The best-selling song in US history
Sometimes, a song becomes so popular that it transcends its status as a piece of music. It becomes a symbol, representing a specific period of time, a set of attitudes or perhaps the collective celebration of an event like Christmas.
For decades, festive songs have been released by musicians in the hopes of securing a large number of sales; after all, the Christmas number one remains the most coveted spot on the charts. Many holiday-themed songs have succeeded in topping the charts, uniting people through unapologetically festive tracks that often feature sentimental lyrics and sleighbells.
While many Christmas songs become incredibly irritating due to their incessant airplay during the last few months of the year, some remain respected classics. From Frank Sinatra’s ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ to Nat King Cole’s ‘The Christmas Song’, traditional festive tracks are hard to dislike – their timelessness enduring over decades.
However, there’s one classic Christmas track that has outperformed all of the others, so much so that it’s not only the best-selling festive song of all time but also the best-selling song ever released in the United States. The title goes to Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’, written by Irving Berlin and released in 1942.
Written for the movie Holiday Inn, subsequently winning the ‘Academy Award for Best Original Song’, the track was a landmark of Christmas recordings. Until this point, songs specifically created for the festive period existed, but they weren’t an overly common phenomenon like they are today. In the book Merry Christmas, Baby: Holiday Music From Bing To Sting, Dave Marsh and Steve Propes explain: “‘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.”
Crosby first performed the song on the radio show The Kraft Music Hall in 1941. However, after it was released as a single in 1942, it was re-recorded five years later due to the original master being heavily worn down. The song has ended up shifting over 50 million physical copies, making it the best-selling single of all time. This doesn’t include the thousands of downloads and streams the song has acquired in the digital age.
Despite its status as the most popular Christmas song, its origins are steeped in sadness. Irving lost his infant son on Christmas Day in 1928. Thus, according to the writer Jody Rosin, who penned White Christmas: The Story of an American Song (via NPR), “The kind of deep secret of the song may be that it was Berlin responding in some way to his melancholy about the death of his son.”
The gentle, nostalgic quality of the song has touched the hearts of Americans for decades. Since its release, the song has been covered countless times, with artists from Sinatra to Elvis Presley and, more recently, Michael Buble putting their own spin on the festive classic.
