Behind the Scenes Minis: Irving's World

Tracy and Holly talk about the movie "White Christmas" and how it has aged. They also discuss collectible sheet music and the idea of there being no definitive version of a song recording. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. I feel
like we just start saying hello and Happy Friday. I
don't remember how we kick off these episodes now anymore,

(00:22):
even though we've been recording them for a million years.
Sometimes you know, one's brain dips a little. It's like
how they're doing the thing at the end of the
episode about where to find us. Sometimes I will just go,
what is our email address? I don't even know? Uh
So this week we had this accidental two part around

(00:42):
Irving Berlin, who I had kind of thought about as
like sort of a like a low key Christmas e
episode for December because of the song White Christmas and
the movie White Christmas. And then it blossomed into two
parts that could no longer happen before Christmas, happened after Christmas,

(01:04):
but not really about Christmas much at all. And I
do they'll want to talk about the movie White Christmas because,
as we said in the episode, uh it has it's
a movie that has aged beautifully and terribly at the
same time. Um, Like there's just there are so many

(01:26):
performances in it that are delightful, in songs that are delightful,
and also the whole movie it is really about a
man who feels old and sad and useless, and everyone
stops what they are doing to try to make him
feel better. Um, there's some age differences in the couples

(01:47):
that people find a little jarring today. And then there's
also that song that sort of celebrates how much they
love minstrel shows. I really don't know how much influence
Irving Berlin had over the plot of the movie. Um,
I did not go look into that, but realizing how

(02:07):
soon that was to like his career winding down and
how he felt about it, I now kind of see
it in the light of that of like, how how
much of this character was like sort of a reflection
of Irving Berlin wondering how many how many years as

(02:29):
an entertainer and a songwriter he had left. Yeah, it's interesting.
I had not known before this the context of Christmas
being a difficult time for him. But I have always
been the person who was like the song White Christmas
is not a happy song. It Yeah, like there are

(02:52):
arrangements of it that are really peppy, but like it
can sound wistful and nostalgic and just sad, like heartbreaking.
It's always sounded sad to me since I was a kid.
It I always conjured this image of somebody like trapped
somewhere where they couldn't get to anyone they wanted to see.

(03:13):
And so now I'm like, oh, maybe maybe that's actually
kind of how the song is. It's not just your
weird little gothic child read of it. Yeah. I um
had a very funny moment when we were talking in
the first part of this one about wax cylinders and

(03:36):
the idea of a performer having to perform it over
and over as they recorded one offs, and how much
like today and for a long time, right since mass
production has been a thing, like part of what people
know in learning of songs are like the unique breaths

(03:59):
and phrases is of a given performer, like when they
sing it or whatever, And how that's one of the
things you noticed when you go to a live show
that they do it slightly differently. And imagine if everybody
had a different sound memory in their head of what
it was supposed to sound like. And it's just a
fascinating thing to me that there would never be one
definitive version of any given song, so any changes within

(04:21):
performances would have completely shifted it. The Internet would lose
its mind if that were the case. It would be like,
well mine, he breathes before the uh, Like I just can't.
It's so fascinating. Yeah. I didn't realize until working on this,
like what sheet music. Like I took piano lessons as
a kid, I had sheet music for things, but like,

(04:43):
to me, the sheet music for whatever was the thing
purchased to learn to play the song for my piano
recital or whatever. The idea that like there would be
effort put into like a very nicely illustrated cover that
was also like a marketing effort for other sheet music,
and then in addition to people buying the sheet music,
they could learn to play a thing on the piano

(05:05):
that they would sort of be collecting sheet music as
these attractive things to have in their home. Like that
was not really a thing that had ever entered into
my mind until working all on this. I kind of
had a sense of that because I remember um when
I was younger, when I was in my teens and

