White Christmas

I'm dreaming of a White Christmas, Just like the ones I used to know

Where the tree tops glisten And children listen to hear sleigh bells in the snow.*

Tailored by Tunesmith Irving Berlin for the suave, sleepy voice of Cinemactor Bing Crosby, this song (from Paramount's Holiday Inn) originally expressed the longing for sleet and ice of an Easterner marooned among the palm trees of Hollywood. But with thousands of U.S. servicemen facing snowless Christmases from North Africa to Guadalcanal, White Christmas has unexpectedly become the first big sentimental song hit of World War II.

Result: a sale, up to last week, of 600,000 copies--more (for a similar ten-week period) than any previous hit in Irving Berlin's hit-studded career.

Watching White Christmas' sales mount, Tin Pan Alley's song publishers crossed their fingers, wondered whether the good old days of the U.S. sheet-music industry might be coming back. White Christmas seemed to be leading a trend. Sheet-music sales, which during the '20s and '30s slumped badly in competition with popular phonograph recordings, are higher than they have been in 15 years (250,000 copies a week).

Rises in sheet-music sales have paralleled piano sales which rose from a depression low of 22,000 pianos in 1931 to 114,734 in 1941. Last July this upward flight of pianos was abruptly .terminated when the WPB stopped piano manufacture, turned U.S. piano factories into airplane parts plants. But Tin Pan Alley's publishers hope sheet music will go marching on, for the American home is already well stocked with pianos.

*Copyrighted by Irving Berlin Inc.

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