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[0:00] David Armstrong: Welcome to a special holiday bonus episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the extraordinary story of how immigrants, Jews, queers, African-Americans, and other outcasts invented the Broadway musical and how they changed America in the process. I'm David Armstrong, and I call this episode, White Christmas, The Story Behind the World's Most Popular Song, Part 1. What you're about to hear is an audio version of a Broadway Nation live show that we performed at the Vashon Center for the Performing Arts in Washington State in December of 2019. Several past episodes of this podcast have explored the crucial role that the Jewish-Russian immigrant songwriter Irving Berlin has played in the invention of the Broadway musical.

Today, I share the story of how he also invented an entirely new category of popular song, The Christmas Standard. The show features musical performances by Cayman Ilica, Eric Ancrum, Chris DiStefano, and Albert Evans, and we'll be back with Part 2 next week. Enjoy.

[1:05] David Armstrong: On December 24th, 1941, something happened that would change our experience of Christmas forever. That night, the music of the holiday season, that ubiquitous soundtrack that underscores the days and weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, began to irrevocably change when Bing Crosby introduced a new Irving Berlin song on his top-rated radio show, The Craft Music Hall. The song was, of course, White Christmas. I'm David Armstrong, and tonight, with the help of some very talented friends and colleagues, it's my great pleasure to share with you the story behind that remarkable song and its enduring legacy. But if we're going to do that well, we're going to have to, in the words of another great songwriter, start at the very beginning.

[2:02] David Armstrong: Carols were first sung thousands of years ago by pre-Christian people celebrating the winter solstice, the birth of the sun. Perhaps best known is the ancient Roman holiday of Saturnalia. During this wildly popular celebration, work and business came to a halt, and the Romans spent an entire week singing, dancing, feasting, drinking, and socializing. They decorated their houses with greenery and lights, and they gave presents to their children and to the poor. The final night coincided with the winter solstice, which, according to the Julian calendar of the day, fell on December 25th. The word carol actually means song of praise and joy, and originally there were carols to celebrate all four seasons, but only the tradition of singing them in the winter has survived.

[2:50] David Armstrong: Then, when the Christians co-opted and transformed these winter celebrations into Christmas, the birth of the Son of God, new carols began to emerge. In the year 129, a Roman bishop proclaimed that a song called Angel's Hymn should be performed at the Christmas celebrations in Rome. This is the first Christmas carol that we know about, although the music and lyrics have been lost, but you can imagine it would probably sound much like a Gregorian chant. Over the next thousand years, the observance of Christmas fell in and out of favor with the Church several times, and by the dawn of the Middle Ages, celebrating Christmas was definitely on the kibosh. It stayed that way until 1223, when St. Francis of Assisi produced the first nativity play in Gareccio, Italy. He was inspired by the biblical story of a poor infant Jesus' humble birth, and he was looking for a bold, visual way of sharing it with his mostly illiterate followers.

[3:43] David Armstrong: He apparently was something of a showman, was a strong advocate for the use of singing, musical accompaniment, and drama in Christian worship. He staged his nativity play in an actual cave, with costumed actors as Mary and Joseph and live animals. According to the reports, many people came from surrounding villages in lightly falling snow just before midnight on Christmas Eve to witness the first ever living nativity. I think that's a picture of the actual cave where he first staged. They don't hold the pageant there anymore, but you can go see it in Gareccio, Italy. According to his biographer, St. Bonaventure, he wrote this about that first nativity play. The forest resounded with their voices, and that memorable night was made glorious by so many brilliant lights and sonorous psalms of praise. They got good reviews for that show.

[4:39] David Armstrong: This new kind of theatrical performance soon spread across Europe to France, Spain, Germany, and England, and these new nativity plays also included new songs that for the first time had lyrics not in Latin, but in the languages of the local people. This nativity play celebration has continued right up to today. In every manger scene, the ones you have in your home were inspired by that. Community celebrations, church pageants, and even the living nativity that for 85 years has been the finale of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular. I wonder what St. Francis would think about that. On a side note, in order to stage that first nativity play, St. Francis had to convince a wealthy noble to provide the funding for it, and that's exactly how plays and musicals have been produced ever since.

