Ba-da Bing: Crooner Crosby, America’s everyman

By Earle Hitchner

Hindsight isn’t always 20-20, and nostalgia isn’t always inclusive. Consider the memories and yearnings stirred by the public’s renewed fascination with World War II and "the greatest generation," a term that’s gained currency through NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw’s best-selling book. Amid all this well-deserved reappreciation of the soldiers, citizenry, political leaders, and cultural icons from that period, one name usually goes missing: Bing Crosby.

How is that possible? From 1934-54, Bing Crosby was the undisputed heavyweight champion of radio, recordings, and movies combined, and he was THE voice of World War II for most GIs and their families. He made more V-Discs and military broadcasts than any other musician, raised $14.5 million in war bonds, and, in 1942, recorded what would become the most popular single of all time, Irving Berlin’s "White Christmas," a song holding a special poignancy for soldiers overseas and their loved ones at home.

Four years after "White Christmas" debuted, U.S. servicemen polled by Yank magazine voted Bing Crosby the one person who had done the most for wartime morale.

"I thought it would have been Bob Hope because of all the OSS tours he did," said Gary Giddins, "but Crosby won by a landslide." Later, in an ABC radio poll, Crosby was voted the most admired man alive — ahead of Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Douglas MacArthur, Bob Hope, and Pope Pius XII.

Overdue reassessment

Winner of the 1998 National Books Critics Circle Award for "Visions of Jazz" and recipient of five ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards, Gary Giddins is one of America’s most perceptive and articulate authorities on jazz. That became apparent to anyone who watched Ken Burns’s 19-hour "Jazz" series on PBS television, where Giddins appeared on screen more than any other critic. Yet his latest book, "Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams, The Early Years, 1903-1940" (Little, Brown), the first of a planned two-volume biography, is an intriguing excursion into the heart of American popular culture, embodied by Bing Crosby.

At a hotel room in Boston, where he was on a book tour and also due to share a panel discussion with Burns at Harvard, Giddins bristled at the dismissive treatment of Crosby the artist and the near-demonization of Crosby the person since his fatal heart attack on a Madrid golf course in October 1977.

"What buried Bing for us baby boomers were the orange juice commercials he made and the family Christmas shows he did, which most of us found unwatchable since his [second] family wasn’t terribly talented," the author admitted. "Our generation wanted torrential rock-and-roll or Frank Sinatra’s jet-set hipster shouting, and here Bing was still the laid-back crooner. That just didn’t cut it for us."

Tarnishing Crosby’s reputation as a family man were two books published after his death: "Bing Crosby: The Hollow Man," a 1981 biography written by Donald Shepherd and Robert F. Slatzer, and "Going My Own Way," a 1983 memoir written by Bing’s eldest son, Gary, with Ross Firestone. The posthumous portrait of Bing Crosby emerging in those books was that of a rampant philanderer and ramrod disciplinarian who harshly beat the four sons from his first marriage.

In his book, Giddins acknowledged early signs of marital discord between Bing and his first wife, Dixie Lee, his later straying, and his administering of corporal punishment. But those were blown way out of proportion, the author insisted.

"It was OK with me if Crosby had turned out to be every bit as creepy as those books suggested," Giddins said, "but that’s not what I discovered in my research. I interviewed more than 250 people, and almost all of them loved the guy. As I began to nail down all the stories in those books, a lot of them just completely filtered away. I am, in a sense, revising the revisionists, but my primary aim is to discuss Crosby as an artist, and I think he’s a great one. I want to put him back into his central place in the development of American popular music."

"Gold being poured out of a cup"

In 1831, Bing Crosby’s maternal great-grandfather, Dennis Harrigan, left with most of his family from Schull parish in cholera- and famine-plagued southwest Cork on a ship for New Brunswick, Canada. In 1888, his son, Dennis Jr., settled in Tacoma, Wash., bringing his family, including daughter Catherine (Kate), a year later.

The Harrigans were Irish Catholic, but the Crosbys, who can be traced back to Ardfert, Co. Kerry, were Irish Protestant, converting to Anglicanism under King Henry VIII. Crosby family descendants have been in America since 1635, and one of them, Harry Lowe Crosby, was born in Olympia, Wash., in 1870. Twenty-four years later, after converting to Catholicism to please his devout wife and in-laws, he married Kate Harrigan in Tacoma, and they had six children, including Harry Lillis, born on May 3, 1903.

