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| His happy place, from what I gather. |
“396 chart singles, including roughly 41 No. 1 hits. [Bing] Crosby had separate charting singles every year between 1931 and 1954; the annual re-release of 'White Christmas' extended that streak to 1957."
“For fifteen years (1934, 1937, 1940, 1943–1954), Crosby was among the top ten acts in box-office sales, and for five of those years (1944–1948) he topped the world.”
“If he’s not the most important vocal artist of the 20th century, he’s in the top 1 1/2.”
- Will Friedwald (American author/critic)
That last quote comes out of a good, but fairly hagiographicPBS documentary, while the other two came from Wikipedia - which, for the record, was the only one of the few sources I read willing to pick through the garbage. I’ll get to that, but I wanted to start this post by driving home the main truth about Bing Crosby: the man was fucking HUGE, nothing less than a colossus of American popular culture. When they asked GIs to name who they thought contributed most to winning World War II, they named Crosby. His famous 1941 recording “White Christmas” (released on vinyl in discs, V-Records, and shipped to the troops) sold 50 million copies, making it the best-selling single of all-time (and No. 2’s a ways behind; full, weird list here); A Public Broadcasting Service timeline of his career pegged his all-time sales land somewhere between 500 million and 1 billion - after a certain point, why count? - and he spent the 1930s and 1940s, two entire decades, as the most successful vocal artist, quite likely in the world. As noted by the once-best-selling artist in Africa, Dorothy Masuka, once said, “Only Bing Crosby the famous American crooner sold more records than me in Africa.”
Now, for how that happened.
He didn’t start as “Bing,” for one. His parents, Harry Lowe Crosby, Sr. and Catherine Helen Crosby named him Harry Lillis Crosby, Jr. at his birth in 1903. A child of the Pacific Northwest, he was born in Tacoma, Washington, and grew all the way up in Spokane, even attending college at Gonzaga University. As for the nickname he made famous, Crosby told several stories - e.g, a story about the sounds me made firing an imaginary gun - but Wikipedia, which I trust for its comparative sobriety, gives the honors to a one-time neighbor, Valentine Hobart, who named him “Bing” after an old comic called “Bingo from Bingville.” (Another story has it that was Bing’s favorite comic.)
Though a decent student and a solid athlete, Crosby fell in love with singing at age 14, when he got a summer job working at Spokane’s Auditorium, a venue for vaudeville acts and orchestras. He watched the performances from the wings and, thanks to an audiographic memory, Crosby could perform the songs he heard when he got home after his shifts; when the legendary (and complicated) Al Jolson came to town, he discovered his first idol.
Crosby started playing drums during high school, with a little singing on the side. He dabbled for the most part until a local band called the Musicaladers recruited him as a drummer; that’s where he met his first partner, Al Rinker. A couple years of parties and proms led to some steady work at Spokane’s Clemmer Theater, enough to convince Crosby he could make a living in music. When his third year at Gonzaga ended, and with another path pointing him toward a career in law, Crosby talked Rinker (then 17) into moving to Los Angeles and trying their hand in show business. Rinker’s sister, Mildred Bailey, was already living and working in Los Angeles and was able to give the young men some leads. Shortly after arriving, an agent found them work on the Loew’s Theater Circuit, where they signed onto runs for vaudeville revues with names like Syncopation Revue and Syncopation Idea. They worked up an act as a duo, one they carried over to another show, the William Morrissey Music Hall Revue…and that’s where Paul Whiteman, then the biggest name in show business discovered them in 1926.
