“Let It Snow!” – the Christmas song that isn’t…

 

Every year at Christmas time, when I hear someone sing or say “Let It Snow!” I am reminded of what I learned when I looked into the song that popularized that phrase.

It was launched into our holiday lexicon in December 1945, when singer and big band leader Vaughn Monroe released the first recording of “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”

On December 22, 1945 his 78 RPM recording of that song entered the Billboard “Best Sellers in Stores” chart (a precursor of Billboard’s Top 40 and Hot 100 charts).
 
The words were written by lyricist Sammy Cahn. The music was by Cahn’s songwriting partner at the time, Jule Styne.

Monroe’s version of the song quickly became a huge hit, making it to Billboard’s number one spot on January 26, 1946.

In the decades since then, “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” has been recorded by countless other singers and bands.

Nowadays, many people think it’s a traditional Christmas song. “Let It Snow” is common on Christmas cards and in Christmas-related internet posts.

But, in fact, there’s no reference to Christmas or the holiday season in the lyrics and it wasn’t intended to be Christmas song.

It’s actually a romantic, somewhat corny love song about a guy who is visiting his girlfriend during the winter in some unnamed location.

Since it was the era of PG lyrics, the guy is not expecting to stay for the night. However, when it’s time for him to leave, “the weather is frightful.”

Gosh darnit! It’s snowing too hard for him to travel safely.

The lyrics are written from the guy’s point of view. He seems to see the weather as a stroke of luck and is happy to “let it snow.” 

He suggests to the girl that he’d hate to go out into the storm right at that moment, but if she’d just hold him tight for a while he’d be warm all the way home.

He also mentions he’d brought some popcorn they didn’t get around to eating yet, and the fire is so delightful, and the lights are turned down low, and…

And, the girl buys his snow job. Perhaps not reluctantly.

Then, like in the movies, there’s sort of a fade to a later time in the lyrics. The fire is dying and the couple is still, er, “good-bye-ing.”

Yeah, baby! “Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!”

Although you may not be old enough to have heard Vaughn Monroe’s original version when it first entered the Billboard chart on December 22, 1945, you’ve heard it if you’re a fan of Bruce Willis action movies.

Monroe’s recording of “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” is the first song that plays during the end credits of Willis’ popular action movie Die Hard. It was also used in the soundtrack of Die Hard II.
 
So, yippee-kay-yay, fellow Bruce fans! Click on the video link at right and sing along! Here are the lyrics...

       “Oh, the weather outside is frightful
       But the fire is so delightful
       And since we’ve no place to go
       Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!
       It doesn’t show signs of stopping
       And I brought some corn for popping
       The lights are turned way down low
       Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!
       When we finally kiss good night
       How I hate going out in the storm
       But if you really you hold me tight
       All the way home I’ll be warm.
       The fire is slowly dying
       And, my dear, we’re still good-bye-ing
       But as long as you love me so
       Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!”

Ironically, as noted in the excellent book Stories Behind the Greatest Hits of Christmas, Cahn and Styne wrote the song while sitting in a stifling hot office in Hollywood during the summer of 1945.

Author Ace Collins says Styne worked out a melody he thought sounded “cool” on the piano. Then Cahn turned his thoughts to winter and: “Looking out the window at the California sun baking the landscape, he whispered, ‘Let it snow.’”

It was perfect! In a short time, Cahn and Styne finished what is now considered one of the top 25 Christmas songs of all time — even though it’s not really about Christmas.

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“Out Where the West Begins”

On an early December night in 1911, journalist Arthur Chapman was trying to come up with a topic for his regular column in the Denver Republican newspaper, called “Center Shots.”

As he was thinking, he saw an Associated Press dispatch about an ongoing disagreement between the Governors of several Western states.

They were arguing over which state should be considered the state where “the West” begins.

The AP story gave Chapman a flash of inspiration. He sometimes wrote cowboy-style poems for his column and, in a matter of minutes, he wrote one on the topic the Governors were debating.

He titled it “Out Where the West Begins.”

On December 3, 1911 the poem was published for the first time in Chapman’s column in the Denver Republican. It was soon reprinted in other newspapers across the country.

Over the next five years, “Out Where the West Begins” became one of best known bits of verse in America.

In 1917, musician Estelle Philleo wrote music for the poem and turned it into a popular song.

That same year, it was published in a book collecting Chapman’s poetry, Out Where the West Begins and Other Western Verses.

“Out Where the West Begins” made Chapman famous and is still renowned as one of the greatest examples of cowboy poetry.

