The way “Blue Skies” sounds, according to musical historians, was clearly “Jewish” to many listeners in the 20s, but it still became a hit. We began watching Go West. Learn how your comment data is processed. A song where white people in blackface and a black family that’s kept in the kitchen praise a white man for freeing the “darkies?” It’s appalling to watch now. Raised the son of a synagogue cantor, Jewish music was a huge influence on his early life and music. The idea to make a movie based on the song “White Christmas” itself, which already had been featured in a movie, might have been a cash grab that came from the fact that the song became such a touchstone for soldiers serving in World War II (Bing Crosby talks about how singing it for the troops was a deeply emotional experience, one that’s recaptured in the film). White Christmas was the first movie to be filmed in the new VistaVision process, in Technicolor. Through one number after another in "White Christmas", Vera Ellen astonishes in her ability to dance through a number of choreographic styles with grace and authority. “White Christmas” – the song, is the most popular song of all time and it was written by a Jewish man during the summer in California. See more ideas about white christmas, vintage dance, 1950s dance. Jessica Mason (she/her) is a writer based in Portland, Oregon with a focus on fandom, queer representation, and amazing women in film and television. starring Bing Crosby, … 15 Things You Didn't Know About "White Christmas" Some trivia about the 1954 Christmas classic ( now streaming on Netflix !) Dec 23, 2016 - Director Michael Curtiz (left) walks through a dance number with Bing Crosby (center) and Danny Kaye (right) on the set of "White Christmas", 1954. .hide-if-no-js { 2020 Was the Year of Everyone Thirsting Online, A Trans/Non-binary Person’s Perspective on the Grogu vs. Baby Yoda Debate, Science Fiction and Fantasy Books to Gift Every Member of Your Weird and Cranky Family, Stop What You're Doing & Come Watch Meg From, “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” Hits Different This Year, Let’s Settle This: A Unified Theory to Define “Christmas Movies”, Guillermo del Toro, Rian Johnson, and Edgar Wright Want You to Help Save FilmStruck, Classic Film Scenes as Ottoman Miniatures Fuse Cultures. −  Boots reboot… Here’s what happened a week ago tonight, when Boots Riley and The Coup liberated Ypsilanti, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOTWN8apuA8, http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=543803, 106 members of Congress are guilty of sedition, Florida ramps up the negligent homicide bodycount in the run-up to the GOP convention. White Christmas was supposed to reunite Bing Crosby with Fred Astaire, who’d appeared together in both Holiday Inn and Blue Skies (1946). Did they remove it with CGI? Or to keep it anonymous, click here. White Christmas is just a fun movie, and I highly recommend it for holiday viewing. Linette has a story about choreographing and performing a modern dance in high school, in gym class or something, and being slapped by another girl in the class, who, I guess, found it offensive in some way. Dance. With Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, Vera-Ellen. Yeah, not a great movie by any stretch, Doug. The worst offender by far though it the super-racist “Abraham” number which is about Lincoln freeing the slaves. Dance to your hearts content !! I would very much encourage her to dance, the body positivity that comes from it is such a life saver. The three leads singing so fondly about shows that were just so funny seems quaint…until you realize they’re lamenting the loss of a racist, harmful artform that went out of style half a century before. But I like to think it also might have to do with the fact that, while White Christmas isn’t a really racist film…Holiday Inn certainly is. The same is true of the minstrel number, which has only the slightest hint of minstrel or blackface imagery in the caricatures we see on some of the backdrops. The Klan might just cut off my leg to make it official. The same goes for Irving Berlin himself, who was part of a larger American cultural tradition that was suffused with racism, and he did his part both to perpetuate and subvert it. The movie on its face has the same problems as most films of its era: it was made by white people for a white audience and carried with it the inherent racism of Hollywood and its time. You should have an “I’m mostly white” button made the next time the Klan comes to town, Pete. Well, that was before he had ever heard of talking pictures or contemplated Al Jolson (who gets a shoutout in White Christmas) singing about a “Mamie” on screen, but blackface and minstrelry were part of his cultural vocabulary so much even then that he wrote several numbers for his all-soldier army revue that were either about or influenced by minstrel shows and one of those songs was “Mandy” and the