Due to their appeal with the college crowd, Whiteman put Crosby and Rinker front-and-center. They killed up and down the Midwest, but what killed in the sticks flopped in New York City. Unable to give them away for free, but not wanting to let them go, Whiteman added a third man to the act, a pianist named Harry Barris; the trio fronted Whiteman’s Orchestra through the end of the 1920s as The Rhythm Boys. The way Whiteman collected talent put the three young men in the same outfit as the biggest and best names of the time - e.g., Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey, Eddie Lang, and Hoagy Carmichael - it even put them in the movies (1929’s King of Jazz, a vehicle Bing got dropped from and lost a car after getting a DUII). All that talent and opportunity - as well as the Rhythm Boys’ first hit, “Mississippi Mud” - couldn’t keep professional and artistic differences from getting in the way. The dawn of the 1930s saw the Rhythm Boys looking for greener grass, which they found in California.
While all three men played those first shows at the famous Coconut Grove, Crosby was the only one who really walked away. He signed with CBS in 1931 as star of a 15-minute weekly radio show; he signed on with Mack Sennett to make a series of film shorts the same year, brief little comedies with thin, repetitive plots and ad-libbed dialogue that served mainly as promotional vehicles for his songs (per the PBS doc, several of the plots involved him losing his license and having to sing to prove he really was Bing Crosby). All that promotion paid off for Crosby and Brunswick Records, his first label: 10 of the top 50 songs of 1931 featured Crosby either solo - e.g., "Out of Nowhere," "Just One More Chance," "At Your Command" and "I Found a Million Dollar Baby (in a Five and Ten Cent Store)" - or in collaboration with someone else.
It’s a literal avalanche of success from there: he starred in his first movie (also) in 1931 - Reaching for the Moon, with Douglas Fairbanks - and signed a deal with Paramount for three movies a year shortly after. Even then, Crosby had enough clout to win a clause that allowed him to film some movies out-of-house; he broke another idol, Louis Armstrong, with one of those, a movie originally titled The Peacock Feather, and later released as Pennies from Heaven. When CBS Studio head, Harry Cohn, balked at calling in Armstrong, but Crosby backed him down by threatening to back out of the picture. It’s possible he felt indebted: beyond admiring Armstrong, Crosby often credited him for introducing him to an entirely new way of phrasing his vocals. As Bing once said, “I’m proud to be a member of the congregation of Reverend Satchmo…Armstrong is the beginning and the end of music in America.”
Crosby grew more famous still starting in 1934, first when he signed for Decca Records - which introduced Jack Capp into his life - and then when he bumped his old mentor, Whiteman, as the host of Kraft Music Hall, the biggest radio show in the country; to give a sense of scale, it reached as many as 50 million listeners on its best nights. His theme for the show was, “Where the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day),” a tune that featured a whistling part that made him famous. Then again, everything he did was famous: by the time the war rolled around, Crosby had more hits than (probably) 10 other bands and crooning imitators could count - hence the rapt reception for “White Christmas.” Released shortly after Pearl Harbor, it became a kind of anthem for U.S. soldiers after they went overseas, something that connected that to homes and families for which they fought. No one could get enough of the guy. Not for two decades, and then some.
And yet there was so much come - e.g., an Oscar for best actor for his role as Father O’Malley of Going My Way (which featured another hit, “Swinging on a Star”), his best years in movies overall (see above), plus the famous “Road to [_______]” movies with Bob Hope - but that gets this little bio to where I wanted it to go. In what I (for now) plan on making a new tradition, I’ll close it out with five (more) remarkable details about Crosby’s life, good and bad.
1) He Saved Decca, and Might Have Saved the Whole Damn Recording Industry
“By the way, Bing actually saved the record business in 1934 when he agreed to support Decca founder Jack Kapp's crazy idea of lowering the price of singles from a dollar to 35 cents and getting a royalty for records sold instead of a flat fee. Bing's name and his artistry saved the recording industry. All the other artists signed to Decca after Bing did. Without him, Jack Kapp wouldn't have had a chance in hell of making Decca work and the Great Depression would have wiped out phonograph records for good.”
