On December 10, 1957, a late-night radio DJ in Portland, Oregon named Al Priddy did something that got him sacked on the spot. He didn’t swear on air. He didn’t insult anyone.
He played a Christmas song. The station, KEX, had banned it — and the song was Elvis Presley singing “White Christmas.” Priddy played it anyway, and management fired him that night for breaking station policy.
The reasons given sound almost funny today. KEX’s program manager said the record was “not in the good taste we ascribe to Christmas music,” complaining that Presley gave it a rhythm and blues interpretation. Elsewhere the objection was put even more grandly: Elvis’s version, one statement claimed, “desecrates the Spirit of Christmas and transgresses the composer’s intent.”
Elvis Presley – White Christmas (Official Audio)
That composer was Irving Berlin — one of the most successful songwriters in American history, the man who wrote “White Christmas” for Bing Crosby. Berlin reportedly loathed what Elvis had done to it, calling it a “profane parody” of his song, and is said to have ordered his staff in New York to telephone radio stations across the country demanding that both the song and the entire album be pulled off the air.
And here’s the detail that turns the whole story sad rather than snobbish. Berlin hadn’t written “White Christmas” as a cheerful holiday tune. He wrote it out of grief. His three-week-old son, Irving Berlin Jr., died on Christmas Day in 1928. The quiet, aching version Bing Crosby made famous was the version Berlin meant. Hearing a 22-year-old rock and roll singer bounce through it must have felt unbearable to him.
There’s also a wrinkle almost nobody mentions. Elvis wasn’t copying Bing Crosby at all — he was following a rhythm and blues version recorded by The Drifters in the mid-1950s. That version had caused no fuss whatsoever, because at the time it was only played on stations that carried “race records” and most white listeners never heard it. The arrangement only became scandalous once Elvis sang it.
Elvis Presley | His Banned Christmas Album
The reaction spread. Some American stations pulled the record; most ignored Berlin completely. In Canada it went further, with most stations refusing to play the album at all, and one official calling it “degrading.” A newspaper reviewer in Ottawa dismissed the record as a “masterpiece of seasonal miscasting.” The Oregonian ran an editorial saying the fired DJ deserved no sympathy at all, and adding that it only wished Presley himself could be dragged into court.
None of it worked. Elvis’s Christmas Album spent four weeks at number one on the Billboard album chart — and it went on to become the best-selling Christmas album of all time, a record it still holds. Every December it plays in shops and homes all over the world. And Al Priddy, the man who got fired for playing it? After a public outcry over his sacking, he got his job back.