By 1910, a schoolmate started calling the boy with jug ears, pointed jaw, and hooded eyes (all universally recognized physical traits later on) "Bingo From Bingville," a name inspired by a newspaper column, "The Bingville Bugle," they both enjoyed reading. Only "Bing" survived the shorthand preferred by children, and Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby grew up in a lower-middle-class Irish American household headed by a stern, exacting mother and a genial, carefree father who spent money a little too freely.

One of his impulse buys, however, proved crucial to his young son’s interest in music: an Edison phonograph. On it Bing heard recordings by Al Jolson, Harry Lauder, and such Irish tenors as Dennis O’Sullivan and John McCormack. Later he also absorbed the varied musical stylings of Red McKenzie and the Mound City Blue Blowers, Ukelele Ike (Cliff Edwards), Ethel Waters, Mildred Bailey (sister of Al Rinker, with whom Crosby sang in Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra), and especially Louis Armstrong.

"Louis Armstrong was the most influential figure in American music — period," said Giddins. "Even Crosby comes out of Armstrong. But in terms of popular music, Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley and John Lennon all came out of Crosby. In two different interviews, Lennon said that he and Paul McCartney wrote the Beatles’ song ‘Please Please Me’ as a result of hearing Crosby sing ‘Please’ in a television skit they saw as kids. Bob Dylan was a big fan, and so was David Bowie, who sang a duet with Bing on a TV special back in the ’70s. They all acknowledged him, and virtually every popular singer who came along during the war and afterward reflected Crosby’s influence."

Blessed with a resonant, virile baritone that stood out from the mannered tenor singing so prevalent on stage and recordings during the 1910s and early ’20s, Bing Crosby got his first big break in 1926 when he was invited to join the orchestra of Paul Whiteman, who had premiered George Gershwin’s "Rhapsody in Blue" at New York’s ‘olian Hall two years earlier. Touted as the "King of Jazz," Whiteman "was the first genuine popular-music superstar," Giddins noted in his book, and though a musician of modest talent himself, the bandleader had an eye for talent. In his orchestra at different stages were such jazz notables as singer Mildred Bailey, saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer, trumpeter Bunny Berigan, trombonist Jack Teagarden (later with Louis Armstrong’s All-Stars), trombonist/trumpeter Tommy Dorsey, xylophonist Red Norvo (Bailey’s husband), saxophonist/clarinetist Jimmy Dorsey, and cornetist Bix Beiderbecke.

It was obvious to most that Crosby’s vocal style and technique were unlike his contemporaries’. His voice is "like gold being poured out of a cup," Louis Armstrong told Time magazine. Using lower pitches, holding notes at the ends of phrases, trilling, experimenting with tempo and vocal entrances, employing an uncanny sense of swing and rhythm, and pioneering a lyrical intimacy and clean melodic line in performance: these were all Crosby hallmarks. The dawn of the electrical microphone in 1924, replacing the mawlike megaphone in concerts and the recording horn in studios, came at just the right time for Crosby, whose close, conversational approach to singing was further enhanced when carbon mikes gave way to condenser mikes in 1927.

Another relatively "new" part of Crosby’s vocal technique was actually quite old: the upper mordent (sometimes called a pralltriller), a wavering catch or momentary undulation in the voice common to sean-nós (unaccompanied old-style) singing in Ireland. No one knows for sure how Crosby acquired it.

"He may have gotten the mordent from his Uncle George or from his mother, who sang when he was a kid," Giddins speculated. "What’s fascinating is that even though Bing doesn’t embrace the Irish persona per se back then, he does embrace this musical element. It’s there from the time he recorded ‘Mary’ with Whiteman in 1927 — what a phenomenal performance that is, with Bing sounding like Bix — through to the early 1930s, his so-called crooning phase, when the mordent is everywhere in his singing. It became known as the Crosby cry."

Bing Crosby called Armstrong "the beginning and end of music in America," and the two were principally responsible for injecting jazz into mainstream popular singing. Their admiration was mutual, and so was their influence. Crosby applied Armstrong’s rhythmic force and melodic inventiveness to his own singing, while Armstrong employed Bing-like trills in "I’m Confessin’ " (1930) and, inspired by Crosby’s 1931 recording of "Just One More Chance," uttered a brief "bu-bu-bu-boo" in his 1931 version of "Stardust."

That Crosby trademark of "bu-bu-bu-booing" in songs was essentially jazz-inspired scatting, and both he and Armstrong were expert at it. Originating in New Orleans, scatting replaces words with nonsense syllables to approximate an instrumental sound. Armstrong scatted most famously on his 1926 Hot Five recording of "Heebie Jeebies." The Rhythm Boys, of which Crosby was a member, scatted on some of Paul Whiteman’s recordings in the late ’20s, and Crosby himself scatted joyously on "Dinah," a hit song he recorded in 1931 with the Mills Brothers.