[5:25] David Armstrong: During the Renaissance, especially during the Tudor period, Christmas expanded into a major celebration involving 12 full days of continuous feasting and merrymaking. The festivities kicked off on Christmas Eve and climaxed on Twelfth Night. That Twelfth Night celebration took on a carnival-like, wild party atmosphere with drunken bands of rabble-rousers roaming the streets, banging on doors, swigging wassail, and loudly singing their demands for figgy pudding and other holiday treats. The Christmas carols, The First Noel, and We Wish You a Merry Christmas, and this song all have their roots in that Tudor.

[7:10] David Armstrong: It's my great pleasure to introduce you to Cayman Ilica and Eric Ancrum, two great stars of the Fifth Avenue Theatre in Seattle, and tonight of the Vashon Center for the Arts. They'll be back soon.

[7:24] David Armstrong: Just a few years later, the Protestant Reformation in Europe and the Puritan Revolution in England put a huge damper on all of that and nearly ended the celebration of Christmas forever. In 1644, an act of Parliament banned Christmas entirely, the singing of carols was forbidden, and all pious Christians were ordered to eternally abominate observance of the holiday. As you might expect, when our Puritan forefathers so famously landed on Plymouth Rock, they brought that same negative view of Christmas with them. They correctly saw the Yuletide celebrations as a continuation of pagan rituals. So Christmas was banned in Boston, as so many things would be, and anyone discovered celebrating the holiday was heavily fined. Talk about a war on Christmas.

[8:10] David Armstrong: Meanwhile, back in Europe, Christmas was a big point of contention among the Protestant Reformers. Calvin and Knox had condemned the holiday, but Martin Luther was a big fan. He advocated for special church services, family celebrations that included feasting and gift giving. It even seems that Luther himself wrote a few Christmas carols. As a result, Christmas continued to thrive in both Protestant and Catholic areas of Germany, and many Norse pagan traditions such as yule logs, holiday markets, gift giving, and decking the halls with evergreens were still part of the midwinter festivals then as they are today. Most significant of these, of course, was the Christmas tree. Some authors even claim that Luther himself originated the practice of putting lights, candles in his day, on the tree.

[9:04] David Armstrong: Let's skip ahead now to Christmas Eve 1818, when another landmark event in the history of Christmas music took place. That was the night that the carol Silent Night was sung for the very first time. It happened in the small town of Obendorf, Austria, where Stille Nacht was first performed by its authors. They were the village priest Joseph Marr, who wrote the words, and its schoolmaster and church organist Franz Gruber, who composed the music. Legend has it that the song was presented that first time on that night with only a guitar as accompaniment. This is because the church organ had been heavily damaged in a flood, or maybe it was because mice had been chewing up the leather of the organ's bellows, or maybe none of that because it all might have been made up by a magazine writer in the 1930s. We actually don't know, but in any event, Stille Nacht soon spread across the world.

In England, Queen Victoria's German husband, Prince Albert, would spark a major revival of the holiday when he put up a Christmas tree in Windsor Castle in 1848 and made it fashionable for everyone to bring a tree into their home.

[10:18] David Armstrong: While here in America, huge waves of German immigrants escaping violence and political upheaval back at home were arriving on our shores every day. Six million of them came between 1820 and 1900. They brought music, culture, beer gardens, and fun to America, and they spread their holiday traditions throughout the East Coast and the Midwest. It was during this Victorian era that many of the most beloved Christmas carols, "Deck the Halls," "Joy to the World," "O Come All Ye Faithful," "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," "O Holy Night," "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," all of them became popular and included a few that were written right here in America, such as "We Three Kings," "Away in a Manger," and of course "Jingle Bells."