Here’s how he answered the question of where “the West” begins in his poem:

       “Out where the handclasp’s a little stronger,
       Out where the smile dwells a little longer,
             That’s where the West begins;
       Out where the sun is a little brighter,
       Where the snows that fall are a trifle whiter;
       Where the bonds of home are a wee bit tighter;
             That’s where the West begins.
       Out where the skies are a trifle bluer,
       Out where the friendship’s a little truer,
             That’s where the West begins
       Out where a fresher breeze is blowing, 
       Where there’s laughter in every streamlet flowing,
       Where there’s more of reaping and less of sowing,
             That’s where the West begins.
       Out where the world is in the making,
       Where fewer hearts with despair are aching;
             That’s where the West begins;
       Where there’s more of singing and less of sighing,
       Where there’s more of giving and less of buying,
       And where a man makes friends without half trying,
             That’s where the West begins.”

If you’d like to know other answers to question of where the West begins – and where the East peters out – see the post on my QuoteCounterquote.com site at this link.

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Further reading and listening about Cowboy (and Cowgirl) poetry…

“You say you want a revolution?”

“You say you want a revolution” is a line every Beatles fan knows.

It’s from the song “Revolution” on the Beatles’ famed double album known as The White Album.

John Lennon was inspired to write the song after watching news about the student riots in Paris in May of 1968.

Like many people around the world, he was shocked to see crowds of young people throwing bricks and Molotov cocktails at the police, breaking shop windows and setting cars on fire.

There wasn’t one specific cause for the riots.

Various demonstrators said they were angry about various things, ranging from university policies and tuition costs to the treatment of low wage French workers and the war in Vietnam.

In the lyrics he wrote for “Revolution,” Lennon indicated that he supported efforts to seek social and political changes, but opposed using violence as means to those ends:

       “You say you want a revolution
        Well, you know
        We all want to change the world…
        But when you talk about destruction
        Don't you know that you can count me out.”

The first version of “Revolution,” with the “count me out” lyrics, was released on a 45rpm single record on August 11, 1968. It was the B-side. “Hey Jude” was the A-side.

The video at the top of this post is a live performance of the single release. (In it, Lennon sings “We’d all love to change the world,” instead of “…want to change...”)

On November 22, 1968, the Beatles released their famed double album known as The White Album.

The first song on the second side of the second LP disc was a version of “Revolution,” titled “Revolution 1.”

It was a slower musical take of the song that had been recorded before the version used on the single.

In the final audio mix of “Revolution 1” for The White Album, Lennon overdubbed a snippet of himself saying the word “in” after “Don't you know that you can count me out.”

So, on “Revolution 1” version we hear:

       “But when you talk about destruction
        Don't you know that you can count me out … IN!”

Why the change?

Because after the original single version of the song was released in August, Lennon was criticized by many leftist leaders and groups who felt that “Revolution” insulted them and their positions on social issues.

That bothered Lennon.

He actually agreed with many of the positions espoused by Left wing activists; especially their opposition to racism and the Vietnam War and their support for better wages and benefits for common working people. 

One reflection of his inner conflict was the “out … IN!” in “Revolution 1.”

As journalist Jon Wiener noted in his retrospective on Lennon’s music in The Nation, Lennon once explained: “I put both in because I wasn’t sure.”

After 1968, Lennon became even more frustrated by the lack of progress toward the social changes he supported and by the continuation of the war in Vietnam.

In 1971, after the Beatles had broken up, he wrote the song “Power to the People,” a phrase borrowed from the Black Panthers and other radical groups that actually did sometimes espouse violent revolution.

It was recorded by Lennon, Yoko Ono and The Plastic Ono Band and released a single that year.

In the lyrics, Lennon revisited the topic of revolution, writing:

         “Say you want a revolution
        We better get on right away...
        A million workers working for nothing
        You better give ‘em what they really own
        We got to put you down
        When we come into town
        Singing power to the people
        Power to the people.”

The record jacket for the “Power to the People” single shows a photo of Lennon with his clenched fist raised in a revolutionary-style power salute.

I’m a huge fan of the Beatles and like a lot of the solo music John Lennon recorded before his tragic assassination by John Hinckley in 1980.

As I was writing this post, I listened to “Power to the People” again on YouTube.

The music still sounds pretty good. And, as a Baby Boomer who leaned fairly far left in the Seventies, I recall why I related to the song’s message back then.

But nowadays, as I near my own Seventies agewise, I prefer “Give Peace a Chance.”

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Related reading, listening and viewing…

“We will bury you!” (Or something like that.)

On November 18, 1956, Communist leader Nikita Khrushchev, the head of the Soviet Union, attended a party at the Polish Embassy in Moscow.

