Authors: Gary Giddins
In the decade following his death, Crosby’s personal stature had been tarnished by a one-two punch.
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First, there was a savage, ineptly researched biography that ignored his art in its haste to show that yet another departed
hero had feet of clay. It was soon followed by a resentful memoir by his alcoholic eldest son, Gary Crosby. Under the law,
the dead cannot be libeled, and those books, published in the early 1980s, generated an irresponsible piling-on. Unfounded
rumors were passed off as fact.
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The fading portrait of the imperturbable crooner, the soul of affection, the totem of cool, was replaced by the crude rendering
of a pinchfaced, right-wing, child-beating philanderer.
His contemporaries had a more accurate sense of him. Crosby was a phenomenon in the cultural life of the United States long
before the war. He had helped lift morale while elucidating the American temperament during the Great Depression, the worst
years of privation in the nation’s history. Combining musical cultures as no one had
ever done (he sang in every idiom short of grand opera), he made the country a more neighborly and unified place. After the
war Crosby became an even bigger star, selling more movie tickets and records than ever, serving as a steady barometer of
the postwar mood, a bulwark against the reign of paranoia, an outrider of the affluence that followed. Without any dramatic
outward change, he had somehow been the right man for successive crises, assertive and optimistic through Prohibition, the
Depression, and hot and cold wars. He had the chameleon’s ability to reflect his surroundings and the artist’s discernment
to illuminate them. If Churchill, in his Savile Row pinstripes with his cigars and learned oratory, incarnated the British
lion, Bing, in his peculiar motley (shirttails, beat-up hats, torn sweaters, mismatched socks) with his pipe and preternatural
calm, embodied the best in American individualism. In 1943 H. Allen Smith observed, “He has been the antithesis of all that
the Sunday schools and the Boy Scouts and the ‘Y’ secretaries taught — and look at him!”
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Of the handful of artists who remade American music in the 1920s, Crosby may be said to have had the broadest immediate impact,
if only because he reached the largest number of people. He played a decisive role in transforming popular song from a maudlin
farrago steeped in minstrelsy and vaudeville into a swinging, racially nuanced, and internationally accepted phenomenon that
in one form or another dominated the age. He was by no means alone, yet he attained a matchless orbit of popularity. Most
histories of the Depression and the New Deal never mention Crosby, as if the rantings of Huey Long or Father Coughlin exercised
greater impact on the public temper than “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” “The Last Round-Up,” or “The One Rose.” Yet as
many as 50 million people tuned in every Thursday evening to hear Bing’s
Kraft Music Hall
(1935-46). Consider that the hottest TV series of 2000,
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,
peaked with 36 million viewers.
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Popular art listens, absorbs, reflects, harangues, and can, in troubled times, console. Crosby’s records were as reassuring
as President Roosevelt’s “fireside chats.” In a national poll conducted in the late 1940s, Crosby was voted the most admired
man alive, ahead of Jackie Robinson, Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur, Harry Truman, Bob Hope, and the Pope.
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Bing was less impressed with himself. He
remarked in 1960, “As far as I am concerned, with the exception of a phonograph record or two, I don’t think I have done anything
that’s really outstanding or great or marvelous or anything that deserves any superlatives.’
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Emerson wrote, “Every hero becomes a bore at last.”
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Even to himself.
Except for a confederation of minstrel troupes and chains of vaudeville theaters, the entertainment industry barely existed
when Harry Lillis Crosby was born in 1903 to a lower-middle-class Anglo-Irish-American Catholic family. The wax-recorded disc
was three years old, and the first nickelodeon was two years down the road. The first regularly scheduled radio broadcasts
didn’t begin until 1920. Over the next half century, the United States forged the first empire dependent not on strategic
colonies but rather on the irresistible sway of its popular arts. Crosby’s prestige was crucial in shaping that empire, in
spreading a New World style and image. Not the least of his achievements was his role in ensuring the prosperity — in some
instances, the very survival — of several major entertainment corporations, including CBS, NBC, ABC, Decca Records, Paramount
Pictures, and Ampex tape.
Crosby was the first white vocalist to appreciate and assimilate the genius of Louis Armstrong: his rhythm, his emotion, his
comedy, and his spontaneity. Louis and Bing recorded their first important vocals, respectively, in 1926 (“Heebie Jeebies”)
and 1927 (“Muddy Water”) and were the only singers of that era still thriving at the times of their deaths, in the 1970s.
When Crosby came of age, most successful male singers were effeminate tenors and recording artists were encouraged to be bland,
the better to sell sheet music. The term
pop singer
didn’t exist; it was coined in large measure to describe a breed he invented. Bing perfected the use of the microphone, which
transfigured concerts, records, radio, movies — even the nature of social intercourse. As vocal styles became more intimate
and talking pictures replaced pantomime, private discourse itself grew more casual and provocative. Bing was the first to
render the lyrics of a modern ballad with purpose, the first to suggest an erotic undercurrent.
The great cultural critic Constance Rourke identified the three regional stereotypes of nineteenth-century American humor
as the Yankee, the backwoodsman, and the minstrel.
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Bing remains the
only entertainer to embody all three, producing in the bargain a twentieth-century composite, often described in his day as
the Common Man. Bing’s discography, a compilation of 1,668 songs (not including hundreds more he sang on radio), is astonishingly
comprehensive. It enfolds the Yankee’s Tin Pan Alley, the backwoodsman’s western laments, and the minstrel’s Old South ballads.
