The song was written by Irving Berlin for the musical film Holiday Inn, released in 1942. The version sung by Bing Crosby is the world’s best-selling single with estimated sales in excess of 50 million copies worldwide. The song would feature in another Crosby film, the musical White Christmas, which became the highest-grossing film of 1954.
About White Christmas (song) in brief
The song was written by Irving Berlin for the musical film Holiday Inn, released in 1942. The composition won the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 15th Academy Awards. Since its release, \”White Christmas\” has been covered by multiple artists. The version sung by Bing Crosby is the world’s best-selling single with estimated sales in excess of 50 million copies worldwide. The song would feature in another Crosby film, the musical White Christmas, which became the highest-grossing film of 1954. In the film, Crosby sings the song 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 as it was not part of the script for the film. The recording is noted for Crosby’s whistling during the second chorus. 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, The song also topped the following weekly charts in the same year: Songs with Most Radio Plugs, National record sales, and National sheet music sales. The single returned to the No. 1 spot during the holiday seasons of 1945 and 1946, thus becoming the only single with three separate runs at the top of the U.S. S chart perennial, before Billboard magazine created a distinct seasonal chart for releases in the 20s and 30s.
It has often been noted that the mix of melancholy and comforting images of home—”where the treetops glisten”—resonated especially strongly with listeners during World War II. The first public performance of the song was by Crosby, on his NBC radio show The Kraft Music Hall on Christmas Day, 1941, a few weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1954, Crosby would sing the song in a musical film of the same name, White Christmas. It was originally conceived as a script by Crosby’s nephew Howard Crosby, not as the song’s composer, and was originally intended to be sung by the actress Martha Mear, not by Crosby himself. The film was released on July 30, 1954, and became a box-office success. It is the only song to have appeared in both Holiday Inn and White Christmas on the box-set of the latter film, as well as on the soundtrack for the TV series The Godfather: Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, and Part VII. The movie was released in theaters on November 14, 1954. It became the first Christmas film to be released in the United States in more than 40 years, and is still the most popular Christmas film of all time. It also remains the only Christmas film in which the song is not sung by Crosby.
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This page is based on the article White Christmas (song) published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 30, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