Crosby’s versatile vocal talent also entailed whistling, which he did with a deft, unflagging sense of swing. Such songs as "From Monday On" (his whistling debut in 1928), "Can’t We Talk It Over?", "It Must Be True," and "White Christmas" all benefit from that deceptively casual, ever-reassuring sound.

It would be patently silly, of course, to suggest that all of Crosby’s jazz and jazz-based pop recordings during his career were highly accomplished. But the ones that were have not dimmed with age or fashion. Three outright gems from 1932 were "Sweet Georgia Brown" (with the Isham Jones Orchestra, featuring clarinetist Woody Herman and guitarist Eddie Lang), "St. Louis Blues" (with Duke Ellington’s Orchestra), and "Some of These Days" (with a small group culled from Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra). Moreover, the idea that Crosby somehow forsook jazz after the 1920s and ’30s is belied by "Bing With a Beat," a superb swing-meets-Dixieland LP he recorded in 1957 with Bob Scobey and his Frisco Jazz Band that is out of print.

Turning to his Irishness

Though raised in an Irish American family and influenced by great Irish singers like John McCormack (and wisely disdaining ersatz Irish tenors like Billy Murray), Bing Crosby seriously embraced his Irish heritage and identity only after 1939.

"Back then, you could pay with your life for being ethnic," Giddins explained. "Bing was big box office, a huge movie star, and the studios believed if you were an ethnic character in a film, you could only be a character actor, not a star. When Bing decided to step out and remake himself and remind people that he wasn’t just this All-American Joe but that he himself was an ethnic, an Irish American, it was an act of enormous courage. The studios didn’t want him to do it."

Partly prompting Crosby’s risky transformation was "Ballad for Americans," a four-part oratorio composed by John Latouche and Earl Robinson that Crosby recorded in 1940, a year after Paul Robeson debuted it on radio. It flew in the face of bigotry and racism then roiling the country, and it stirred within Crosby a renewed pride in his own ethnicity. He had always been a devout Catholic, never missing Mass on Sunday. Now he became, fully and publicly, Irish American.

In December 1940, Crosby recorded the first two Irish-styled songs of his career: "Did Your Mother Come From Ireland?" and "Where the River Shannon Flows." He would go on to record dozens of others, garnering three gold records (when "gold" meant a million copies sold) for "Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral" in 1944, "MacNamara’s Band" in 1945, and "Galway Bay" in 1947.

For devotees of Irish traditional music, shamelessly maudlin or arcadian ditties about Ireland, along with outsized characters bordering on caricature (e.g., "Two Shillelagh O’Sullivan," cut by Crosby in 1952), are anathema. Generally, when sentimentality soars, art sinks. But Gary Giddins cautions against easy, wholesale, baby-out-with-the-bathwater judgments.

"One of Bing’s best-selling albums ever, ‘Shillelaghs and Shamrocks,’ was a pretty good overview of his work in Irish material and had some good stuff on it," he said. "Sure, ‘MacNamara’s Band’ was done mostly for fun, and it is fun. But Crosby did it with a jazz band, so it swings. I don’t think Sinatra could have sung something like that at all."

Nowhere was Crosby’s Irishness more proudly on display than in "Going My Way," a 1944 movie in which he took on the role of Fr. Chuck O’Malley, a young priest assigned to a New York slum parish overseen by an aging pastor played by Barry Fitzgerald. This immensely popular film was nominated for 10 Oscars and won seven: best picture, director (Leo McCarey), actor (Bing Crosby), supporting actor (Irish-born Abbey Theater veteran Fitzgerald), original story, screenplay, and original song ("Swinging on a Star," sung by Crosby).

As appealing as that Johnny Burke-James Van Heusen song was for moviegoers, it paled beside "Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral," a James R. Shannon chestnut from 1914 that Crosby sang by the bedside of Fitzgerald’s dying pastor.

"Bing sings the heck out of it, and he’s at his peak as an interpreter of that kind of song," Giddins said. "It’s one of the greatest tearjerking moments of the cinema, and audiences sobbed. Could any other grown-up man in Hollywood have gotten away with sitting on another man’s bed and singing him a lullaby? Only Crosby."

"Inside baseball"

Gary Giddins’ "A Pocketful of Dreams" ends in 1940, before the war, before television, before Crosby’s second marriage and family. The second volume of his biography will focus on Crosby’s financing and popularizing of taped broadcasts, among other subjects.

