Bing Crosby (28 page)

Two days after “Muddy Water,” Whiteman reinstalled Bing and Al as performers at his nightclub. Two weeks after that, the band
opened on Broadway in the musical comedy
Lucky,
with Mary Eaton, Walter Catlett, Skeets Gallagher, and Ruby Keeler. The show, a tale of a Ceylonese pearl diver and her conniving
father, boasted lavish sets and a score by two great songwriting teams, Kern and Harbach and Kalmar and Ruby. But nothing
could induce people to buy tickets. Whiteman appeared for nearly thirty minutes in a cabaret scene that began at 11:00
P.M
., allowing the band time to perform nightly at his club as well. The song assigned Bing and Al, “Sam, the Old Accordion Man,”
was ignored by the critics; theatergoers were apparently no more hostile to it than to the rest of the evening, which closed
after seventy-one performances. Whiteman rewarded Bing with a solo number at the club, but by then the room was draining more
money than it brought in. (Whiteman shuttered it on May 24, three days after
Lucky
folded.) Knowing the show and the club were fading,
he could think of nothing to do with his proteges beyond dispatching them on vaudeville tours.

Once again, Matty Malneck came to the rescue. He arranged for Bing and Al to meet a friend of his from Denver who was having
a rough time in New York — a wildly kinetic singer, pianist, and tune-smith named Harry Barris.

They were trying to get him to make a solo record, but he laughed
—
said it was silly, no one wanted to hear him alone.

— Cork O’Keefe ( 1946)
¹

As frenetic as Bing was calm, Harry Barris, at twenty-one, was the quintessence of Jazz Age show business, or at least thought
he was. He played piano, sang, joked, and wrote songs (though he had yet to sell any) and was brazen with confidence. Small,
wiry, and moonfaced with glittery eyes, and dark hair slicked back and parted in the middle, Harry had already logged more
miles than Bing and Al combined. He was born in New York, on November 24, 1905, to a Jewish family that relocated to Denver
when he was in his teens. He studied music in high school with Wilberforce Whiteman, who took a liking to him, and at fifteen
played local dances with a small band that included Glenn Miller, Ted Mack, and Matty Malneck. He enrolled at the University
of Denver in 1923 but did not last long. Harry liked to claim he was expelled for playing piano after hours. (Told he could
play until 10:00
P.M
., he cracked, “That’s when I get up.”)
²
His predicament was exacerbated by incipient signs of the alcoholism that tormented him all his life.

He toured briefly with Gus Edwards’s revue
School Days
and played for a short while in Paul Ash’s orchestra in Chicago, but mostly
he toured as a single for Paramount-Publix with his Blu Blowing Baby Grand. Along the way, he married and a daughter was born.
Variety
caught up with his twelve-minute act in St. Louis and acclaimed his showstopping “nut songs,” which had the audience “tied
in knots.” The reviewer concluded, “Young, peppy, and goofy is this young man Barris. And he can help any show.”
³
Harry tried to convince Whiteman of that when he arrived in New York, but the bandleader was full up with pianists and singers.
He soon found a job at bandleader George Olsen’s club, where his hotcha style of banging the piano lid on the beat and mix
of ragtime and nonsense songs won him a modest following, though not enough income to support a family. Bing would later remember
his act as “sort of a metropolitan type Fuzzy Knight” — a reference to the western actor who started out as a hillbilly pianist
and bandleader.
⁴

One of the first people Barris looked up in New York was an old friend, Jimmy Cavanaugh, who toured in vaudeville performing
original material, none of which caught on. After the two downed a few beers, Cavanaugh showed Harry a lyric he was working
on and asked whether he could do anything with it. Harry walked to the piano and fashioned a melody; they called their song
“Mississippi Mud.” Mal-neck, determined to help three fish out of water, told Harry about Bing and Al, suggesting they might
team up. Harry was initially skeptical: if one of them played piano, what would he do? But Matty arranged a meeting at which
Harry banged out his new tune, and the rapport was instant. “The next day we went over to Barris’s apartment,” Al recalled,
to work out a routine:

