Count Your Blessings

Irving Berlin

What song could be more appropriate for the season of thanksgiving than the sweet and simple and uplifting “Count Your Blessings,” by Irving Berlin?

When I'm worried and I can't sleep
I count my blessings instead of sheep
And I fall asleep counting my blessings.
When my bankroll is getting small
I think of when I had none at all
And I fall asleep counting my blessings.

I think about a nursery and I picture curly heads,
And one by one I count them as they slumber in their beds,
If you're worried and you can't sleep,
Just count your blessings instead of sheep,
And you'll fall asleep counting your blessings.

Unlike most of the immigrant composers and songwriters whose work we have been revisiting for Sometimes a Song, Irving Berlin (born Israel Beilin) had virtually no formal musical training. Refugees from the Russian pogroms of the late 19th century, Berlin’s family fled to the United States, having lost everything but their lives to the ravages of anti-Semitic madness. Israel was young boy when he saw his home set on fire, and he and recalled awaking on the street the next morning to see his home reduced to ashes. He was five years old when he arrived in the US, and thirteen when his father passed away, leaving the family utterly destitute. Though he had been working odd jobs for most of his childhood, by age fourteen Izzy considered himself more of a burden than a help to his family. And so about a year after his father’s death, he left home and set out to scrabble up a living for himself among the hoards of immigrants and other down-and-outers living in seedy lodgings and flophouses in the Bowery. In 1907 at age 19, Izzy published his first song, and sold the rights to it for a whopping thirty-three cents — about $30 in today’s value, but still a small sum, indeed. (That song, by the way, due to a typesetting error on the sheet music, changed his name from Beilin to Berlin.)

Like many of his Tin Pan Alley counterparts, Izzy was a cantor’s son, and so rather naturally sought out work as a singer in clubs and music halls in lower Manhattan, where he gained a first-rate and a rather “hands-on” musical education and honed his talent for songwriting. At one of the clubs where he worked, he stayed after hours working late into the wee hours teaching himself to play the piano, which he did, by ear, using primarily the black keys, and composing all of his tunes in the key of F sharp. Only late in his career did Irving Berlin master reading and writing in standard musical notation; instead, he did the bulk of his composing by ear, then dictating his songs to a music transcriptionist. But great as it was, Irving Berlin’s natural gift for music was not the secret of his success. He worked at his music long hours every day and composed over fifteen hundred songs over his long career, the royalties from many of which he assigned to civic organizations and charities. Most notably, though in his 50’s at the time, he served the US Army full-time during the second world war for over three years producing shows which contributed over ten million dollars to the war effort. For his sacrificial service, Irving Berlin was awarded the Medal of Merit, the highest award given to a civilian for raising moral among the troops.

What does the early suffering and great poverty of Irving Berlin have to do with this week’s song? It reveals more than a little about the songwriter and the national character of America, “the land that I love,” as he called it in the song he wrote and which has became our second national anthem, “God Bless America.” Imagine facing two world wars only a couple of decades apart, with a Great Depression adding deprivation to misery “in between times.” (Listen to the original recording of “Ain’t We Got Fun” by Irving Berlin’s friend, Richard Whiting). And yet, despite of — or perhaps because of — the widespread, often abject poverty which so many endured, they pressed on, making the most of the little they had, grateful for privilege of living in a free land. This gratitude comes through loud and clear in such songs as “Count Your Blessings,” written by a young man who rose from less-than-nothing to become one of the most beloved songwriters and personalities of the 20th century, not just in his adopted homeland, but around the world.

And so on this Thanksgiving weekend in 2022, and with Advent beginning tomorrow, I give you “Count Your Blessings,” by Irving Berlin. And for what we have received, may we all be truly grateful.