- Audio Engineer, Steve Hoffman, Decca Records
Crosby was a hell of a business man - one of the wealthiest ever, by some counts - so it’s hardly surprising to see him involved in that minor miracle of marketing savvy. It’s also worth noting that Kapp steered Crosby away from jazz, and to songs with “a clear vocal style.” Between his popularity and that vast musical palette, Bing Crosby recorded “have number one hits in Christmas music, Hawaiian music, and country music, and top-thirty hits in Irish music, French music, rhythm and blues, and ballads.” It can't be said Kapp steered him wrong.
“For fifteen years (1934, 1937, 1940, 1943–1954), Crosby was among the top ten acts in box-office sales, and for five of those years (1944–1948) he topped the world.”
“If he’s not the most important vocal artist of the 20th century, he’s in the top 1 1/2.”
- Will Friedwald (American author/critic)
That last quote comes out of a good, but fairly hagiographicPBS documentary, while the other two came from Wikipedia - which, for the record, was the only one of the few sources I read willing to pick through the garbage. I’ll get to that, but I wanted to start this post by driving home the main truth about Bing Crosby: the man was fucking HUGE, nothing less than a colossus of American popular culture. When they asked GIs to name who they thought contributed most to winning World War II, they named Crosby. His famous 1941 recording “White Christmas” (released on vinyl in discs, V-Records, and shipped to the troops) sold 50 million copies, making it the best-selling single of all-time (and No. 2’s a ways behind; full, weird list here); A Public Broadcasting Service timeline of his career pegged his all-time sales land somewhere between 500 million and 1 billion - after a certain point, why count? - and he spent the 1930s and 1940s, two entire decades, as the most successful vocal artist, quite likely in the world. As noted by the once-best-selling artist in Africa, Dorothy Masuka, once said, “Only Bing Crosby the famous American crooner sold more records than me in Africa.”
Now, for how that happened.
He didn’t start as “Bing,” for one. His parents, Harry Lowe Crosby, Sr. and Catherine Helen Crosby named him Harry Lillis Crosby, Jr. at his birth in 1903. A child of the Pacific Northwest, he was born in Tacoma, Washington, and grew all the way up in Spokane, even attending college at Gonzaga University. As for the nickname he made famous, Crosby told several stories - e.g, a story about the sounds me made firing an imaginary gun - but Wikipedia, which I trust for its comparative sobriety, gives the honors to a one-time neighbor, Valentine Hobart, who named him “Bing” after an old comic called “Bingo from Bingville.” (Another story has it that was Bing’s favorite comic.)
Though a decent student and a solid athlete, Crosby fell in love with singing at age 14, when he got a summer job working at Spokane’s Auditorium, a venue for vaudeville acts and orchestras. He watched the performances from the wings and, thanks to an audiographic memory, Crosby could perform the songs he heard when he got home after his shifts; when the legendary (and complicated) Al Jolson came to town, he discovered his first idol.
Crosby started playing drums during high school, with a little singing on the side. He dabbled for the most part until a local band called the Musicaladers recruited him as a drummer; that’s where he met his first partner, Al Rinker. A couple years of parties and proms led to some steady work at Spokane’s Clemmer Theater, enough to convince Crosby he could make a living in music. When his third year at Gonzaga ended, and with another path pointing him toward a career in law, Crosby talked Rinker (then 17) into moving to Los Angeles and trying their hand in show business. Rinker’s sister, Mildred Bailey, was already living and working in Los Angeles and was able to give the young men some leads. Shortly after arriving, an agent found them work on the Loew’s Theater Circuit, where they signed onto runs for vaudeville revues with names like Syncopation Revue and Syncopation Idea. They worked up an act as a duo, one they carried over to another show, the William Morrissey Music Hall Revue…and that’s where Paul Whiteman, then the biggest name in show business discovered them in 1926.