We fooled around with some ideas and we tried out some three-part harmony. We were all baritones but I had the highest voice
so I sang the top part. Barris sang the middle part while Bing sang the low part…. One of Harry’s tricks in his solo act was
to slam the top of the piano for an effect and make the sound of a cymbal with his mouth. This sounded great and all three
of us were getting our kicks at the way we sounded. We all came up with ideas. Bing took most of the solo parts and Barris
and I would fill in with answers or a rhythmic scat background. Although we weren’t conscious of it, we were creating an entirely
new style of singing pop songs. We were far more jazz oriented than any other singing group of that time…. We were greatly
influenced by the great jazz musicians we had heard and were working with. We were very free and uninhibited. We had a solid
beat in our
rhythm numbers, but we could also give a pretty ballad an individual and personal feeling. In two more days we had put together
two complete songs, “Mississippi Mud” and “Ain’t She Sweet.” We sang the songs for Matty Malneck and he was bowled over. He
said, “If Whiteman doesn’t flip over you three guys, he’s gotta be nuts.”
⁵

Whiteman flipped. He installed them in his dying club the next Saturday night, bringing in a second white spinet to match
the first. The house was nearly full. Paul introduced them as the pianos were wheeled out. Bing stood between them with his
cymbal. According to Rinker, they “slammed the piano lids and carried on. You can bet the audience at the Whiteman club could
hear us now.”
⁶
The crowd not only listened but stopped dining, drinking, and talking, and applauded enthusiastically for both numbers. Barris
had the least distinctive voice of the three, but his sizzle and high-strung energy inspired Bing and Al, whose curtain-pulling
days were now over.

Whiteman could not wait to get them into the studio — and not just them. Whiteman had never given up on his desire to hire
bona fide jazz soloists, and Bing and Malneck made him more determined than ever. The best white players were in Jean Goldkette’s
band, but Paul was reluctant to raid another orchestra; in any case, several of Goldkette’s stars were none too eager to wade
into a sea of Whiteman strings. Instead, he co-opted four of the five musicians who worked in Red Nichols’s famous recording
unit, the Five Pennies.

Nichols was a competent but rarely inspired cornetist who had created a fascinating small band with timpani and a clever ratio
of written to improvised music. Though Whiteman made a fuss over him, Nichols ultimately chafed at playing what he considered
compromised jazz. He came on board in February and was gone by summer. Still, Whiteman managed to capture a couple of his
best cornet solos on the same session that introduced Barris, on April 29. Max Farley orchestrated a new song by Harry Woods,
“Side by Side,” with a vocal chorus worked out by Barris that incorporated a stutter — “Oh, we ain’t got plenty of muh-muh-money
/ Maybe we’re ragged and fuh-fuh-funny.” Bing sings the bridge solo, backed by the harmonizing of Al and Harry, and reasserts
a touch of Jolson schmaltz in his quivering cadences.

Bing was more himself on Malneck’s adaptation of “I’m Coming, Virginia,” the song he and Rinker had flubbed at a previous
session,
with Barris adding only a hot-cha-cha coda. Here Bing captures the originality of “Muddy Water,” combining his deft time with
a full, relaxed articulation of the words. Contrary to Al’s suggestion of a diligent jazz influence, two surviving takes show
that their scat routines were worked out to the last detail. Yet Bing’s imperturbable vocal, Matty’s writing, Nichols’s solo,
and the band’s skill combined to make “I’m Coming, Virginia” the best and most authentic jazz record Whiteman had ever made.

Harry did not participate in the May recording of “I’m in Love Again,” and Bing and Al were relegated to the choir, backing
Charles Gaylord, except for a brief and undistinguished solo passage in which Bing reveals a hoarseness that would plague
him for years, ultimately altering his sound and style. Two weeks later Whiteman presented his new vocal trio on an innocuous
if cheerful Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson tune called “Magnolia,” a record that introduces their patter style,
each spurring the others with spoken or sung interjections punctuated by Barris’s cymbal-like
hahh!
The song, replete with topical references to “sex appeal” and movie queens Clara Bow, Lillian Gish, and Gloria Swanson, was
an excuse to focus attention on the band’s recent jazz recruits, now including Jimmy Dorsey, who solos on alto saxophone,
and the innovative jazz and symphonic drummer Vic Berton, a Nichols associate, who bounces the ensemble with pedaled timpani
and choked cymbals.