At that event, he made some boasting comments about the competition between Communism and “capitalist states” like the US.

One of those comments included what would become Khrushchev’s most famous (and infamous) quotation.

The words he spoke in Russian were “My vas pokhoronim,” an idiomatic expression that was traditionally used as a humor-tinged taunt in Russia.

Some translations say it means “We will outlast you.” But since the word pokhoronim does refer to burial, it has also been interpreted as “We will be present at your funeral.” 

It bears a similarity to the American English idiom “It’s your funeral,” which is often used jokingly.

US news reports translated Khrushchev’s remark as “We will bury you.”

In an era when nuclear war between US and USSR was a constant concern, Americans didn’t see it as funny.

The context of the quote involved comments Khrushchev made about two recent world events.

One was the brief revolution in Soviet-dominated Hungary, which had just been brutally squashed by Russian troops.

The other was the recent bombing and invasion of Egypt by France, Britain and Israel, precipitating the Suez Crisis.

At the Embassy party on November 18th, Khrushchev blamed Western-backed “Fascist gangs” for fomenting the rebellion in Hungary. He also denounced the “imperialists and their puppets” who had attacked Egypt, a recent Soviet ally.

Then, according to an Associated Press report, Khrushchev added:

“Socialist states...base ourselves on the idea that we must peacefully co-exist. About the capitalist states, it doesn’t depend on you whether or not we exist...If you don’t like us, don’t accept our invitations and don’t invite us to come to see you. Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.”

The story caused a huge stir in the US.

Headlines blared “‘We Will Bury You,’ Russian Boss Rants” and “Raging Soviet Boss Shouts At The West ‘We Will Bury You.’” 
 
Many Americans believed Khrushchev was saying that the Soviet Union could — and some day would — violently destroy the US and its allies, implicitly in a nuclear war.

Nowadays, most books and Internet posts that cite the quote say “We will bury you” is a mistranslation of the Russian idiom and that Khrushchev was being more flippant than fearsomely threatening.

A post on the always-interesting site Cracked.com, titled “6 Mistranslations That Changed The World,” offered this explanation:

“As it turns out, a better literal translation of his words would have been, ‘We will be present when you are buried.’ This was actually a pretty common saying in Soviet Russia. What Khrushchev really meant was, ‘We will outlast you.’ It was just the usual ‘communism is better than capitalism’ posturing that went on all the time in the Cold War, but thanks to misinterpretations...Americans thought Khrushchev was threatening to literally bury us in the rubble of a nuclear attack.”

I grew up in the 1950s, when we practiced “duck and cover” drills at school and families were building fallout shelters in their back yards in the hopes of surviving the expected nuclear showdown with Russia.

I tend to think the modern take on Khrushchev’s most (in)famous quote overlooks something.

In 1956, the nuclear arms race and the threat of nuclear war were real and taken very seriously.

“We shall be present at your funeral” or “We shall outlive you” or any of the other “better” translations that are now suggested would probably have sounded just as hostile and threatening to most Americans.

So the fact that “We will bury you” may have been a mistranslation, misquote or misunderstanding, while interesting, may also be moot.

The concern caused by Khrushchev’s use of the words “My vas pokhoronim” would likely have been the same in the US regardless of the translation.

Of course, six years later, during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, we found out Khrushchev didn’t actually have the sharries to start a nuclear war with the U.S.

He backed down after President John F. Kennedy threatened to push the button first if the Soviets refused to remove the nuclear missiles they had secretly shipped to Cuba.

I don’t know what Kennedy said to Khrushchev behind the scenes during that high stakes game of Cold War brinksmanship.

But I suspect it might have been something along the lines of “We will bury you.”

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Related reading, listening and viewing…

The 1984 presidential debate that launched the term “Spin Doctors” – and a famous quip...

Nowadays, most people are familiar with the term “spin doctors.” I think they’ve been more omnipresent than ever during the 2016 presidential campaign, though few people know how they got that name.

The term is used to refer to the professional political consultants, PR gurus and media commentators who create or utter statements designed to influence public perceptions of politicians, events, corporations and organizations.

The connection between the word spin and things that are tricky or misleading is fairly old.

The use of the expression “spin a yarn,” in the sense of telling a tall tale, goes back at least to the early 1800s.

And, for more than a century, pitchers have been putting “spin” on baseballs to trick batters.

But “spin doctor” is a more recent phrase.

As documented by language maven William Safire in his New York Times column and noted in a fascinating story on NPR radio, that term was first used in a New York Times editorial published on October 21, 1984.