Due to their appeal with the college crowd, Whiteman put Crosby and Rinker front-and-center. They killed up and down the Midwest, but what killed in the sticks flopped in New York City. Unable to give them away for free, but not wanting to let them go, Whiteman added a third man to the act, a pianist named Harry Barris; the trio fronted Whiteman’s Orchestra through the end of the 1920s as The Rhythm Boys. The way Whiteman collected talent put the three young men in the same outfit as the biggest and best names of the time - e.g., Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey, Eddie Lang, and Hoagy Carmichael - it even put them in the movies (1929’s King of Jazz, a vehicle Bing got dropped from and lost a car after getting a DUII). All that talent and opportunity - as well as the Rhythm Boys’ first hit, “Mississippi Mud” - couldn’t keep professional and artistic differences from getting in the way. The dawn of the 1930s saw the Rhythm Boys looking for greener grass, which they found in California.
While all three men played those first shows at the famous Coconut Grove, Crosby was the only one who really walked away. He signed with CBS in 1931 as star of a 15-minute weekly radio show; he signed on with Mack Sennett to make a series of film shorts the same year, brief little comedies with thin, repetitive plots and ad-libbed dialogue that served mainly as promotional vehicles for his songs (per the PBS doc, several of the plots involved him losing his license and having to sing to prove he really was Bing Crosby). All that promotion paid off for Crosby and Brunswick Records, his first label: 10 of the top 50 songs of 1931 featured Crosby either solo - e.g., "Out of Nowhere," "Just One More Chance," "At Your Command" and "I Found a Million Dollar Baby (in a Five and Ten Cent Store)" - or in collaboration with someone else.
It’s a literal avalanche of success from there: he starred in his first movie (also) in 1931 - Reaching for the Moon, with Douglas Fairbanks - and signed a deal with Paramount for three movies a year shortly after. Even then, Crosby had enough clout to win a clause that allowed him to film some movies out-of-house; he broke another idol, Louis Armstrong, with one of those, a movie originally titled The Peacock Feather, and later released as Pennies from Heaven. When CBS Studio head, Harry Cohn, balked at calling in Armstrong, but Crosby backed him down by threatening to back out of the picture. It’s possible he felt indebted: beyond admiring Armstrong, Crosby often credited him for introducing him to an entirely new way of phrasing his vocals. As Bing once said, “I’m proud to be a member of the congregation of Reverend Satchmo…Armstrong is the beginning and the end of music in America.”
Crosby grew more famous still starting in 1934, first when he signed for Decca Records - which introduced Jack Capp into his life - and then when he bumped his old mentor, Whiteman, as the host of Kraft Music Hall, the biggest radio show in the country; to give a sense of scale, it reached as many as 50 million listeners on its best nights. His theme for the show was, “Where the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day),” a tune that featured a whistling part that made him famous. Then again, everything he did was famous: by the time the war rolled around, Crosby had more hits than (probably) 10 other bands and crooning imitators could count - hence the rapt reception for “White Christmas.” Released shortly after Pearl Harbor, it became a kind of anthem for U.S. soldiers after they went overseas, something that connected that to homes and families for which they fought. No one could get enough of the guy. Not for two decades, and then some.
And yet there was so much come - e.g., an Oscar for best actor for his role as Father O’Malley of Going My Way (which featured another hit, “Swinging on a Star”), his best years in movies overall (see above), plus the famous “Road to [_______]” movies with Bob Hope - but that gets this little bio to where I wanted it to go. In what I (for now) plan on making a new tradition, I’ll close it out with five (more) remarkable details about Crosby’s life, good and bad.
1) He Saved Decca, and Might Have Saved the Whole Damn Recording Industry
“By the way, Bing actually saved the record business in 1934 when he agreed to support Decca founder Jack Kapp's crazy idea of lowering the price of singles from a dollar to 35 cents and getting a royalty for records sold instead of a flat fee. Bing's name and his artistry saved the recording industry. All the other artists signed to Decca after Bing did. Without him, Jack Kapp wouldn't have had a chance in hell of making Decca work and the Great Depression would have wiped out phonograph records for good.”