(05:26):
early twenties. I did more of this than I have
in later years. But I used to often go to
flea markets and just like, and there were instances where
I would see sheet music's grouped together in collections, and like,
I remember talking to a couple of vendors who specifically
did have a lot of sheet music. Remember this is
late eighties, early nineties, um where they were. They were

(05:49):
talking about how, oh, some people like to collect, you know,
all of the pieces from this publisher from this year
to this year. And so I had a little bit
more of a sense of it, but I didn't think
about it being marketed four well to collect, if you
know what I mean. People often collect things that are
not intended to be collector's items, but these kind of
were actually designed that way from the top. Yeah. One

(06:10):
of the things I knew I wanted to include in
these episodes from the beginning was the argument not really argument,
was Woody Guthrie's response to God Bless America. Like, as
I was taking my very first notes, before I had
even gone and gotten any research about this particular aspect
of it, I just had in written in there like

(06:31):
and the Woody gutthree dispute Um because man's first of all,
I just the general having a dispute between two songwriters
over music like that in general is like okay, I
um into that idea. But also the fact that so
many of Woody Guthrie's criticisms of the song like just

(06:53):
don't hold up to his response to his response in
terms of writing the land as your land, especially today,
especially in the like having today's context of things like
the land back movement, Uh, you know, like like that
adds a whole new layer to what already even without

(07:16):
that movement that's existing now today, Like already words like
like I said in the episode talking about a white
man from Oklahoma writing about this land is my lands, Like,
it's just a little, a little weird choice to have
that be your song response. There's a whole lot of

(07:46):
irving Berlin's like work and career and impact that I
just feel like it's just such a mess um and
like so many things at the same time, like he
really does seem to you have understood and valued the
musical contributions of black performers and tried to like fight

(08:08):
for black performers he was working with to be respected
and that kind of But then like also we gotta
do black face. We got that whole argument. I was like,
as I the I found an article that was just
about that, and I was like, yikes, Like this is
full of yikes, so much yikes. But then just also

(08:28):
you know, casually including stuff that was stereotypical or bigoted
or whatever in songs that he was trying to like,
there's just a lot of it, uh and it um
even songs that like, I like putting on the Rits
to me is a brilliant song, Like it's got just

(08:52):
wonderful lyrics in my opinion, But also like that is
a song that he wrote about, uh, like poor black
people in Harlem getting dressed up to like go out
on the town in a way that like isn't necessarily
read in a flattering way when you read the lyrics,
but the lyrics themselves are incredible in my opinion. And

(09:16):
also anytime I watch uh Young Frankenstein, That's exactly what
I was thinking. Yeah yeah, um, that was another thing.
I stopped what I was doing to watch. I was
trying to write this, how many YouTube videos My whole
YouTube Boggerythm is like now just all skewed because it's

(09:37):
full of all kinds of renditions of Herving Berlin songs.
I mean, Peter Boyle forever um so funny. I once
again we'll say, boy I sure wish I could get
up at noon and go to bed at five. That
would be just about right for me. Yeah, I uh.

(09:58):
And in many recent years, rs, I have been to
go to sleep fairly early, wake up sometime between six
and seven, like, not even on purpose. That's just like
what my body is doing. Now when you say go
to bed early, what does that mean for you? Because
that means very different things for different people. Means ten.

(10:18):
I'm usually in bed by ten, maybe ten thirty. D
and D night. It has to be ten thirty because
that's when D and D ends, And sometimes the last
thirty minutes of D and D are very hard for me.
But when I was younger, for a while I was
working in a spot, and I was working a shift
that went from two pm to nine pm, and I gradually,

(10:39):
like gradually got into this rhythm where um, like I
would get off of work and treat the rest of
my day as it had been if I had gotten
off of work at five, like my evening was starting
at nine, and then I would sleep really late, and
then I would get up and go to start my
two pm shift again. Um, and so yeah, I like