By now they had decided to call themselves the Rhythm Boys, a play on the Happiness Boys, one of the first successful radio
acts. The boss, presenting them as Paul Whiteman’s Rhythm Boys, arranged an independent recording contract for them at Victor
and brought them back to the Paramount when the orchestra was hired for an unprecedented six-week engagement, at $10,500 a
week. Not much attention was paid to the other acts or the film (Lois Moran in
The Whirlwind of Youth).
Whiteman’s first week was so successful that Sam Katz, the president of Publix, wanted to double the length of the band’s
stay. Paul’s touring commitments prevented it, but to make each week special, Katz brought in Crosby and Rinker’s prior boss,
Jack Parting-ton of San Francisco’s Granada Theater, to design the thematic productions. As the movie changed to W. C. Fields
in
Running Wild,
so the band suddenly found itself wearing sailor suits aboard the USS
Syncopation,
while Whiteman conducted from a gun turret. The
production changed weekly — among the titles were
Rushia, Jazz a la Carte,
and
Fireworks
— and the audiences were as receptive to the new singers as the
Variety
reporter, who lauded their spot as “a stellar opportunity in itself.”
⁷
In a succeeding notice, the reviewer pointed out that the show lacked comedy except for “the natural laughs in the delivery
of the jazz vocal trio.” In the patriotic
Fireworks,
the band — including the two “blues yodeling plebes from Spokane” — performed a “cute” number with pop guns.
⁸

Midway through the Paramount run, the Rhythm Boys formally debuted on records, singing the first two numbers they had rehearsed,
now tricked up as medleys and accompanied only by Harry’s piano and Bing’s cymbal whacks. “Mississippi Mud” is oddly structured:
a twenty-two-bar chorus with a sixteen-bar middle section. The lyric is catchy (though marred by the term
darkies,
which was eventually changed to
people),
and the melody is propelled by accents on the first beat of almost every measure. Bing recorded it three times over the next
seven months. Though the Rhythm Boys’ version is not as effective as those that followed, it confirmed the trio’s style as
part music and part wisecracking comedy. A scat passage introduces them one at a time: Bing, then Al, then Harry, who finishes
with a
hahh.
After a unison chorus in which Bing takes the lead in the middle section, the patter leads to an interpolation of “I Left
My Sugar Standing in the Rain,” where Bing displays for the first time on record his sustained balladic tones as well as his
humor and wordplay — in the spin he puts on the spoken phrase “I don’t know” and the spoonerism “irregardless and respective.”
The second number employs “Ain’t She Sweet” as a rapid windup to Barris’s “Sweet Li’l.” Bing instructs the others at the outset,
“If it’s gonna be good it must be fast,” and when they close with an exchange of scat breaks, he mimics a tuba
(bub-bub-bub bub-a-bub-bub-bub),
the modest beginning of a trait for future mimics.

Those recordings are not especially good, and
darkies
aside, have not aged well. Barris is too jumpy, though Rinker proves fairly adept at scat, and the humor is intrusive. Still,
“Mississippi Mud” became hugely popular, and they performed it nightly at the Paramount and at the Whiteman club, establishing
it as their signature song. Everyone who saw them remembered the number as a Jazz Age anthem. It secured Barris’s role as
the new brains of the outfit, supplanting Al,
who was both grateful and annoyed. Bing was no less ambivalent. “Barris was and is remarkably talented,” Bing wrote. “He writes
songs as easily as other folk write a letter. In addition he can sing and he’s a good comedian. But while he could do all
of these things, he knew he could do them. And because he gave the impression of knowing all there was to know, Al and I called
him Little Joe Show Business.”
⁹