Authors: Gary Giddins
Bing was elated to be surrounded, finally, by some of the country’s most admired white jazz players. He roomed with Bix at
New York’s Belvedere Hotel, where many of Whiteman’s musicians were quartered. The two friends listened to and discussed music
constantly, whether they were sober or spinning. Bix held his liquor better than Bing, who frequently fell into a stupor.
Of the men he most often named as musical influences — Jolson, Armstrong, and Beiderbecke — Bing was personally closest to
Bix. He memorized his cornet solos, scatted his phrases, and was particularly taken with Bix’s devotion to modern classics,
from Eastwood Lane and Cyril Scott to Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky. As critic Larry Kart would observe, Bix’s blend
of American jazz and European classicism was “a romantic sound — gentle, intimate, and tinged with nostalgia. And those were
the qualities that soon would mark Crosby’s style.”
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Bing and Bix spent a lot of time at a speakeasy down the street from the Whiteman club’s old spot. The place had a piano on
the balcony, where, despite the speak’s loud goings-on, Bix and other musicians exchanged ideas. “I didn’t contribute anything
but I listened and learned,” Bing recalled. “I felt my style then was a cross between Al Jolson and a musical instrument.
I was now being influenced by these musicians…. Bix, Bill Challis, even Frank Trumbauer would make suggestions to me for my
vocalizing and I’d give it a try.”
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When Trumbauer organized a session for OKeh Records early in 1928, he hired Bing along with Bix, Malneck, Chester Hazlett,
Jimmy Dorsey, Min Leibrook, and pianist Lennie Hayton, among others (paying Bix fifty dollars, Hazlett thirty dollars, and
the rest twenty-five). He even selected two numbers created by the Rhythm Boys. Trumbauer’s recording of “From Monday On”
was never issued, but “Mississippi Mud” is a jazz classic, albeit one often found distasteful because of the patter between
Tram (as Trumbauer was known) and Bing. Though they avoid heavy dialect, their routine is decidedly in the idiom of blackface
vaudeville acts like Moran and Mack, with Tram
stuttering his lines. The only soloists are Bix (a resplendent chorus) and a strikingly relaxed Bing, upholding his end of
the patter without missing a beat of the song.
With his jazz players pressuring him to feature Bing as a soloist, Whiteman made him a regular at recording sessions, though
he buried him in the choir almost as often as he brought him into the limelight. Yet Whiteman was canny enough to give Bing
numbers that suited him — especially after “01’ Man River” topped sales charts in March. Remarkably, Bing participated in
more sessions in 1928 — about three dozen — than he would again until 1940. Those record dates track the artist in development,
as he jettisons the Jolson flutter and the stiffness that marred “Muddy Water.” Bing developed a uniquely spirited sangfroid.
No matter how jazzed-up the setting, he negotiated the words, rhythm, and melody with a polished timbre and flawless enunciation.
Even on off days Crosby’s instrument radiated confidence. Most of his predecessors who were not belters belonged to the genteel
school and sang with effete head tones. Bing conveyed a chest-tone approach, making full use of his diaphragm. His vocal mask
was complete and mature. But his most extraordinary gift was to communicate naturally. While other pop singers employed ponderous
or flaccid tones, Bing sang the same way he spoke. His style avoided the mannerisms of style; his art seemed artless, even
effortless.
One example is his stunning chorus on Grofe’s breakneck version of
Show Boat’s
“Make Believe.” The instrumental chorus is ornate, but Bing’s vocal, backed by Steve Brown’s stomping bass, marries rhythmic
panache to pitch-perfect articulation and underscores the lyric’s meaning despite the charged tempo. Tom Satterfield reflected
Challis’s influence in his finest arrangement, “There Ain’t No Sweet Man That’s Worth the Salt of My Tears,” a jazz classic
with Bix driving the ensemble and Bing rattling his first word — a rhythmically italicized
I’m
— for a sensational entrance. The song’s unchanged gender reflects the obstinacy of song publishers, who would not allow
singers to alter pronouns; Bing was not permitted to sing “there ain’t no sweet gal.” Since the great majority of songs were
conceived as male entreaties to women, the sanctity of pronouns discouraged the employment of female singers, a convention
Whiteman eventually breached when he hired Mildred Bailey.
