I´ll be home for Christmas
- Þorkell Daníel Jónsson
- Dec 30, 2024
- 2 min read
Song: Buck Ram og Walter Kent. Lyrics: Buck Ram og Kim Gannon. Icelandic lyrics: Þorkell Daníel Jónsson
Bing Crosby recorded the song "I'll Be Home for Christmas" in October 1943 along with the John Scott Trotter Orchestra. In 1943, World War II was in full swing, and many American boys were far from home during Christmas. Homesickness undoubtedly weighed heavily on many soldiers, and that is what the lyrics are about. The song is a Christmas classic today, and there are countless versions of it. On Spotify, it ranks 14th in terms of the number of versions for a Christmas song, with a total of 9,318 versions available on the streaming platform.
The song and lyrics were created by Kent and Gannon, but Ram is always credited as a co-writer, even though he had no involvement in either the melody or the lyrics. The reason for this is a lawsuit filed by his publishing company against Gannon and Kent. The lawsuit allegedly arose because Ram had written a song and lyrics for his mother with the same theme a year earlier and had allowed Gannon and Kent to hear it. Legal matters can be peculiar, as Ram's song and lyrics bear no resemblance to Gannon and Kent's work. However, it can be argued that Gannon and Kent stole the idea.
I decided to play this song to expand my repertoire of chords. Additionally, I have a bit of an obsession with creating Icelandic lyrics, so I wrote my own lyrics for the song. If you'd like to try your hand at it as well, there's a chord and lyric sheet below the video.
Below you can hear Crosby´s version of the song.
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