“White Christmas,” written by the formidable composer and lyricist Irving Berlin, receives its world premiere on December 25, 1941 on Bing Crosby’s weekly NBC radio program, The Kraft Music Hall. It went on to become one of the most commercially successful singles of all time.
Hit Parader was first published in 1942 during World War II out of Derby, Connecticut and became one of the longest-running U.S. music magazines.
The publication pre-dated the music charts by a few years. Initially the magazine would provide the lyrics to the popular songs of the day, a practice which came to an end in the ’70’s.
The magazine came into the spirit of pop and rock with the arrival of first, The Beach Boys and then especially with the explosion on the scene by The Beatles. At that point in time it took on a whole new look and feel, often mimicked by many other ‘teen’ magazines which began to ‘pop’ up.
Hit Parader migrated through the various genre’s during the 1970’s – moving on to hard rock, metal and the like up into the mid 1980’s. The magazine went through some troubled times in the 1990’s shutting down for a time and finally called it quits after putting out it’s final issue in December of 2008.
On this day in 1776, Gen. George Washington and his troops crossed the Delaware River for a surprise attack against Hessian forces at Trenton, NJ.
At The Battle of Trenton, after a brief struggle, nearly the entire Hessian force was captured, with negligible losses to American forces.
The above historical marker is near the very spot the Continental Army soldiers under George Washington’s command would have disembarked from their boats to begin their march to Trenton.
"Silent Night" was performed for the first time, at the Church of St. Nikolaus (above) in Oberndorff, Austria on this day in 1818.
Shown above is the only surviving autograph of the song by Joseph Mohr (below).
Josephus Franciscus Mohr (December 11, 1792 – December 4, 1848)
Josephus Mohr was an Austrian Roman Catholic priest and lyricist. He wrote the lyrics of the Christmas carol (English: ‘Silent Night’).