Harmonies of the human heart

“Songs make history,” Irving Berlin declared. “And history makes songs.” Yet a precious few songs outlive their eras and elude, if not transcend, history. This is especially true in America, land of diversity and novelty, where tradition is short and memory shorter. It takes more than a catchy tune, a heartfelt lyric and a hook to make a standard that sticks in our scattered national consciousness.

Steve Turner’s “Amazing Grace: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song” and Jody Rosen’s “White Christmas: The Story of an American Song” explore how two such standards were written and why they have endured. An Englishman and former slave trader writes a hymn beloved by African Americans. A cantor’s son from Russia takes the Christ out of Christmas and composes one of America’s favorite Christmas songs. These ironies, far from being coincidental, are essential to both songs’ staying power. To be sure, the slow waves of melody that crest midway through “Amazing Grace” are both uplifting and lulling, and the hints of dissonance and minor and diminished chords imbue “White Christmas” with a haunting melancholy. But religious and racial confusion -- muddling colors and creeds, the sacred and the secular -- augments these songs’ appeal.

Much of America’s most successful popular music embraces such contrarieties as eagerly as Walt Whitman’s poetry. It’s a way to get one’s arms around our motley multitudes. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, saluted John Newton, author of the lyrics of “Amazing Grace,” as “a healer of breaches, a reconciler of honest but prejudiced men, and a uniter (happy work!) of the children of God.” “Amazing Grace” and “White Christmas” are uniters, dissolving people’s differences in piety and kitsch, yet each retains a tang of contrariness that honors those differences.

Turner’s book is a twofer: a biography of John Newton and an account of “Amazing Grace” since its composition in 1773. Turner, the author of five previous books about rock ‘n’ roll, is a Christian of unspecified but evidently evangelical affiliation. Some readers will find it disconcerting when he writes, “It was as though God had put his hand on my shoulder” or observes, “Slavery was as acceptable as abortion is today ....”

But Turner’s faith gives him a profound empathy for Newton’s spiritual odyssey from a shanghaied sailor, deserter, blasphemer and slaver to an Anglican minister, hymnodist and antislavery crusader. It also lends him insights into how differently the song has been understood over the centuries. Noting that an encounter group inspired Judy Collins to record the first and biggest hit version of the song, Turner comments, “In the era of transformative therapies ‘Amazing Grace’ was no longer automatically perceived as a song about the mercy of God but as a celebration of human potential.”

Reconstructing Newton’s life at sea and in Africa requires a lot of “probablys” and “would have beens.” Turner makes imaginative use of seafarers’ journals and letters to contrast life above-decks, where officers amused themselves with games and dancing, and below-decks, where seamen abused each other and livestock. At its best, Turner’s account has the briny savor of a Patrick O’Brian novel, but it occasionally wanders off course in irrelevant detail or sinks into sheer surmise, as when he speculates that Newton “may have used slave girls for sex” or “may have taken short-term African ‘wives.’ ” Pondering these possibilities, Turner betrays a startling racial, cultural and gender bias when he supports “the fact that African women didn’t think it immoral to sleep with someone they might never see again” by citing as his sole authority an Englishman who enjoyed the favors of village chieftains’ “concubines.”

Turner is more interested in words than in music, which he describes less vividly than Rosen in “White Christmas.” Perhaps this is because “Amazing Grace,” like many hymns of its era, was originally sung to a variety of familiar tunes by congregations who seldom read music. It took 62 years for Newton’s verses to find the melody we recognize today in a famous American compendium of hymns, “The Southern Harmony.” “Amazing Grace” was always more popular in America than in England, which preferred another Newton hymn, “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken.” Turner conscientiously chronicles the song’s semi-independent development in the white and black churches of the South, its introduction to the North after the Civil War by evangelists like Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey, and its appropriation by the folk revival and civil rights movement.

