Authors: Gary Giddins
“We lived in Oakland,” Joe’s widow, Elsie Perry, recalled, “and Jack Kapp called us about six o’clock in the morning, and
he said to Joe, ‘I want you to go to the office today and quit your job.’ He says, ‘I’m forming Decca and I want you with
me.’ And so Joe — ‘cause he loved Jack Kapp, they were like brothers almost, you know — went to the office and he put in his
resignation. The next year Jack asked us to move to Los Angeles.”
13
Joe went on to produce such classics as Bing’s “White Christmas,” Jolson’s “Anniversary Song,” Armstrong’s “When It’s Sleepy
Time Down South,” Nat Cole’s “Sweet Lorraine,” Ella Fitzgerald’s “Stairway to the Stars,” and Judy Garland’s “You Made Me
Love You.”
14
Bing named a racehorse after him, Decca Joe.
Jack also engaged, no less brusquely, his brother, Dave, who was working as a talent representative in Chicago, averaging
ninety dollars a week. Jack told him to make a field trip to record a singer in the Midwest. When Dave complained, Jack said,
“Don’t you understand? We got a new record company and you’re with us” — at fifty dollars a week.
15
Dave was so effective developing the hillbilly catalog that Decca cornered the country-music market for years. While Jack
was recruiting staff and performers, Warners — as he predicted — solved the problem of office and studio space. In exchange
for its 5,000 shares of Decca stock, it turned over a New York office building at 799 Seventh Avenue, a factory that made
radio transcriptions, pressing equipment, and a $60,000 promissory note.
16
Decca’s key asset, however, was Bing. The entire operation was launched at his feet, literally: the Los Angeles studio was
built at 5505 Melrose Avenue, across the street from Paramount’s south gate. Contrary to widespread assumptions, he received
none of the precious stock. “Everybody thought Bing had gotten a lot of money, a lot of stock,” Frieda said, “but he never
got one penny. In later years he bought [Decca shares] and Jack said to him, ‘Why are you buying stock now?’ Bing laughed,
‘Well, now I know the company is good. Now I have faith.’”
17
Decca barely survived its first year. Brunswick, fearful of Kapp’s pricing, moved some of its own catalog recordings to its
twenty-five-cent subsidiary, Melotone. (Budget labels trafficked in cheap pressings of pop tunes by studio hacks or catalog
items by established artists.) Kapp responded quickly. Decca Records, he told the trades, would sell not for fifty cents,
but for thirty-five cents, three for a dollar. Furthermore, he emphasized, Decca was not a budget label; it did not stint
on production costs in ways that affected the product or consumer. Instead, song-publishing royalties were reduced (1.25 cents
instead of two), as were advances to artists. Kapp argued that increased sales would more than compensate for those reductions
and encourage the artists’ concern with commercial viability.
To ensure higher volume, he pursued the burgeoning jukebox trade, a by-product of Prohibition’s repeal, which — with 25,000
units around the country — had became the largest single market for records. A juke, in southern argot, was initially a roadhouse
or brothel, but by the mid-thirties the term encompassed any place with inexpensive entertainment. The boxes replaced live
music in bars and branched out to ice-cream parlors and restaurants; they were impervious to the usual seasonal slumps in
record sales. The jukes had already proved friendly to Bing’s Brunswicks, particularly in the South and East. Mezz Mezzrow
wrote that even Harlem hipsters, who would not play anyone on their jukes but Louis Armstrong, made an exception for “Where
the Blue of the Night,’ and not only because Bing was considered one of them: “That was a concession to the sentimental chicks,
too, because they were starved for sweet romance and they sure didn’t get much of it from Louis’s recordings.”
18
Kapp also invested in large-scale advertising. He hurled his first print ad straight at Brunswick’s head:
DECCA SCOOPS MUSIC WORLD
Here they are — your favorite stars of radio, screen and stage — in their greatest performances of instrument and voice!
Not
obsolete records, cut in price to meet a market, but the latest, newest smash hits — exclusively DECCA. Hear them
when
you want — as
often
as you want — right in your own home.
19
But for all his apparent confidence, Kapp had plenty of worries. Decca was using old and inferior equipment. Most of the first
200,000 records were intended for jukes but were pressed at ten inches in diameter, one-sixteenth of an inch too large for
the standard machines. The distributors returned them. The corrected copies wiped out Decca’s capital, requiring a crucial
cash infusion from English Decca. Worse, Kapp’s rivals underhandedly warned dealers not to do business with Decca, insisting
that the company was unsound and cheated its creditors. Kapp hit back with a million-dollar defamation suit, specifically
accusing Victor, Brunswick, ARC, Consolidated Film, and Columbia of predatory business tactics. The suit never went to court,
but the rumoring ceased. Kapp was a man possessed. He scheduled four or five sessions a week, supervising more than 200 records
in a few months, almost all by prominent artists. Yet the record that guaranteed the company’s survival was a novelty by two
unknowns.