"He single-handedly turned radio from a live medium into a canned medium," Giddins said. "Bing took a truly courageous stand, risking his entire caree, by insisting on the idea of prerecording. It was front-page news throughout 1946 and would revolutionize the entertainment industry."

Like Peter Guralnick, whose recent two-volume biography of Elvis Presley meticulously and artfully redresses the harm done by Albert Goldman’s tawdry, error-filled 1981 biography, Gary Giddins admits he’s on a bit of a crusade. Known for the strength of his opinions (he tagged Barbra Streisand as America’s most overrated singer in American Heritage magazine), Giddins adamantly believes that "it’s a big mistake to dismiss everything Bing did after he got into the mainstream. If you get to be that popular, get to the level that Crosby attained, in a sense you become the ultimate folk musician. He became what everybody wanted to sound like."

So why hasn’t Giddins assembled a boxed set on his subject to further prove his point?

"I tried my damnedest," he said, frustration creeping into his voice. "I spent weeks putting together for Columbia a four-disc set of records I thought were truly masterly, running up to 1940. Then they told me to do a two-disc compilation, so I put that together. Then they said maybe we should do only one, which I did, and then they said we’re not going to do the one. I said, ‘F–k this,’ and went to MCA. But it was the same thing there: four discs, then two. Then an MCA exec told me: ‘It would be too inside baseball.’ And I said, ‘This guy sold over 400 million records. What are you talking about?’"

It’s hard to imagine the world’s most popular and successful entertainer — "the first hip white person born in the United States," claimed Artie Shaw — getting such short shrift. But what made Bing Crosby so popular and successful ironically contributed to the later decline in his reputation: blandness.

Also, Crosby’s appeal to Irish America began to yield to a new attraction in the late 1950s: the Clancy Brothers. Their robust singing of Irish songs and the Irish ballad boom they kindled cast an unflattering light on Crosby’s own Irish recording canon and made it seem far less genuine. Even the kitschiest of commercial Irish performers today rarely acknowledge Crosby.

In his book, Giddins argued that "universal acceptance demanded of him a willful blandness that obscured the full weight of his achievement."

Speaking from Boston, Giddins added: "This blandness was a great asset for Crosby in the 1940s, and the country loved it because it brought everyone together. He may have been bland, but he wasn’t corny.

He had perfect time, perfect enunciation, and he was as big in black communities as he was in white communities. Jazz musicians adored him because he really knew how to put across a song. The trick for all of us is to go a little beyond the blandness and filter through his records, where you’ll find these great performances."

Book review Whole take on a half life

BING CROSBY: A POCKETFUL OF DREAMS, THE EARLY YEARS 1903-1940, by Gary Giddins. Little, Brown, 728 pp, $30.

Village Voice jazz columnist Gary Giddins has written about Bing Crosby before. In his first book, 1981’s "Riding on a Blue Note," he devoted a chapter to him: "Bing for the Millions." Right off the bat there, Giddins grants the reader’s skepticism: "It seems almost an impertinence to discuss Bing Crosby . . . in terms of the specifics of his singing."

By the 1960s, Crosby seemed all too familiar and bu-bu-bu-bland, an aging, pipe-chewing, golf-sweatered symbol of square to the younger generation. His once vast popularity and hyper-productivity had been dimmed by changing cultural tastes, and the question on many baby boomers’ minds was: How could he have been any good?

Giddins’s book, the first in a projected two-volume biography, answers that question with cogent force through a wealth of research, interviews, and close critical examination. He takes the reader on a journey from Ireland, where Crosby’s paternal and maternal forebears lived, to the Pacific Northwest, where Crosby was raised by a spendthrift father and a martinet mother more feared than loved by her children.

As Giddins shows us, Crosby’s eight years of classical Jesuit education at Gonzaga High School and Gonzaga College in Spokane ingrained in him a strong work ethic and also honed his elocution. These were habits and skills he later relied on as a singer and actor, and became cornerstones of his success.

Crosby’s musical progression from the Musicaladers (high-school band with Bing as lone collegian) to the professional duo of Crosby and Rinker (both ex-Musicaladers), the Rhythm Boys with Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra, and then solo work is well delineated by Giddins.

What Crosby brought to his singing — an appealing lack of pretension and a style that made it seem he was singing to just one person, not an audience of millions — he also brought to his film roles. Giddins documents the emergence of Crosby’s unflappable, casually witty persona in cinema. His unsculpted torso, receding hairline (he usually wore a hat on screen), and wingy ears (one gibe he heard: "A camera pointed straight at you would make you look like a taxi with both doors open") certainly didn’t have Cary Grant quaking in his boots. But Crosby "came across as an extraordinary ordinary guy," points out Giddins, and America loved him for it and found both comfort and escape in it during the Depression ’30s.