The topic was the televised debate scheduled that night between President Ronald Reagan, who was running for reelection, and the Democratic Presidential candidate, former Vice President Walter Mondale.

It was the second of two presidential debates between Reagan and Mondale.

During the first debate, on October 7, 1984, many observers thought Reagan seemed somewhat tired and confused. Mondale gave the stronger performance.

Reagan remained ahead on the polls after that debate. But some pundits speculated that if Reagan “lost” a second debate — or seemed lost during the debate — it could spell trouble for him when voters cast their ballots on November 6th.

An editorial published in the New York Times on the day of the second debate predicted that the candidates’ surrogates would work fast and hard to make it seem like their candidate won, no matter what happened.

The first paragraph of the editorial said:

“Tonight at about 9:30, seconds after the Reagan-Mondale debate ends, a bazaar will suddenly materialize in the press room of the Kansas City Municipal Auditorium. A dozen men in good suits and women in silk dresses will circulate smoothly among the reporters, spouting confident opinions. They won’t be just press agents trying to impart a favorable spin to a routine release. They’ll be the Spin Doctors, senior advisors to the candidates, and they’ll be playing for very high stakes. How well they do their work could be as important as how well the candidates do theirs.”

Reagan and Mondale’s PR people did indeed try to put their spin on the outcome after the debate. But the real outcome was that Mondale failed to gain any significant ground in the polls and Reagan uttered the most memorable line of the night.

One of the debate moderators, Baltimore Sun reporter Henry Trewhitt, asked Reagan about an issue he said had been “lurking” during the campaign — Reagan’s age. (President Reagan was 73 at the time.)

“You already are the oldest President in history,” Trewhitt said. “And some of your staff say you were tired after your most recent encounter with Mr. Mondale…President Kennedy had to go for days on end with very little sleep during the Cuban missile crisis. Is there any doubt in your mind that you would be able to function in such circumstances?”

Reagan responded with what became one of his most famous quotations, saying:

“Not at all, Mr. Trewhitt, and I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience.”

The audience laughed and applauded loudly at Reagan’s quip.

Then Reagan added:

“If I still have time, I might add, Mr. Trewhitt, I might add that it was Seneca or it was Cicero, I don’t know which, that said, ‘If it was not for the elders correcting the mistakes of the young, there would be no state.’”

There is no record of Seneca, Cicero or any other ancient Roman celebrity saying anything exactly like that.

However, as Latin scholar Chris Jones has noted on the excellent LatinLanguage.us site, there is a quote recorded by Cicero that comes close to what Reagan said.

In Cato Maior De Senectute, Cicero quotes Cato as saying: “The greatest states are made unsteady by the young, sustained and restored by the old.” (Also translated as: “The mightiest States have been brought into peril by young men…supported and restored by old.”)

At any rate, Reagan’s advanced age and somewhat fuzzy memory were not viewed as problems by the majority of American voters.

On November 6, 1984, Reagan was reelected by an overwhelming margin. He carried 49 of the 50 states, 59% of the popular vote and 525 electoral votes out of 538 — the highest number of electoral votes ever received up by any American president.

Looking at the current political landscape, I think it’s a win record that is unlikely to be broken in the foreseeable future.

NOTE TO HISTORY BUFFS: To watch the entire October 21, 1964 Reagan-Mondale debate, click this link to the C-SPAN Video Library.

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“Let Hertz put you in the driver’s seat!”

The real life “Mad Men” who formed the Norman, Craig & Kummel (NCK) advertising agency in 1955 share the credit for a number of classic advertising slogans and campaigns that most people still remember.

One is the Maidenform bra series of ads that used variable headlines based on the formula “I dreamed I (did or was something) in my Maidenform bra.” Another is “Ajax: Stronger than dirt.”

In 1959, NCK was selected to be the new advertising agency for the fast-growing rental car company Hertz.

The NCK ad gurus soon developed a new ad concept and slogan: “Hertz puts you in the driver’s seat.”

According to the trademark application filed by Hertz, that slogan was first used in commerce on September 2, 1959.

It wasn’t bad. But it did seem a bit more like a demand than an offer.

So the NCK copywriters did some thinking and tweaking and created a more friendly-sounding, request-oriented variation — the world-famous advertising catchphrase almost everyone came to know:

       “Let Hertz put you in the driver’s seat.”

The paperwork Hertz filed when it trademarked that version said it was first used in commerce on October 16, 1959.

In the early 1960s, print ads, signs and television commercials featuring the line were everywhere.

The TV commercials, which pioneered some early special effects, were especially memorable.

Gravity-defying people floated down from the sky into the seats of their rental cars, as viewers heard a cheery vocal group sing “Let Hertz put YOU in the driver’s seat” in a swinging jingle.

