White Christmas
Subtitle: the story of an American song
By: Jody Rosen.
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2002
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 213
ISBN-13: 9780743218757
Subjects: Contemporary popular music; World history: from c 1900 -; Music/Songbooks; History and criticism; Genres & Styles - Children's; Seasonal; History; Modern - 20th Century; History: World; Holiday Inn.; History & Criticism - General; Social Science / Popular Culture; Berlin, Irving,; Popular Music; United States; White Christmas; 1888-; 1888-1989.; Holiday Inn
First sentence: IRVING BERLIN was born in the nineteenth century and nearly outlived the twentieth.
Description: "In this vividly written narrative, Jody Rosen provides both the fascinating story behind the making of America's favorite Christmas carol and a cultural history of the nation that embraced it.

Berlin, the Russian-Jewish immigrant who became his adopted country's greatest pop troubadour, had written his magnum opus - what one commentator has called a "holiday Moby-Dick" - a timeless song that resonates with some of the deepest themes in American culture: yearning for a mythic New England past, belief in the magic of the "merry and bright" Christmas season, longing for the havens of home and hearth. Today, the song endures not just as an icon of the national Christmas celebration but as the artistic and commercial peak of the golden age of popular song, a symbol of the values and strivings of the World War II generation, and of the saga of Jewish-American assimilation.

With insight and wit, Rosen probes the song's musical roots, uncovering its surprising connections to the tradition of blackface minstrelsy and exploring its unique place in popular culture through six decades of recordings by everyone from Bing Crosby to Elvis Presley to *NSYNC.

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."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes index.