"Go Tell It on the Mountain" and other African-American Christmas-themed spirituals also emerged during this period, but they wouldn't become widely known until the 1960s. By the 1880s, the traditional canon of Christmas hymns and carols was complete, and for the next 60 years it would remain virtually unchanged. These beloved songs were sung mostly in church, around the piano at home, or caroling door-to-door, and were only very rarely performed by professional entertainers. Of course, the advent of songwriting as a profession in the late 1800s, when that happened, the occasional Christmas-themed song did emerge. The ragtime era produced a tune called "The Reindeer Rag," and the 1920s delivered a song called "Santa Claus, That's Me," but they were a little more than novelty songs, and they received very limited exposure. It's now my pleasure to bring Cayman and Eric back to share one of those. It was introduced by Broadway and film star Eddie Cantor on his radio show in November of 1934.

[12:15] ♪ Musical number: "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" — performed by Cayman Ilika and Eric Ankrim ♪

[13:46] David Armstrong: It's a delightful song, of course, and we know it very well today, but following that first performance, it enjoyed only a brief blip of popularity and then was almost totally forgotten and went unheard of for more than a decade. This reinforced the mindset of most songwriters and record producers of this period. Why waste your time creating a song that people only want to hear a few weeks out of the year? All of that would change with "White Christmas." Part of what makes "White Christmas" so remarkable is that it first and foremost is a pop song. It's not a hymn, it's not an ages-old Christmas carol, it did not arise anonymously from folk culture. It was written for a 1940s movie musical, a commercial product designed to entertain and with any luck bring its songwriters some handsome royalties.

"White Christmas" is not just the first Christmas-themed pop song to become a major hit, it is the hit of all hits, the top-selling and most recorded song of all time. The original Bing Crosby single has sold over 50 million records, and when you add in the other 500 or so recordings of the song, the sales go way over 100 million. Consider this, in 1955, which was the very first edition of the Guinness Book of World Records came out, "White Christmas" was credited there with being the world's best-selling single, and in the 2020 edition it still holds that title. Every year brings new versions by artists that run the gamut from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to Twisted Sister. Is there any other song that Kenny G, Peggy Lee, Liberace, and the Flaming Lips all have in common?

Is there any other tune that Destiny's Child, The Three Tenors, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Perry Como, Garth Brooks, Aretha Franklin, Doris Day, and Kiss have all recorded? This quintessentially American song has captivated the world and has been published and recorded in hundreds of languages, including Danish, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili, Japanese, and most appropriately, Yiddish. Appropriate because the man who wrote the song, words and music, was a Russian Jewish immigrant named Israel Beilin. He was born in 1888 in a shtetl near Russia's Siberian border, very much like the fictional town of Anatevka in "Fiddler on the Roof." His father there was a Jewish cantor, and Israel Beilin's only memory of Russia was being held by his weeping mother as they watched their family's house being burnt down during a pogrom.

Like Tevye and his family, the Beilins joined a mass Jewish exodus to the United States. When they arrived in New York, five-year-old Izzy spoke only Yiddish with a smattering of Russian. He grew up on the dirty, crowded streets of the Lower East Side of New York. His father and mother struggled to make a living in any way that they could. His sisters wrapped cigars and worked in sweatshops, and around 1900, Izzy got a job selling newspapers. Just like those boys in the musical "Newsies," Izzy was one of those boys. However, the few coins that he earned were not enough to pay his keep, and when his father died when he was 13 years old, he didn't want to be a burden on his single mother, so he left home, or as he put it, went on the bum, joining the army of homeless boys that roamed the dangerous streets of New York, desperate to stay alive.

It was probably, however, the musical influence of his father—he was a cantor, remember—that proved to be his salvation. Izzy sang for pennies on the sidewalk and in saloons along the Bowery, and by 1907, he found a job as a singing waiter. He didn't have much of a voice, but he had lots of energy and loads of chutzpah. His life changed when a rival saloon down the block began pulling in crowds with a new Italian novelty song, which had been written by that saloon's pianist and bouncer. So Izzy's boss ordered him and their pianist to write a song that would bring the customers back to their saloon. They came up with a little ditty called "Marie from Sunny Italy."

