's recording spent eleven weeks on top of the Billboard charts. The original version also hit number one on the Harlem Hit Parade for three weeks,[7] Crosby's first-ever appearance on the black-oriented chart. Re-released by Decca, the single returned to the #1 spot during the holiday seasons of 1945 and 1946 (on the chart dated January 4, 1947), thus becoming the only single with three separate runs at the top of the U.S. charts. The recording became a chart perennial, reappearing annually on the pop chart twenty separate times before Billboard magazine created a distinct Christmas chart for seasonal releases.
Following its prominence in the musical Holiday Inn, the composition won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1942.[8] In the film, Bing Crosby sings "White Christmas" as a duet with actress Marjorie Reynolds, though her voice was dubbed by Martha Mears. This now-familiar scene was not the moviemakers' initial plan; in the script as originally conceived, Reynolds, not Crosby, was to sing the song.[6]
The version of "White Christmas" most often heard today is not the original 1942 Crosby recording, as the master had become damaged due to frequent use. Crosby re-recorded the track on March 18, 1947, accompanied again by the Trotter Orchestra and the Darby Singers, with every effort made to reproduce the original recording session.[5] There are subtle differences in the orchestration, most notably the addition of a celesta and flutes to brighten up the introduction.
Crosby was dismissive of his role in the song's success, saying later that "a jackdaw with a cleft palate could have sung it successfully." But Crosby was associated with it for the rest of his career. Another Crosby vehicle — the 1954 musical White Christmas — was the highest-grossing film of 1954.
[edit] Sales figures
Crosby's "White Christmas" single has been credited with selling 50 million copies, the most by any release and therefore it is the biggest-selling single worldwide of all time. The Guinness Book of World Records 2009 Edition lists the song as a 100-million seller, encompassing all versions of the song, including albums.[3][4] Crosby's holiday collection Merry Christmas was first released as an LP in 1949, and has never been out-of-print since.There has been some confusion and considerable debate on whether Crosby's record is or is not the best-selling single in the world, due to a lack of information on sales of "White Christmas," because Crosby's recording was released before the advent of the modern-day US and UK singles charts.[9] However, after careful research, Guinness World Records in 2007 concluded that, worldwide, Crosby's recording of "White Christmas" has, in their estimation, sold at least 50 million copies, and that Elton John's recording of "Candle in the Wind 1997" has sold 33 million, making Crosby's recording the best-selling single of all time.[1] However, an update in the 2009 edition of the book decided to further help settle the controversy amicably by naming both John's and Crosby's songs to be "winners" by stating that John's recording is the "best-selling single since UK and US singles charts began in the 1950s," while maintaining that "the best-selling single of all time was released before the first pop charts," and that this distinction belongs to "White Christmas," which it says "was listed as the world's best-selling single in the first-ever Guinness Book of Records (published in 1955) and - remarkably - still retains the title more than 50 years later."[10]
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