Mike Riley and Eddie Farley led a Dixieland band at the Onyx Club on Fifty-second Street, near Kapp’s office, and wrote a
song, “The Music Goes ‘Round and Around,” that pleased their audiences. Kapp encouraged them to work up a lyric and recorded
six versions before he deemed one good enough to release, in the autumn of 1935. By December it was the hottest tune in the
country, a phenomenon, selling more than 100,000 copies and endlessly covered. (Columbia Pictures produced a dreary musical
of the same name.) “At least everyone can sing Whoa-ho-ho-ho,” Kapp wrote, “and that is what made the song a hit.” He recorded
a version for children by Mae Questel, one for “swing addicts” by the Boswells, one for “the old time tune trade”
by Haloran’s Hooligans, and one for “the evergrowing Armstrong cult.”
20
Variety
called “The Music Goes ‘Round and Around” “a freak tune,”
21
but it put Decca in the black in its second year.
By 1938 the number of jukeboxes would increase tenfold, accounting for 13 million records, mostly at thirty-five cents, a
price Brunswick and others had to meet to stay in business. That year Kapp would introduce one of his most telling innovations:
record sleeves with cover art. Other Kapp breakthroughs included Broadway cast albums and dramatic recitations, songs and
playlets commissioned specifically for records, and liner notes. In 1939 the industry would sell 50 million records; 18 million
of them — 36 percent of the entire market — were blue-label Deccas. By then Jack’s enterprise would represent more than a
corporation. It was the people’s record company. Consumers went to stores and asked for Deccas, ignoring the competition.
Parents handed their children a dollar bill and told them to bring back three new Deccas. Brand loyalty inevitably advanced
Bing’s status as the people’s singer.
On August 8, 1934, four days after Decca was incorporated, Kapp conducted the session that would produce the label’s first
two catalog numbers, Decca 100 and Decca 101. The performer, of course, was Bing, but the material was unusual, to say the
least.
Music sales have always been stoked by new material. In the 1930s songwriters, song-pluggers, publishers, radio, and movies
thrived on novelty. For his final Brunswick sessions, Bing featured mostly fresh material, not all from his own movies. “Little
Dutch Mill,” a lightweight ditty and one of two he recorded as a favor to its composer, Harry Barris, strutted its way to
the top of the sales lists, as did his radiant performance of “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” But Bing also enjoyed hits
with more venerable numbers, like “Dinah” and “Home on the Range.” Mindful of that, Kapp decided Decca would offer something
so old that it was new: not the latest tunes you heard on radio for free, but quality songs of a sort that charmed generations.
For Decca 100 he selected sentimental evergreens by Carrie Jacobs Bond, “Just a-Wearyin’ for You” (1901) and “I Love You Truly”
(1906).
Subsequent, uncharmed generations have speculated that he chose such weary songs because they were in the public domain and
cost-effective, which was far from true. Bond, who died in 1946 at eighty-four, operated her own publishing house and was
a bear for royalties. They were not Kapp’s first choices; he resorted to them only when Bing flatly refused to attempt the
sham operetta of Oley Speaks’s “Sylvia” (1908) and Victor Herbert’s “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life” (1910), arguing “That’s not
for me, that’s for the high-class singers.”
22
Kapp was determined to reposition Bing as the foremost interpreter of American classics. It was not enough just to take away
his
bu-bu-bu-boo.
Hoping that the Bond songs had raised his sights and confidence, he wrote Bing on August 30:
After listening to “Just a-Wearyin’ for You,” there can be no doubt of your ability to do songs of a semi-classical nature
as well, if not better, than any singer in the country today. I feel our judgment in this regard is wholly justifiable. There
is one thing I’d like to call to your attention. The public today wants an unadulterated Bing Crosby, without any frills.
They think that the combination of his voice tinged with a natural feeling which he possesses, is unsurpassed. I agree with
them and I think that the frills should be avoided, as well as “hot” songs. You have in your grasp the opportunity to be the
John McCormack of this generation. You can achieve that much more easily than you think. By doing what we are discussing and
by following thru both on records and on radio, you will reach a popularity, which, in my opinion, will be as great as ever
enjoyed by any singer in this country. Think it over Bing. I do not mean to be presumptuous, but the masses want melody combined
with soul, which is yours. Nobody can touch you there.