[17:53] ♪ Musical number: "Marie from Sunny Italy" — performed by Eric Ankrim ♪

[18:27] David Armstrong: We know it's pretty terrible. You were fine, Eric.

[18:31] Eric Ankrim: Thank you very much.

[18:32] David Armstrong: But somehow it got published, and on the title page, our boy was credited not as Israel Beilin, but as I. Berlin. This new name was carefully chosen, close to his own, but with a formal Teutonic ring to it, which was very smart because the music business was run almost entirely by Germans. Sheet music was big business in those days. Remember, this is before radio and television and sound recording is still in its infancy. So the only way songs could be sold was in sheet music form. Almost everybody had a piano in their home and someone who could play it reasonably well. If you wanted to hear music in the evening, the family would gather around and sing the latest hits. You had to make the music yourself.

The music publishing offices were all located on one block of New York City, which became known as Tin Pan Alley. This was because the clatter and racket of so many pianos in so many offices, all on top of each other and all being played at once, sounded to people passing on the street like nothing more than the cacophonous banging on tin cans. The German Jews who ran the industry were mostly first and second generation immigrants and they had been shut out of most other respectable lines of trade. But music publishing and really all of show business provided a rare opportunity for immigrants and African-Americans to get out of the ghetto. "Marie" was enough of a sensation that Berlin made this decision to pursue songwriting full-time, all by himself, both lyrics and music, which took a lot more chutzpah considering he couldn't read or write a note of music and he could only play the piano in one key.

He churned out dozens of songs during this period and he had some success. Then in 1911, he wrote a snappy, syncopated march, fitted it out with lyrics and sold it to a producer who plugged it into his new Broadway show, which quickly flopped. But somehow the tune found its way to Al Jolson, the biggest star of the era, who made it a hit. It sold a half a million copies, then a million more, then two million. And with this one song, Irving Berlin became a hit.

[20:36] ♪ Musical number: "Alexander's Ragtime Band" — performed by Cayman Ilika, Eric Ankrim, Chris DiStefano, and Albert Evans ♪

[22:00] David Armstrong: Irving Berlin would go on to write the scores for 25 Broadway musicals and dozens of films, including more than a thousand songs of which at least 100 have become standards. Songs that you can't go to Starbucks without hearing. I could spend all night talking about Irving Berlin and maybe someday I'll come back and do just that, but right now let's jump to 1933 when Berlin is at the height of his Broadway career and he wrote a unique Broadway musical review called *As Thousands Cheer*. What he did with the show is he used the format of a daily newspaper as its organizing theme. Every scene and song in the show was inspired by sections or articles in the newspaper. Headlines would appear projected overhead on a screen, one of the very first uses of projections in a Broadway show or really in any aspect.

And a musical number or a comedy sketch would take the stage inspired by the headline above. For example, one of the headlines was "Heat Wave Hits New York." And in response, the great star Ethel Waters belted out Berlin's now classic song "Heat Wave." You know, we're having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave. The temperature's rising. It isn't surprising. She certainly can, can, can. The show's first act finale brought to life the illustrated Sunday magazine supplement, also known as the Roto Gravure. The entire cast dressed to the nines and strolling down a nostalgic replica of old Fifth Avenue introduced the song "Easter Parade." This is important because it was the popularity of this song that gave Berlin the idea for *Holiday Inn*.

It seems his first thought was to create another big Broadway review, this time with sketches and songs all themed around the holidays throughout the year. And he left some handwritten notes behind for the show that indicate that he was already thinking that the first act would end with a song that hadn't been yet written yet called "White Christmas." But the show never got made and the concept seemed to be completely forgotten until eight years later when he pitched the idea to Paramount Pictures for a movie called *Holiday Inn*. The idea was that it would, this plot would be about a star singer who retires to the country to run a hotel that's only open on holidays. Doesn't sound like a very good business plan to me, but made for a good movie.