AdAge magazine has listed that series of ads as one of the “Top 100 Advertising Campaigns of the Century.”

It helped make Hertz the largest rental car company in the world.

Then in 1963 Hertz’s smaller rival, Avis, started it’s own memorable ad campaign.

Those ads noted that Avis was “only No. 2” in the car rental business. Not as big as Hertz.

What that meant, the ads suggested, was that Avis was more motivated to please customers than Hertz.

This cleverly-snarky concept was encapsulated by copywriters at the Doyle Dane Bernbach agency in the famous ad slogan: “We try harder.” (Also listed in the AdAge Top 100.)

It was a jiu-jitsu move that turned Hertz’s position as the largest car rental company against it and succeeded in gaining more attention and customers for Avis.

By 1966, an article in Time magazine noted that Hertz “is being at least nibbled by ‘We’re only No. 2’ Avis...Avis has upped its revenues by 34% in 1966, compared with Cadillac-sized Hertz's gain of 18%.”

The article also noted the Hertz had unceremoniously dumped Norman, Craig & Kummel and hired a new ad agency.

Their new agency never came up with anything as well remembered as “Let Hertz put you in the driver’s seat.” And, ironically, Hertz has continued to use the slogan off and on in more recent decades.

The Hertz vs. Avis ad slogan war and the firing of NCK the agency business are a reminder that the advertising business in the 1960s was both extremely creative and extremely rough, as dramatized by the hit TV show Mad Men.

It still is, of course.

But I doubt if the ad biz of today will ever be viewed as being anywhere near as cool as it was in the era depicted by Mad Men.

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Related reading, listening and viewing…

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About that “giant sucking sound” and what qualifies something as a “famous quotation”…

The huge amount of attention focused on the 2016 presidential debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton made me think of some of the famous quotations from past presidential debates.

One that coined a phrase still widely used today was uttered by Independent candidate Ross Perot on October 15, 1992, in the three-way presidential debate between Perot, Republican President George H. W. Bush and Democratic nominee Bill Clinton.

During that debate, Perot made a prediction about the effects of the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Many people today would view it as prescient.

Perot said:

“If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory south of the border, pay $1 an hour for your labor, have no health care, have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care for anything but making money, then there will be a giant sucking sound going south.”

That quote by Perot was included in hundreds of news reports about the presidential debate. Probably thousands.

Few people remember his entire sentence nowadays, but the catchy phrase “a giant sucking sound” quickly gained what turned out to be long-lasting fame.

It is still regularly used and repurposed.

In fact, on almost any day, if you do a Google news search on “giant sucking sound” you’ll usually find the phrase in dozens of recent news-related stories and blog posts, even though the stories may not mention its source and many readers may be unaware of it — or of Ross Perot.

My own view is that it’s the familiarity of the line or phrase and its longevity that qualifies it as “famous quotation.” It’s not whether most people remember the specific origin or coiner.

It’s often not immediately apparent whether a line or phrase will rise to the level of being a truly famous quote. Many are just “famous for 15 minutes.” 

That’s why one of my favorite quotation mavens, Nigel Rees, has criticized the tendency of some modern quotation reference books, such as the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, to elevate things like pop song lyrics to the level of other famous quotes simply because they were widely known the year the book was published.

“Remember the dreadful example of the 1999 edition of the Oxford DQ, stuffing in remarks and supposedly quotable lyrics from the Spice Girls?” Rees wrote in an issue of his great “Quote...Unquote” newsletter. “What a surprise that they have mostly gone from the most recent edition.”

On the flip side, many scholarly quotation reference books like Bartlett's Familiar Quotations include hundreds of historical and literary quotes that are not actually familiar to most people.

These less familiar quotes may be worthy bits of wisdom or wit, or worth knowing for the purpose of cultural literacy. But they are not necessarily what I would call “famous quotations.”

My own working definition of a famous quotation is a quote that is both widely known in part or in its entirety and which has had, or is clearly likely to have, a long life in our language — a line or phrase that is frequently and widely cited, quoted, praised, mocked, misquoted, adapted, recycled or repurposed.

In October 2016, everybody heard a lot about a crass quote by Donald Trump, recorded on a “hot mic” when he was getting ready to appear on the TV show Access Hollywood in 2005, after it was revealed to the press at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump was heard to say:

"I'm automatically attracted to beautiful [women]—I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything...Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."

It’s not clear whether those words will rise to the level of being a long-remembered and oft-cited “famous quotation.”

Hopefully, they won’t become a famous presidential quotation.

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