so-called “Minstrel Number” that eventually made it into White Christmas nearly four decades later. Clooney, Kaye and Crosby look back fondly on the minstrel days they miss. White Christmas has endured recordings by various artists — there are over 500 known versions! A successful song-and-dance team become romantically involved with a sister act and team up to save the failing Vermont inn of their former commanding general. The Ypsilanti Public Library has Holiday Inn, though at this time of year you’ll be waiting a while for it. The touring production at the Benedum Center wraps popular songs and big dance numbers in a shiny holiday package. Sep 6, 2014 - Explore Robin Stelly's board "White Christmas Dancers" on Pinterest. About Amazon Toys & Games. White Christmas might as well be called White-washed Christmas because it does sweep so many elements of its songs that were used in racist ways in the past under the rug. If you think we should add a song to the list, be sure to comment it in at the bottom of the page. Remember a few paragraphs back when I told you about Irving Berlin’s time in the army in WWI? “White Christmas ” I just laugh so hard at the choreography Santa & The Dance Squad on Amazon Music. I’ll have to see if I can convince her to tell the story someday. Holiday Inn stars Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire and is about a hotel that’s only open on Holidays (which seems dumb) and they start scraping the barrel for holiday songs really fast. General Waverly's Columbia Inn in fictional Pine Tree, Vermont, made it's debut a decade before, in Holiday Inn. [2] They didn’t seem painfully serious to me, just dancing without a lot of arch showboating. She's a trained lawyer and opera singer as well as a mom and author. “The only thing is,” she said, “I don’t know if I could keep my face like Wednesday Addams for that long.” I told her that, during practice, you were probably allowed to smile, and that it was just during performances that you were required to look suicidal. White Christmas is a classic movie that I love and its music is iconic in many ways. I just introduced Alro to him for the first time a few days ago. And thanks for letting me find the name of the The shapes and costume, are pulled right from Graham’s choreography. And dance to a song like this: The lyrics to "Mandy" are as follows: I was strolling out one evening by the silv'ry moon I could hear somebody singing a familiar tune So I stopped a while to listen Not a word I wanted to miss It was just somebody serenading something like this Mandy There's a minister handy And it sure would be dandy White Christmas (1954) cast and crew credits, including actors, actresses, directors, writers and more. Why show children this crap? This action, dance & camp song is a hit with kids of all ages! And one of those people was the greatest American songwriter in history, Irving Berlin. And thanks for the link, ATF. Personally, I lack the background to make sense of it, but I found it fascinating, and it made me wonder what was going on at the time to have pushed Berlin and the filmmakers to expend the energy. And, for what it’s worth, I wasn’t critiquing the modern dance itself, which I found interesting. If you don’t know what a minstrel show is, the song is perfectly fine…but if you do, its a very weird thing to hear in a musical that is otherwise pretty far removed from minstrelry. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. sings a verse to her kids…in the kitchen. White Christmas is a musical based on the Paramount Pictures 1954 film of the same name.The book is by David Ives and Paul Blake, with music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. White Christmas is what we’d essentially call a jukebox musical nowadays. I don’t know if Irving Berlin knew or felt that blackface was racist at the time, because The Jazz Singer wasn’t Irving Berlin’s first or last interaction with blackface and the larger minstrel tradition it arose from. The “Abraham” number in White Christmas is purely a dance break. Brascia was a featured dancer with Vera-Ellen in White Christmas (1954) and with Cyd Charisse and Liliane Montevecchi in Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956). But it always matters. I can’t dance at all and I’m mostly white. White Christmas ties directly into Hollywood’s checkered history with blackface, minstrel shows and the complicated legacy of one of America’s greatest songwriters: Irving Berlin. And, yes, Doug, I think that Danny Kaye found himself vomited on my dinner companions quite often. But the past use of these songs in associations with minstrelsy and blackface also can’t be erased. Minstrel shows and blackface arose first among white performers in the 1830s and involved those white performers painting their faces in caricatures of black slaves. The number is not only performed by Bing Crosby in blackface (along with the band and dancers), there’s a section where the