At a February session Bing sang the obscure “Sunshine,” notable only as his first recording of an Irving Berlin song — a handsomely
executed but commonplace beginning for what would turn out to be a mighty collaboration. Within weeks he was also featured
on Mal-neck’s strongest arrangement since “I’m Coming, Virginia” (perhaps his finest ever), the definitive version of “From
Monday On,” for orchestra and all six singers. A Barris original, with input from Bing on the lyric, the song was first recorded
by the Rhythm Boys in January. That performance marked Bing’s debut as a whistler and includes an awkward Al Rinker chorus
that publicly revealed what everyone in Whiteman’s fold knew: a huge musical gap existed between the former Musicaladers.
Malneck’s version, made six weeks later, was something else, an arranger’s fantasia.
Matty devised an elaborate setting for “From Monday On,” beginning with Fulton and company mooing the introduction in tenor
range. The Rhythm Boys scat an interlude, and Bix charges in with a high note and full chorus as the saxes carry the theme.
Matty confined Al to the choir and let Bing carry the main vocal chorus. In the best-known of three surviving takes, Bing
tags a couple of words
(skies, on)
with Jolsonesque vibrato, though he lightened up on the later takes. He is otherwise loose and robust, and the record has
a joyousness that has lost nothing over the years. To a musician like Challis, “He sang a song right, in the register you
wanted to hear it. If it was up to me who the singer would be, it was usually Crosby. He enunciated and he had presence. He
could hit a low A flat, maybe a little lower, and his top note was F, but he didn’t have a preferred key. I always used my
own judgment.”
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“High Water,” Whiteman’s pretentious attempt at a hymn, typifies what jazz players loathed about his music but is perversely
amusing for Bing’s spoken interlude — a parody of Jolson — and for his evident relief when swinging the chorus. “What Price
Lyrics?” by Barris, Bing, and Malneck, is a chatty send-up
of moon/June
rhymes (Bing offers
Sammy/mammy)
and finishes with a round of scat. “Lovable” is a negligible Richard Whiting melody, brightly arranged by Challis. Bing’s
stellar chorus makes the most of Seymour Simons’s lyric (“others just imitate / kisses that you create”) and is characterized
by canny breath control and minor embellishments, prefiguring his mature style. (For some reason, “Lovable” was released only
in England.) Challis’s “My Pet” intrigues because three takes exist in which Bing improvises very different eight-bar segments,
combining scat and words on the first, borrowing Armstrong licks for the second, and finding himself on the third.
* * *
Most of the songs of the period were not appreciably better than “My Pet,” and many that Bing tackled were worse, for example,
“I’m Afraid of You” or “It Was the Dawn of Love.” But every so often a gem came along, suggesting another reason that Bing
was the ideal man for the time. Songwriting was entering a new phase of sophistication and subtlety. Only parodies could accommodate
the
June/moon
rhymes, mother worship, patriotic gibberish, and coon song outrages that had dominated Tin Pan Alley for nearly a quarter
of a century. The 1920s brought talented songwriters able to embrace the Jazz Age blend of Prohibition, flaming youth, exotica,
and sex. Among the most enduring were Walter Donaldson (“Makin’ Whoopee,” “Yes Sir! That’s My Baby”); Spencer Williams (“I
Ain’t Got Nobody,” “Everybody Loves My Baby”); Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields (“I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” “Doin’
the New Low-Down”); Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby (“Nevertheless,” “Three Little Words”); and Buddy DeSylva, Ray Henderson, and
Lew Brown (“Button Up Your Overcoat,” “The Best Things in Life Are Free”).
Yet by 1928, after
Show Boat,
even the songs of those progressive talents seemed transitional. Something new was going on. You heard it in the swinging
ingenuity of Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers (“Manhattan,” “Thou Swell”), the sexy wit and minor keys of Cole Porter (“Let’s
Do It,” “You Do Something to Me”), the invigorated melodies of the prophetic Irving Berlin (“Blue Skies,” “How About Me?”).
With the arrival of book musicals on stage and later in film, American songwriting entered a golden age, an explosion of melody
and harmony to rival the recently faded glory days of Italian opera. Crosby was the era’s first great voice and interpreter.
He made lyrics understandable, worthy of attention.
Good songs liberated Bing. On “Louisiana,” written by J. C. Johnson and Andy Razaf, Challis introduces him with a brassy fanfare
and a “waaaah” from the vocal choir, launching a marvelous supple chorus in which Bing fulfills the promise of those elocution
distinctions he earned at Gonzaga. Unfortunately, the exuberance of that performance was torpedoed the next afternoon by the
mutiny of White-man’s old guard.