Berlin planned to bring back "Easter Parade" and write new songs for all of the other holidays. Paramount jumped on the idea and assigned their biggest star Bing Crosby and got Fred Astaire to join him in the picture. One of the key scenes in the movie would, of course, have to be the Christmas scene. If you're going to do all the holidays, you can't leave out probably the biggest holiday of the year, Christmas. And there had to be a song for it. Now there are several versions of the story of how, when, and where the song got composed. Berlin himself told very different versions of it in various interviews over the years. But this version seems to be the most likely as it comes from notes that were taken by his longtime musical assistant Helmi Kresna.

Remember, Berlin had no musical training, so he always had to dictate his songs to someone who could write them down, an amanuensis, if you will. So one Monday morning in 1940, Berlin rushed into his New York office, flushed with excitement, and shouted, "Helmi, grab your pen and take this down quick. Not only is this the best song I ever wrote, it's the best song anybody ever wrote." He and Helmi then worked meticulously to get the melody, the chords, and the accompaniment down on paper exactly the way Berlin heard it in his head. This seems to be the perfect time to bring out onto the stage my longtime friend and colleague Albert Evans, who has a better understanding of how songs are put together than pretty much anybody I've ever met. Please welcome Albert Evans.

[26:03] Albert Evans: So, David, if we flash forward, *Holiday Inn* has had its premiere at the Paramount Theater in New York, and Berlin is waiting excitedly for the overnight reviews to come out. However, to his shock and great dismay, none of the critics even mention the greatest song anybody ever wrote.

[26:26] David Armstrong: Well, that could be because the movie actually opened in the middle of August during a sweltering heatwave. He should have introduced "Heat Wave."

[26:33] Albert Evans: But Berlin seemed undeterred. He kept his faith in that song.

[26:36] David Armstrong: Yeah, but his publishing company really didn't. He had a vast, well, not vast, but he had a large staff who were in charge of publicity and promoting the songs, and they were betting that the Valentine's Day song, which was called "Be Careful It's My Heart," a beautiful song.

[26:52] Albert Evans: Very pretty.

[26:53] David Armstrong: They thought that would be the film's standout hit. They were so wrong.

[26:57] Albert Evans: They were wrong, and Berlin was right. Within a few weeks, "White Christmas" was selling like a hit. Sheet music stores couldn't keep it in stock. Bing Crosby's record was flying off the shelves. Berlin's London office cabled back that it was going to be the biggest song they'd ever handled, and its appeal even transcended racial barriers because Bing Crosby's record became the very first by a white artist to chart on Billboard's Harlem Hit Parade. By December, his recording was the number one song of the year and well on its way to become the bestselling song of all time.

[27:30] David Armstrong: Albert, I've asked you here tonight to answer one question and one question only.

[27:33] Albert Evans: Uh-oh.

[27:34] David Armstrong: Why? Why is "White Christmas" the bestselling song of all time?

[27:38] I'm afraid that's all the time we have for this week, but if you have experienced Albert's brilliant examinations of songs in previous episodes, then I'm certain that you're going to want to join us for next week's episode of *Broadway Nation* and what may be Albert's most insightful and engaging analysis yet.

[27:56] David Armstrong: If you love this podcast and want to delve even deeper into the world of Broadway musicals, I invite you to become a member of the Broadway Nation Backstage Pass Club. For as little as $7 a month, members will receive exclusive access to never-before-heard, unedited versions of every season 2 interview and many from season 1 as well. I often record at least twice as much conversation as ends up in the public episodes, and this includes additional in-depth conversations with my frequent co-host, Albert Evans. You will also have the opportunity to ask us any questions about Broadway musicals that you would like to hear answered and to propose topics and subject matter that you would like me to cover, all of which I will incorporate into a special series of Ask Me Anything About Broadway episodes.

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[29:13] ♪ Musical number: "Happy Holidays" — performed by Cayman Ilika, Eric Ankrim, Chris DiStefano, and Albert Evans ♪