Mamie character (that’s her actual character name!) No one likes a bragger, Peter “I’m Mostly White” Larson. When I watched on Netflix, there was no blackface during the minstrel number. He only made it about five minutes in, but that’s five minutes longer than he’s ever watched anything before. Ah! This song, like other racially icky songs, is actually used in White Christmas in a non-racist way. The “Abraham” number in White Christmas is purely a dance break. We still live with minstrel relics in our culture – White Christmas being just one of them. There is no comparison on film. Irving Berlin, the composer of “White Christmas” and “God Bless America” was a Jewish, Russian immigrant who came to America when he was only a child. I suspect that I’m right, but I don’t know. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Bosley Crowther reviewed “White Christmas” for The New York Times on Oct. 15, 1954. Sorry you almost lost your dinner over it, old friend. I’m sure they’d love to have you join them on their side of the police barricade. The racist parts of it aren’t there. Most of the songs were not written for the movie, and it’s just a tour through decades of Irving Berlin’s music, including many songs he wrote when he was in the army because White Christmas is about a pair of WWII veterans. Reply Delete Interesting! display: none !important; But is that okay? But it’s important to understand the cultural context of the movie and the music to see where it fits in a larger, longer story of American culture and race. Franklin Pierce (1853-1857) is believed to have been the first President to put a Christmas tree in the White House. The dancers are fine. I love Holiday Inn too (although the black face scene does make me cringe). Stream ad-free or purchase CD's and MP3s now on Amazon.co.uk. The thing that struck me was the fact that the filmmakers had decided to critique modern dance here, in this way… by showing the “beautiful” woman in hot pink descending from above into this pit of drab, expressionless women. Company on Amazon Music. even more utilitarian and powerful. Enjoy our Christmas songs. While “Mandy” is innocuous when taken alone, the number in White Christmas that proceeds it, when Crosby, Kaye, and Clooney sing of their longing for “The Minstrel days we miss” is more complicated taken in context. }. “Blue Skies” in particular only gained racist associations with blackface after it became popular. I read somewhere that Danny Kaye smoked like 5 packs of cigarettes a day yet could still shake his ass like that (not saying it’s *great* dancing but that it’s very active). Directed by Michael Curtiz. I reminded Clementine of the Merce Cunningham videos that we’d watched at the Andy Warhol Museum, and tried to put the whole thing into historical context, but I think I did a pretty pathetic job of explaining why it is that, in 1954, Irving Berlin, and the people who made White Christmas, would want to divert from their storyline in order to critique modern dance. Choose from White Christmas sheet music for such popular songs as White Christmas, Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep, and Sisters. The original St. Louis production starred Lara Teeter, Karen Mason, Lauren Kennedy, and Lee Roy Reams, and the 2004 San Francisco production starred Brian D'Arcy James, Anastasia Barzee, Meredith Patterson, and Jeffry Denman But that’s because White Christmas is a showcase for Berlin songs that were sort of stitched together from everywhere, including other far more problematic properties. “White Christmas ” I just laugh so hard at the choreography Dance. Dinner is always endangered by Danny Kaye. Every movie and song and piece of art has a story, it’s not always merry and bright. In the spirit of Christmas, we created a list of popular Christmas songs that have the word Christmas in the song title. And it has been translated into 25 different languages. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=543803. Amazon's Toys & Games store features thousands of products, including dolls, action figures, games and puzzles, advent calendars, hobbies, models and … Boom Chicka Boom Christmas is one of our most popular Christmas songs for kids. It was during the Abe Lincoln song, right? But, I made something up, and we paused the movie for a few minutes, so that Clementine could try out a few moves.  =  The contrasts of The Jazz Singer and the first use of “Blue Skies” are emblematic of so much of how early and golden age Hollywood dealt with race. Have a tip or story idea? The set on the Paramount lot was refurbished for the next Christmas classic. Huh? on to this post. Explicitly and textually it’s not racist…but that’s only because there are no black people in it aside from one bartender in the club car in the “Snow” scene. [ 2 ] White Christmas being just one of those people was the greatest American songwriter in history Irving! 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