![]() And by the late 1940s television was growing out of radio, and through the 1950s the pair set holiday living rooms around the country aglow with musical performances.” “ Irving Berlin invested ‘White Christmas’ with the sort of meterological longing that comes from living in Southern California, but troops picked up on the sentiment, making the song a classic in this regard.” This also happened to be the zenith of the golden age of radio ( a compilation of whose Christmas broadcasts we featured last year here on Open Culture). “By the 1940s, radios were a default presence in most American homes. “It’s no coincidence that the boom in Christmas tunes came during World War II, when tens of thousands of American soldiers were abroad defending their country, no doubt longing for the simple warmth of home,” writes The Atlantic‘s Eric Harvey. That boom began, as the Cheddar Explains video at the top of the post tells it, with Crosby’s Christmas Day 1941 rendition of “White Christmas,” just weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The year before that brought “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” the year before that, “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” That was recorded first and most definitively by Bing Crosby, the singer most closely identified with the 1940s Christmas-music boom. This song beats Berlin’s “Snow” from “White Christmas” by a mile, but that’s another conversation altogether.Even “The Christmas Song,” whose most beloved version was recorded by Nat King Cole, wasn’t written until 1945 (as was “Let It Snow”). Not a big deal but it was a small lump in the road for me. It sounds as though the singer is asking to be held tight all the way home, but they’re really asking to be held tight during the good night kiss. The coziness of the romance in the song and the wonderful melody made me want to find out why he wants to “Let It Snow.”Īs a kid, I was always confused by the line about “hold me tight” followed immediately by “all the way home, I’ll be warm.” Are they parting or is he taking her home and hugging her all the way there? As an adult, I understood it but it took a bit of thought because things are out of sequence. I agree, the title doesn’t sound very interesting. It does what a hook does (and the title is usually the hook or one of the hooks). To my mind, the title isn’t functioning as a mini-chorus. Please let me know your thoughts in the Comments section below:ĭoes this song mention Christmas? I don’t think so. Yes, at the end of the song, they’re still fooling around (those crazy kids…).Īll in all, a beautifully written song, by two master songwriters, that deserves its status as a Christmas classic (even though there’s no mention of Christmas in the song). So the second Verse slips in, ‘The lights are turned way down low’ (the first sign of hanky-panky)… and the Bridge declares… ‘Let It Snow Let It Snow Let It Snow’ feels like a Chorus, even though it’s just a single line.Īnother fun thing – back when Let It Snow was written, in popular culture any sexual content had to be snuck in with suggestion and inference. Here the Title is more like a Refrain than is typical in an AABA song (I define a refrain as a short mini-Chorus). As is common with that form, the Title is at the end of every ‘A’ section. There’s also a rhyme ( ‘go/Snow’) to add emphasis and pop to the Title, another strategy that’s very common… because it’s usually effective. In this case, as with so many other good songs, the surrounding lyrics give the Title meaning by setting it up with a specific, clear story: So, as is true of most title-based songs, any feeling and resonance has to come from the way the Verses and Bridge lyrics set up the Title. ![]() The words ‘Let It Snow’ don’t tell us anything… or even suggest much (if you’re not Sammy Cahn). ![]() Like a lot of songs, ‘Let It Snow”s Title is a commonplace phrase that in itself is pretty meaningless. Today we’ll be looking at Sammy Cahn’s lyric. The joyous melody is great, but we’ll save that for another day. It illustrates some common approaches that are useable in almost any style of song. ![]() It’s not only one of most popular and successful songs of all time, it’s a model of good songwriting. Cahn started with the first line of the lyric, Styne responded with the beginning of a melody, they went back and forth for a while… and ‘Let It Snow Let It Snow Let It Snow’ was written. In the summer of 1945 in Los Angeles, on one of the hottest days of the year, composer Jule Styne and lyricist Sammy Cahn, first generation Americans born of Jewish immigrants, wrote a Christmas song.
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