(11:01):
that his like five am perfect. Like that is a
little too far for me, but I can. I can.
I've had periods of my life when I've been a
little bit more of a nighttime person, and I can,
like at least somewhat see it working away. Even I
know it's a terrible habit, but even like if we

(11:25):
have like a chunk of time off, like around the
holidays or whatever, where there's no obligations for several days
within three days, Brian and I are on that schedule.
Like we both just tend to want to like wake
up at eleven or twelve, have the afternoon in nighttime,
and then go to bed as the sun is coming up.
I don't know why we divert automatically to vampire hours,
but we both do, thankfully. I feel like I should

(11:47):
confess that the mere mention of Ethel Merman's name made
me cry in this episode. Yeah. I wasn't expecting that either. Really.
I read it was like, oh, I love Ethelm, and
then we talked about it and I just started bawling.
I don't know what that's about. Yeah, Irving Berlin clearly
love to write songs for. But if you've never seen
Ethel Merman sing Everything's coming up roses, it's very easy

(12:09):
to do. Just check out YouTube and she's amazing. I
also highly recommend that Gene stapleton appearance on The Muppet
Show is also very easy to find online, and it
is lovely. It's so sweet, so sweet, Ethel, Ethel and Ethel.
And you know, clearly I like the very brash singers

(12:31):
of that era. Yeah, yeah, I'm like none of the lilting,
sweet voiced singers I want, Like I want Ethel Merman forever.
Arthur not mentioned in this episode. It's like my dream episode. Yeah.
The list of people like that was not even a
complete list of all the people that performed in the
and the hundredth Birthday tribute concert. But at like I

(12:55):
kept finding I was like, gotta put this person in there,
Gotta put Jerry Orbach in there, Gotta put Yeah, so many.
I know. I definitely had a sad as he read
that list because so many of them are gone. Yeah,
with only a few exceptions. I yeah, well, and that's
like one of the like living to be a hundred
and one years old. Like at that point, pretty much

(13:15):
everybody that he had, you know, a long working relationship
with had died before he did. He he by the
time he died, he had this reputation for being just
kind of reclusive and cantankerous isn't quite the right word, like,
not very personable in his last years. And after his death,

(13:38):
one of his daughters like got really frustrated with what
people's perceptions of her father had become and wrote a
really I have not read it, but it's described as
like a very lovely and tender um memoir about how
like totally acknowledging that her father worked all the time,
but that also the like late years reclusiveness. UM, like

(14:03):
that just what that wasn't his whole personality and that
wasn't how people who knew and worked with him necessarily
would have remembered him. So yeah, that's out there too
if folks want to, I want to read it. UM.
One of the many there's a long source list for
this episode, UM, And one of the many sources in

(14:24):
that source list is the book UM that I mentioned.
I think we quoted from it briefly in the episode,
and that was by James Caplan called Earning Berlin, New
York genius. Um. That is from Yale University Press. But
in my opinion it is really accessible to like non
academic readers. I know, sometimes stuff that comes out from
university presses can be a little dense. I did not

(14:45):
find it to be so at all. There were sometimes
where I sort of felt like if I were Jewish,
I would have gotten some nuance that I was not
bringing the way something was described. Um. But other than that, like,
I found it to be a really lovely, inaccessible work
on him. Um. If folks are interested in more, Yeah,

(15:08):
Happy Friday. Based on when this is coming out, Tomorrow
is gonna be New Year's Eve, and so you will
have Saturday Classic tomorrow, and I hope whatever is going
on for folks's New Year's Eve, I hope it's great.
I've been in jobs where I had to work with
the public on New Year's Eve, and I remember that

(15:31):
often being a challenging thing. So whatever is up with
you tomorrow, I hope it's great. If you're going to
a party, hope it's great. If you're staying home, hope
it's great. If you have to work tomorrow, I hope
that's great. Whatever is happening, We'll be back with Saturday
Classic tomorrow with something brand new on Monday. Stuff you

(15:53):
Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, app podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows. H m hm