Second in life-time sales only to Elvis Presley’s 1947 “Elvis’s Christmas Album,” Bing Crosby’s “Merry Christmas” released by Decca Records in 1945, has sold over fifteen million copies worldwide. The collection was originally packaged as five 78 rpm records, all with holiday themes except “Danny Boy” which was paired with “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” The immense success of Crosby’s signature song, “White Christmas” released in 1942, prompted Decca Records to release “Merry Christmas.”
The November 5, 1942 edition of “Billboard” magazine featured “White Christmas” at position number seven. Decca Records, the home label for many of the most important black artists of the day including the Inkspots, released Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” a single that transended all categories including the difficult-to-breach barriers of race.
On the pop charts, “White Christmas” had already appeared for a full month’ it would spend a total of seventeen weeks there, eleven of them at number one. For the recording industry, Christmas as we know it had begun.
Irving Berlin wrote “White Christmas” for a movie called Holiday Inn (1942), an implausible tale of an inn that opened only on holidays. While the composer grew heated in the writing and Bing Crosby immediately loved it, others were dubious. After the first New York screening, Berlin’s staff returned to the office convinced that the boss’s big number had flopped.
What saved “White Christmas” were requests made by GIs to Armed Forces Radio around the world. Soldiers away from home, many of them in the South Pacific or North Africa, uncertain of whether they’d ever again see family and friends, let alone a snowfall, responded passionately to Berlin’s understated evocation of the mythic romance of Christmas Past. (“Keep it simple! Keep it simple!” he’d continually insisted to the amanuensis who helped him write it down.)
The song’s slow start in America, Berlin eventually decided, was because of the opening verse about Christmas in a warm California climate. He ordered the first verse cut from the sheet music (to resounding initial complaints from music stores, who felt they were being cheated of material), and Bing Crosby’s hit record climbed the charts without it. About the only place you can hear anything but the chors today is on the version Darlene Love sang in 1963 on Phil Spector’s A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector. In the ensuing ten years, “White Christmas” sold three million copies as sheet music, while Crosby’s rendition sold more than nine million records. Other artists sold another five million of the same song. It was for many years — and perhaps remains today — the largest selling single song, Christmas or other, ever waxed.
“White Christmas” changed Christmas music forever, both by revealing the huge potential market for Christmas songs and by establishing the themes of home and nostalgia that would run through Christmas music evermore.
After the huge success of the original release, Decca re-issued a second edition of four 78s in 1947 omitting “Danny Boy” and “Let’s Start the New Year Right” from the original edition and including new recordings of “White Christmas” and “Silent Night” recorded in March that year. “White Christmas” had to be re-recorded because, in an unprecedented occurence, the original master had worn out and was unuseable. It was this recording of the Christmas standard that would be used for every subsequent pressing. In an effort to replicate as closely as possible the original 1942 version of the song, Bing Crosby and Decca undertook the re-recording with the same orchestra and chorus.
In 1955, Decca released the vinyl LP version of the collection which is most familiar to most of us. The LP contained the eight songs from the 1947 edition as well as four new selections, some of which highlight the Andrews Sisters. Together with the arworkt featuring Bing Crosby on the cover wearing a Santa hat, Bing Crosby’s “Merry Christmas” is THE Christmas record album for millions and millions of people.
 |
| Merry Christmas. Bing Crosby. 1955 “Merry Christmas” Bing Crosby Decca Records. Original release 1945 as 78rpm set. Re-release 1947 as 78rpm set. Re-issue 1955 as LP. Re-issue 1963 as stereo LP. Re-issue 1973 by MCA Records. Song Listing:
|
christmaslpstocd 