- Audio Engineer, Steve Hoffman, Decca Records
Crosby was a hell of a business man - one of the wealthiest ever, by some counts - so it’s hardly surprising to see him involved in that minor miracle of marketing savvy. It’s also worth noting that Kapp steered Crosby away from jazz, and to songs with “a clear vocal style.” Between his popularity and that vast musical palette, Bing Crosby recorded “have number one hits in Christmas music, Hawaiian music, and country music, and top-thirty hits in Irish music, French music, rhythm and blues, and ballads.” It can't be said Kapp steered him wrong.
2) Bing, Hope, and the Road to [_______] Movies
Crosby first met Hope in 1932 at New York City's Capitol Theater, where the latter served as MC and the latter showed up as talent. They clicked almost immediately and would form a duo that played in every medium and every venue - up to including filling intermissions between races at the Del Mar Racetrack (in which they both held partial ownership) and years of entertaining the troops overseas (Crosby got caught behind enemy lines once during the Battle of the Bulge). They took very much the same routine to the big screen in the famous “Road movies” starting with Road to Singapore in 1940. Though working with a normal cast - including a female character who gadded about with them in every movie, played by Dorothy Lamar - Crosby and Hope ad-libbed almost all of the scenes, much like during Crosby’s days in Sennett’s film shorts. While the main run ran through 1952 (the year Road to Bali) came out, Crosby and Hope reunited for another in 1962, The Road to Hong Kong. To dish (the first of) a little dirt, Crosby pushed to keep Lamar out of the project, arguing she was too old for the part; someone had already hired Joan Collins and Peter Sellars for the foils. To his credit, Hope refused to do the movie unless Lamar came on, so, even though Collins and Sellars kept their parts, she wound up with a massive cameo. They actually talked about doing one more somewhere around 1977, the year that Crosby died, one that featured the original team, including Lamar, on the Road to the Fountatin of Youth.
3) He Killed Live Radio, and Good for Him
Sure, Germany gave America the (Nazi) scientists who helped build the space program, but they also introduced the country - and Crosby - to tele-magnetic tape, a technology that finally allowed radio stations to broadcast radio-quality from recorded sources - starting with an early version of the 33 1/3 RPM records we’ve all come to love. Prior to that time, hosting a radio show meant doing shows live, and twice a day, one for Eastern Standard Time, the other for Western. (Very) Shortly after seeing the technology, Crosby started pushing to record his shows. When Kraft balked, he stayed off the air for seven months in 1945-46. The sides eventually settled, which allowed Crosby to bounce to CBS Radio, who were only too happy to let him pre-record his shows, so long as they got him. Bing liked it too:
“I could do a thirty-five or forty-minute show, then edit it down to the twenty-six or twenty-seven minutes the program ran. In that way, we could take out jokes, gags, or situations that didn't play well and finish with only the prime meat of the show; the solid stuff that played big. We could also take out the songs that didn't sound good. It gave us a chance to first try a recording of the songs in the afternoon without an audience, then another one in front of a studio audience. We'd dub the one that came off best into the final transcription. It gave us a chance to ad-lib as much as we wanted, knowing that excess ad-libbing could be sliced from the final product. If I made a mistake in singing a song or in the script, I could have some fun with it, then retain any of the fun that sounded amusing.”
I know I’m going on, but that’s fascinating. And Crosby made a killing: $30K/week, plus another $40K in licensing fees to all the radio affiliates who paid for those 33 1/3 discs. And that only adds to the mystery of the next bit...
4) Dirt, Part I
Crosby’s gambling addiction has to be the most baffling thing I read in (briefly) researching this. During his early years, especially, he piled up debts large enough for the Mafia to threaten his life and for him to beg friends and competitors - Frank Sinatra, among them - to ask for loans to cover his, apparently, ample losses. You’d like to think he got ahead of that at some point, and he golfed with big-name mobsters like Bugsy Segal and Frank Nitti…then again, Crosby was batshit about golf, apparently...
