Ebook {Epub PDF} White Christmas: The Story of an American Song by Jody Rosen

 · "White Christmas" — a Russian-born cantor's son's ode to a Christian American holiday — is a milestone of Jewish acculturation matched perhaps only by another Berlin magnum opus, "God Bless America": a symbol of the extraordinary way that the Jews who wrote pop songs, sang them on vaudeville stages, invented Broadway, and founded movie studios, turned themselves into Americans — and Brand: Scribner. White Christmas chronicles the song's legacy from jaunty ragtime-era Tin Pan Alley to the elegant world of midcentury Broadway and Hollywood, from the hardscrabble streets where Irving Berlin was reared to the battlefields of World War II where American GIs made "White Christmas" their wartime anthem, and from the Victorian American past that the song evokes to the twenty-first-century present where Cited by: White Christmas chronicles the song's legacy from jaunty ragtime-era Tin Pan Alley to the elegant world of midcentury Broadway and Hollywood, from the hardscrabble streets where Irving Berlin was reared to the battlefields of World War II where American GIs made "White Christmas" their wartime anthem, and from the Victorian American past that the song evokes to the twenty-first-century present where Released on: J.

"Not only is it the best song I ever wrote, it's the best song anybody ever wrote." Irving Berlin, A biography of the single most important record in the history of popular music A vividly written narrative about the world's best-loved popular song, White Christmas provides both the story behind the making of Irving Berlin's most memorable tune and a rich cultural history of the America. Jody Rosen, White Christmas: The Story Of An American Song (New York: Scribner, Novem). Sheet music to White Christmas is not included in any major published collection, as nearly as I can tell. During his lifetime, Mr. Berlin jealously guarded the lyrics; according to Jody Rosen, Berlin "frostily refused permission to reprint his. Jody Rosen says that one of the more surprising aspects of the popularity of "White Christmas" is that in spirit, if not in form, it's a blues song. "It's very melancholy," Rosen says.

The song's images of sleigh rides and falling snow and eager children capture the mythic essence of the American Christmas. "White Christmas" seems to have always existed, lurking, as one Berlin. Berlin introduced "White Christmas" to Kresa on January 8, Rosen explains the song's little-known introduction (which sets the narrator in California, longing for cold weather); offers. White Christmas chronicles the song's legacy from jaunty ragtime-era Tin Pan Alley to the elegant world of midcentury Broadway and Hollywood, from the hardscrabble streets where Irving Berlin was reared to the battlefields of World War II where American GIs made "White Christmas" their wartime anthem, and from the Victorian American past that the song evokes to the twenty-first-century present where Berlin's masterpiece lives on as a kind of secular hymn.