Is Giddins finally convincing in his argument that attention must be paid to Crosby, whose present reputation makes him seem like the Willy Loman of pop? Yes, with this caveat: Be prepared to sift the wheat from a lot of Crosby chaff. But what’s good is frequently outstanding, and Giddins is correct in asserting that the endless repackaging of Crosby staples like "Swinging on a Star" and "Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral," as charming as those performances may be, tends to further submerge other Crosby work that’s been overlooked or inaccessible for far too long.

Among the seven books he’s published, "A Pocketful of Dreams" is not Gary Giddins consistently writing at his peak. For that, read the splendid "Visions of Jazz." His customary elegant style, nonpareil among jazz critics today, falters from time to time in this new book. (Example: "His inclinations toward wildness could be indulged only in the context of an Augustinian postponement.") Also, the density of detail (e.g., all the plush aspects of Spokane’s Clemmer Theater described on page 108) sometimes slows the book’s narrative pace.

But Giddins has rendered a tremendous service here, reminding us that there were compelling ‘sthetic as well as historic reasons for the unparalleled ascendancy of Bing Crosby. In this book, Crosby looms as both entertainer and artist, and for this reviewer, whose World War II veteran father still gets emotional at hearing "White Christmas," volume two can’t come fast enough.

— Earle Hitchner

Recommended Crosby albums Bing Crosby holds the all-time record in recording: 1,668 songs, of which 396 charted and 38 went to No. 1. So selecting what’s best or worthiest from this sprawling oeuvre is a challenge, further complicated by what’s available and, sadly, what’s not.

"A lot of his greatest work has never even been reissued on LP, let alone CD," biographer Gary Giddins said.

Undaunted, he recently cited in the New York Times these currently available recordings: "Bing Crosby: The Voice of Christmas" (MCA double disc), "Bing Crosby: His Legendary Years, 1931-1957" (MCA four-disc box set compiled by Tony Natelli and Will Friedwald), "Bing Crosby, 1926-1932" (Timeless), "Bing Crosby, 1928-1945" (L’Art Vocal), "Bing Crosby and Some Jazz Friends" (Decca/MCA), "Bing Crosby’s Gold Records" (MCA), "I’m an Old Cowhand" (ASV), "Bing Crosby Kraft Shows" (Lost Gold), and "Havin’ Fun" (Jazz Unlimited).

To Giddins’s list, I’d add these CDs, varied in quality but all with appealing Crosby moments: "Bing Crosby: 16 Most Requested Songs" (Columbia/Legacy; what you won’t find on the Decca releases, like "Sweet Georgia Brown" and "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"); "Bing Crosby: The Best of the War Years" (Stardust; V-Discs cut by Crosby during World War II; when you hear him singing with Al Jolson on "The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else," the leap forward in vocal style by Crosby becomes all too clear); "Bing Crosby: Top O’ the Morning/His Irish Collection" (MCA/Decca; some nuggets amid ample dross, and all of their time); and "Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney: Rendezvous" (RCA Camden; a bargain-bin pick, it’s Crosby dueting with another underrated singer of Irish heritage, Rosemary Clooney, backed a bit too brassily by Billy May and His Orchestra).

— Earle Hitchner

Recommended Crosby films

Bing Crosby was the world’s No. 1 box-office movie star five times, from 1944-48, and he ranked in the top 10 15 times between 1934-54. During that period he received three Oscar nominations for best actor: "Going My Way," for which he won; "The Bells of St. Mary’s" (1945), and "The Country Girl" (1954).

Besides those three, biographer Gary Giddins, who began as a film critic for the Hollywood Reporter, recommends the following Crosby movies if you can find them. In chronological order, they are "The Big Broadcast" (1932), "Going Hollywood" (1933), "We’re Not Dressing" (1934), "Here Is My Heart" (1934), "Rhythm on the Range" (1936), "Pennies From Heaven" (1936, marking Louis Armstrong’s Hollywood debut), "Waikiki Wedding" (1937), "Sing You Sinners" (1938), "East Side of Heaven" (1939), all seven "Road" pictures made with Bob Hope between 1940 and 1962, "Rhythm on the River" (1940), "Birth of the Blues" (1941), "Holiday Inn" (1942), "Welcome Stranger" (1947), "Riding High" (1950), "White Christmas" (1954), and "High Society" (1956, featuring Armstrong and Sinatra).

— Earle Hitchner