“I never thought of it as a Christian song,” Joan Baez says, which is as perfectly understandable as never thinking of “White Christmas” as a Jewish song. Rosen’s “White Christmas” is three books in one: a detailed account of the song, a deft biographical sketch of Berlin and a whirlwind tour of 20th century American popular culture. Rosen traces the song’s origins to a revue that Berlin contemplated but did not complete, and he suggests that one reason “White Christmas” is “the darkest, bluest tune ever to masquerade as a Christmas carol” is that the holiday had not been “merry and bright” for Berlin and his Catholic second wife since the death of their infant son on Christmas Day, 1928, 12 years before Berlin composed “White Christmas.”

While Rosen is psychologically astute, I wish he didn’t use the word “carol” so naively. Carols are religious, and “White Christmas” does not qualify as “the Great American Christmas Carol” or rank with “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” Like “Silver Bells” and “I Saw Mama Kissing Santa Claus,” “White Christmas” is a Christmas song, and even within this secular seasonal category, “Jingle Bells” is every bit as all-American, nearly a century older and more widely sung.

Rosen doesn’t have to stake exaggerated claims for “White Christmas” to make his first book a gold mine of information and insight. The first volume of Gary Giddins’ biography of Bing Crosby ends in 1940, leaving Rosen plenty of elbow room to chronicle Crosby’s recording of the song and the making of the movie that introduced the song, “Holiday Inn.” Because the 1942 film was otherwise highly forgettable, Rosen reminds readers that Crosby performed one sequence in blackface and links “White Christmas” to burnt-cork minstrelsy and 19th century songs that pined for a lost childhood home and appealed to Americans uprooted by immigration and urbanization. He clinches his argument by connecting Berlin’s “May your days be merry and bright” to “All merry, all happy and bright” in Stephen Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home.”

Rosen is at his best when describing the prominent role that enterprising, assimilating Jews played in creating 20th century American popular culture and thereby 20th century America’s image of itself. Though this is hardly virgin territory -- Neal Gabler, for instance, surveyed it in “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood” -- it remains touchy. Once I alluded in an article to the “Jewish sensibility” of a later generation of American songwriters: Neil Sedaka, Howard Greenfield, Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil and others. Rosen notes that Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, father figures and charter members of that generation, wrote a letter to the editor dismissing my observation as “hogwash” that made “about as much sense as implying that Irving Berlin’s Jewishness influenced his writing of ‘White Christmas.’ ”

Rosen makes it abundantly clear that Berlin’s Jewishness influenced his authorship of not only “White Christmas” but also “Easter Parade” and “God Bless America.” The Great American Songbook, he argues, “is a soundtrack of assimilation: the musical record of a marginalized people’s conquest of the cultural mainstream.” “Yankee Doodle Yiddishkeit,” he calls it. Pointing out that Sammy Cahn, Harold Arlen, Yip Harburg and other songwriters were also cantors’ kids who mastered the popular idiom, Rosen draws an intriguing parallel to Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin and other black singers whose “soul music” crossed over from gospel to pop.

“White Christmas” is a song about distance -- between California and the East Coast, a palmy present and a Currier & Ives past, Jew and Gentile -- and the yearning to overcome it. So is “Amazing Grace,” though here the distance is between man -- a “wretch like me” -- and God, a gulf that only grace can bridge. Such yearning, as well as ambiguity, gives both songs legs. The ironies and duplicities of their histories encourage us to see in these standards what we will yet prevent us from exhausting their music and meaning.

*

Amazing Grace

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)

That saved a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found;

Was blind, but now I see.

‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,

And grace my fears relieved;

How precious did that grace appear,

The hour I first believed!

Through many dangers, toils and snares,

I have already come;

‘Tis grace has brought me safe thus far,

And grace will lead me home.

The Lord has promised good to me,

His Word my hope secures;

He will my shield and portion be,

As long as life endures.

Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail,

And mortal life shall cease;

I shall possess, within the veil,

A life of joy and peace.

The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,

The sun forbear to shine;

But God, who called me here below,

Shall be forever mine.

When we’ve been there ten thousand years,

Bright shining as the sun,

We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise

Than when we first begun.

*

White Christmas

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas

Just like the ones I used to know,

Where the treetops glisten

And children listen

To hear sleigh bells in the snow.

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas

With ev’ry Christmas card I write:

‘May your days be merry and bright

And may all your Christmases be white.’