It explores every idiom, class, and precinct of American song, from hymns, anthems, spirituals, and novelties to Hawaiian,
Irish, light opera, and r&b; he even took a fling at rock ‘n’ roll. No other performer’s catalog is comparable.
During his most prominent years, from 1934 to 1954, Crosby held a nearly unrivaled command over all three key entertainment
media, racking up legendary phonograph sales, radio ratings, and motion-picture grosses. At no time was he marketed to one
generation or faction of the audience. He may have begun as a Jazz Age emoter for the
College Humor
set, but by the mid-thirties, he was America’s troubadour. Bing’s influence can be heard in the work of numerous singers
in diverse idioms, including Armstrong, whose first foray into popular songs in 1929 was in part a response to Bing’s achievement,
Jimmy Rushing, Connie Boswell, Perry Como, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Wakely, Roy Rogers, Herb Jeffries, Billy Eckstine,
B. B. King, Mel Tormé, Ella Fitzgerald, Rosemary Clooney, Johnny Hartman, Tony Bennett, Ruth Brown, Dean Martin, Ray Charles,
and Elvis Presley, who recorded more than a dozen of Crosby’s signature hits. Instrumentalists from Jimmy Dorsey to Sonny
Rollins have attempted to mimic a semblance of the Crosby cry.
Popular culture, like sports, is beset with statistics, a fixation on chart and box-office rankings, grosses and salaries,
and prizes. But whereas sports statistics live forever, pop stats are ultimately transitory and meaningless — no recitation
of past sales figures can incline us to listen to Billy Murray records or to read Lloyd C. Douglas novels or to buy Walter
Keane paintings. The only pop stats that continue to matter involve artists who continue to matter.
It is impossible to regard Bing Crosby as a historical figure without considering some of his statistics. If nothing else,
they reveal his dominance over popular entertainment from Prohibition until the mid-1950s, when his decline as the nation’s
preeminent muse was signaled by the comeback of a newly charged Sinatra and the arrival
of Elvis — the former marketed to adults, the latter to their children. During Crosby’s reign, that split did not exist.
* * *
Such reckonings count for little and would mean nothing at all if Crosby’s art did not merit rediscovery. He was, first and
foremost, a masterly, innovative musician — an untrained vocalist of natural charm and robust power with impeccable instincts
about phrasing and tempo. He pared away the rococo mannerisms of bygone theatrical styles in favor of the clean melodic line.
Lyricists thought him a godsend because he not only articulated words but also underscored their meaning. Crosby, who never
learned to read music and could play no instrument except rudimentary drums, had an apparently photographic and audiographic
memory. He had only to hear a song to know it.
As an actor, Crosby broke the rules. He was the antithesis of a Hollywood matinee idol — small and average-looking with outsize
ears, thin lips, pointed jaw, and a padded midsection that belied his graceful athleticism. He created a new prototype: the
unflappable maverick with a pocketful of dreams, a friend to men and catnip to women. The immense success of his 1940s movies
has overshadowed his often daring work in the 1930s, when he developed into an accomplished farceur and an exceptional improviser
of physical shtick.
A performer of such enormous popularity becomes, inevitably and in spite of himself, a social critic. Crosby, an unreasonably
modest man who never took credit for anything musical, let alone social or political, nonetheless played a coercive role in
the acceleration of civil rights. He encouraged and pioneered racial integration on stage, radio, and records and in movies;
in 1936, after winning the contractual right to produce his own pictures, he hired Louis Armstrong and gave him star billing,
a Hollywood first for a black entertainer. A Jesuit by training and temperament, Crosby had enjoyed the benefits of a classical
education. He lived in a small parochial world until he was twenty-two. He was a classroom cutup and lover of old show business,
not least minstrelsy, but by the time he dropped out of law school, he understood that American popular music was a stew of
intermingling ethnicities. He absorbed the influences of performers so diverse that few would have mentioned them in the same
sentence, among them, Al Jolson, John McCormack, the Mound City Blue Blowers, Ukelele Ike, Ethel Waters, Mildred Bailey, Van
and Schenck, Bix Beiderbecke, and, most decisively, Armstrong.
Perhaps the most telling aspect of Crosby’s neglected role in integrating American show business was his calculated decision
to attach
himself to an ethnic wing. At the time of his death, he was widely remembered as Irish American. Yet not until he reached
his mid-thirties did Bing show any inclination to embrace that identity. His mother’s forebears had left Ireland for Canada
three generations earlier, and his father’s Protestant family had been in the United States since 1635. Paramount Pictures
had nurtured his persona as the all-American man, without ethnic attachments. The primary semblance of Irishness in his work
was his signature vocal technique, the upper mordent, a broken-note adornment imported from Ireland and Scotland that became
known as the Crosby cry. Not until 1939, on the eve of the war, did he truly embrace his Irish heritage. Thanks to the antisemitic
venom spewed by the radio priest Father Coughlin, Irish American Catholics had come to be associated with intolerance. Bing
quietly stepped up to embody a larger truth. As he began to sing Irish songs and play Irishmen and priests, he required no
rhetoric to stress the point that nothing was more all-American than its minorities.