Furious at the attention lavished on Beiderbecke, Henry Busse was at the boiling point. No one could recall exactly what set
him off,
but in the last hour of a recording session, he loudly berated Paul. The bandleader snapped back at him. Another old-timer,
drummer Hal McDonald, sided with Busse. The dispute ended with the two stomping out of Liederkranz Hall and the Whiteman organization.
With one scheduled tune left, a dejected Paul canceled work till the next day and put out a call for replacements. Despite
the calamity, the postponed tune emerged as a Whiteman benchmark. Satterfield adapted Rodgers and Hart’s “You Took Advantage
of Me,” a hit song introduced by Joyce Barbour and Busby Berkeley in the revue
Present Arms.
The record is celebrated for the riotous chase chorus (a conversational but formally precise exchange) by Bix and Tram and
the vocal that follows. Bing had the unenviable task of upholding a high level of invention, but as Bix’s biographer, Richard
Sudhalter, has observed, “Bing Crosby, entering immediately afterwards, catches the mood exactly, voice brimming with obvious
pleasure at what has just gone on.
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That number represented not only the end of the old Whiteman band but the end of the orchestra’s historic eight-year association
with Victor. Chiefly because of a perceived rivalry with another Victor bandleader (Nat Shilkret), Whiteman signed with the
accommodating Columbia Records. He was so miffed at Victor that on May 12 he allowed a Fox Movietone newsreel crew to film
him tearing up his contract at the stroke of midnight (when his association with Victor officially ended). Worried by the
large number of records Whiteman had stockpiled at Victor, Columbia wanted him in the studio immediately. To underscore its
commitment to the band, the company paid Whiteman the singular tribute of designing him his own disc label: a pale blue potato-shaped
caricature of Paul set against an orange-and-green background. Yet a thorn lurked behind the pastels. Columbia’s engineers
were not as good as their Victor counterparts at capturing the band’s plush sound. Worse, the sessions were run by Eddie King,
a jazz-hating producer who encouraged Whiteman to revive his old sound; the winged phrasing of a Bing or Bix gave him no pleasure.
Meanwhile, Bing was enjoying the good life, whether on tour or at home base. The money was good and the booze was plentiful.
Every city the band played — Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Erie — provided him with a golf course by day and speakeasies
by night. In New York the Rhythm Boys were in demand for private parties thrown by
or for such celebrities as Mayor Walker, Buddy DeSylva, and Beatrice Lillie. Other nights the guys headed for Harlem, for
mixed-race jam sessions in Fletcher Henderson’s basement or shows at the Cotton Club and other venues starring such titans
as Duke Ellington and Ethel Waters. On Broadway the boys soaked up songs in such shows as
Oh, Kay I,
with Gertrude Lawrence and a Gershwin score;
Oh, Please!,
with Bea Lillie and music by Vincent Youmans;
Funny Face,
with Fred Astaire and another Gershwin score; as well as
Hit the Deck!
(Youmans) and A
Connecticut Yankee
(Rodgers and Hart) and more — entertainment without end. Bing, Al, and Harry were present at
Midnight Frolic,
an exclusive show atop the New Amsterdam, when Maurice Chevalier made his American debut. They met Maurice Ravel at a Whiteman
session and attended his concert at Mecca Auditorium. They spent numerous evenings doubled-up with laughter at the Parody
Club, home to the vaudeville anarchy of Clayton, Jackson, and Durante. The great Durante never failed to convulse Bing. But
maybe the Rhythm Boys spent too much time together; they were beginning to get on one another’s nerves.
“We couldn’t decide which of us was boss,” Bing recalled. “Every three or four weeks we decided to break up, then the next
day we’d get back together again.”
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Bing could be cantankerous and was becoming unreliable. Some nights he was so green from drink that he had to be held up
at the mike; on other nights he did not show at all. Barris was never without his flask, constantly nipping. Al tried to keep
up, no easy task when he double-dated with Bix, but remained the most responsible — “I was too young to keep up with them”
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— and was sometimes perceived by the others as a scold. The women they saw were chorus girls, of which there was a limitless
supply.
When Whiteman played Philadelphia in December 1927, Bing met two roommates, Ginger Meehan and Dolores Reade, who were appearing
in the road cast of Eddie Dowling’s
Honeymoon Lane.
The women would remain in his life, but as the wives of men with whom he had lifelong associations: in 1930 Ginger married
Johnny Mercer, and three years later Dolores married Bob Hope. Dolores recalled, “Back in the Philadelphia days, if they couldn’t
find Bing, they’d say, well, where was he last night, and they’d go and look for him under one of the tables.”
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