23
Small wonder that by the 1940s, Jack was denigrated by many insiders as Killer Kapp, for killing Bing’s early greatness in
a relentless exploitation to sell more and more records. Bing grew up admiring McCormack and other Irish tenors his father
played on Edison cylinders, but he had long since become a far more important artist, a first-rank innovator, one of the most
influential singers of all time — with the exception of Louis Armstrong, the most forceful that America had ever produced.
Through Bing, American popular music came of age and found a beat, learned to strut on the stage of modernity, relaxed the
prejudices that isolated pop, jazz, country, and every other idiom he addressed. By 1941 the deeply satisfied Kapp could boast,
“If he hadn’t diversified his talent, he would remain just a popular singer of popular songs.”
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Bing’s unique position, his ability to sing so many different kinds of music, reflected the myriad styles he assimilated.
Kapp appreciated that, but in singling out McCormack as a career template and encouraging Bing to deflect hot songs, he hoped
to remake him as a smoother, less mannered, ultimately less expressive singer, a kind of musical comfort food. To the degree
that he succeeded, he made possible the singular career that allowed Bing to repeatedly remake himself. The erstwhile symbol
of Prohibition and now the Depression would be reborn yet a third time as an unchallenged icon of World War II and a fourth
time as the gladdening troubadour in an age of postwar paranoia (his peak years) and a fifth time as the avuncular skipper
of the affluent 1950s. Had Bing not leveled his style, the mainstream would likely have left him behind, a Dixieland dinosaur
bewildered by changing times and not the show-business titan who enjoyed an additional twenty years at the epicenter of American
tastes and attitudes. Bing’s renovation was never so complete, however, as to undermine the rhythmic ease that set him apart.
A score of Jack Kapps could not have scuttled the self-possession, adroitness, and Armstrongian musical wisdom that permitted
him to glide over changing times with discriminating aplomb.
That much was indicated at the first Decca session, when in addition to the Carrie Jacobs Bond songs, which sold modestly,
he sang two others for a second disc that sold even more modestly but produced two Crosby classics. These songs were also
timeworn, but the mood Bing created supersedes nostalgia. “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” (1910), one of two vaudeville standards
(along with “Meet Me To-night in Dreamland”) by Beth Slater Whitson and Leo Friedman, is a paragon of melodic simplicity,
with few notes and many of them dotted halves. Bing cuts the sentimentality with his dauntless clarity, extracting real emotion
from the enchantingly artless melody. The flip side, “Someday Sweetheart” (1919), was a jazz standard said to derive from
a Jelly Roll Morton melody and encouraged Bing to rock a little.
On the early Decca sessions, Bing was backed by the journeyman Georgie Stoll orchestra, from the Woodbury show. Happily, it
kept a low profile on “Someday Sweetheart,” making its first entrance at the release and providing room for the soloists.
Bing saunters in on the fourth bar of pianist Joe Sullivan’s introduction and sounds transported, as though back in Chicago
in the days of Bix and Eddie. He sings with riveting lucidity and command, alternately nudging the
beat and reclining on it. For the instrumental passages, Stoll outdid himself, writing handsome interplay between reeds and
brasses and wittily shadowing Bing at the outset of his deftly embellished second chorus, which closes with Bing’s original
and much imitated eight-bar vocal coda.
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It is a masterpiece, though not the sort Jack Kapp was looking for.
For Bing’s second Decca session, Kapp reverted to the usual formula of covering new hit songs, to which the public responded
with greater sympathy. Jack chose “The Moon Was Yellow,” a tango in the “Temptation” mold, as the A-side for one disc, but
the B-side, Ray Noble’s “The Very Thought of You,” stimulated sales and became an all-time standard. Bing was a bit hoarse
at that date, which also produced the satisfactory “Two Cigarettes in the Dark” and the lamentable “Sweetheart Waltz.” He
exhibited a new and short-lived mannerism that reflected Kapp’s injunction to sing in a style suitable to light classics —
a high, sighing head tone to cap phrase endings. For his third Decca session, Bing was back on the terra firma of songs written
for his pictures. He scored his first megahit for Decca with “June in January” and delivered a far more expansive interpretation
of “Love Is Just Around the Corner” than the one heard in
Here Is My Heart;
spurred by a lively rhythm section, he swings, embellishes, and whistles. With the release of three new movies during the
spring and summer of 1935
(Mississippi, Two for Tonight,
and
The Big Broadcast of 1936,
in which Bing made only a cameo appearance), Bing feared an overload and restricted his recording activities to four sessions
for the entire year, focusing mostly on his movie songs, with two crucial exceptions.