Bing Crosby - White Christmas

I don’t think my parents had this one growing up, but Crosby’s renditions of “White Christmas” and “Mele Kalikimaka (Merry Christmas)” are in heavy rotation on New Jersey FM radio. In an inversion of what is traditional for old LPs, the slow tracks take up the A-side here, and the fast tracks with the featured singers are on the B-side. The album is a classy 1940s affair, with nods to where American design would go in the 50s with its whimsical typesetting, bold contrasting colors, and focus on the center of the piece. The interior booklet is kind of lazy with only song titles and songwriters, but come on. You know the lyrics to every song on here already.

The title track is the clear standout on the record, though I was quite surprised to read that it is the best selling 7-inch single of all time. It’s a nostalgic, bittersweet look at an ideal Christmas (naturally, it was written by a Jew). Crosby’s voice is pure of tone, but wild and dramatically phrased. He sounds almost out of control with emotion on sombre tracks like “Adeste Fideles” and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”, quavering and slurring in his bass register. This drunken, jazzy quality sets him apart from the Rat Pack who he so influenced. You can practically smell the spiced rum from the eggnog wafting out of the speakers, especially on the A-side. It’s never so severe as to impact the quality of the music, but it adds character and charm to what could be a square, stony Greatest Generation pop album.

This is a compilation record from the 40s, where mixing engineers wore lab coats and hadn’t really gotten a handle on things like “gain staging” and “compression” yet. There’s a lot of tape distortion on some of the older and louder tracks. The upbeat numbers on the back half of the record also tend to have cleaner mixes. I was surprised how much I liked Carole Richards’ portion of “Silver Bells”. She steals that song right out from under Crosby. The Andrews Sisters are a delight on all three songs they show up on, from the jazzed-up rendition of “Jingle Bells” to the sugary “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town” and of course the country-Hawai’ian twang of “Mele Kalikimaka (Merry Christmas)”. Yeah, I don’t know how often I’ll actually listen to this, but I see no reason to get rid of it, and I was able to enjoy it for what it was.

White Christmas by Bing Crosby is a good compilation, and I like it.