5) Dirt, Part II, The Big One
Based on what I’ve read, Bing Crosby almost certainly hit his kids, but it doesn’t sound like he full-on beat/abused them. [Ed. - I appreciate that’s a sliding standard, but I grew up with corporal punishment in both my home and school, and it operated on very clear “crime & punishment” standards and never crossed over into hitting outside that context.] The heat of the rumors came from an autobiography titled Going My Own Way by Crosby’s oldest son, Gary, which, based on the excerpts, chronicled some highly-specific forms of physical and verbal abuse. Going the other way, Crosby’s youngest, Phillip vociferously disputes that account (e.g., “Gary is a whining, bitching crybaby, walking around with a two-by-four on his shoulder and just daring people to nudge it off.”). By way of silence and corroboration, respectively, the two middle sons -Dennis and Lindsay, who were twins - confirmed Crosby was “strict” and “a disciplinarian,” but neither called it abuse, and both understood it as a part of the way he grew up (his mother was a strict Catholic, reportedly). That means Crosby married, of course, the woman in question was Dixie Lee, a rising actress when they married in 1930…at which time Bing was something (or a lot) of a playboy. When she bolted for Mexico and fresh air six months into the marriage, Crosby flew down to make amends and won her back. He even wrote a song for her: “I Surrender Dear.” She died young, from alcoholism, ovarian cancer, and perhaps neglect from Bing, but he missed her something awful, by all accounts.
That takes care of the story, now…
About the Sampler
I decided to start the sampler with a couple pieces from one of Bing Crosby’s radio shows - first, an introduction featuring the Andrews Sisters, then them singing “You Don’t Have to Know the Language” with Crosby, followed by two clips of audio between Bing and Nat King Cole, followed by “Sam’s Song,” a duet between the two. [Ed. - Couldn't find the same snippets on Youtube, sorry!]
It goes…somewhat chronologically from there. To pick up songs I haven’t already linked to above, I included early hits from his Whiteman days like “Changes” and “Ol’ Man River,” plus some that I think[Ed. - Nope!] are early like, “Moonlight Becomes You,” “I’ve Got a Pocket Full of Dreams,” “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” (which will tweak modern ears a bit), and, one of his biggest hits/the anthem of the Great Depression, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime.” It’s pretty much a grab-bag between there and “White Christmas” and the “Road to Morocco,” so I’ll just list them: “Jingle Bells,” “Dinah” with the Mills Brothers (another massive hit), “Wrap Your Troubles in a Dream (And Dream Your Troubles Away),” “Pistol Packin’ Mama,” “Shoo Shoo Baby,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and “Don’t Fence Me In.”
I fully appreciate how long this has gone on, but I wanted to note two more things. A kind of relentless and loose optimism was a massive part of Bing’s appeal - something you’ll hear in most of the song’s above. For what it’s worth, I find him hard to listen to for the same reason: even if I know it’s not, it all sounds like the different versions of the same six songs after a while. Still, it took reading a stray passage I heard or read (can't remember the source right now) to appreciate his biggest innovation as a performer: his approach to phrasing. The arrival of amplified sound (e.g., microphones, speakers, etc.) meant he no longer had to project to the back of the room - they called it “belting” back in the day - and that gave Bing Crosby more freedom to control pitch and volume as he sang. That freed him to interpret the meaning of the lyrics into the song, to almost literally perform them as if reciting poetry to music. That style became the standard, even if the tens of singers who imitated him, and the thousands who carried that standard forward, couldn’t sing half as well as he could.
That’s plenty for this one. Like trying to shave a couple thousand feet off Mt. Everest, I tell you. Till the next one...
Crosby first met Hope in 1932 at New York City's Capitol Theater, where the latter served as MC and the latter showed up as talent. They clicked almost immediately and would form a duo that played in every medium and every venue - up to including filling intermissions between races at the Del Mar Racetrack (in which they both held partial ownership) and years of entertaining the troops overseas (Crosby got caught behind enemy lines once during the Battle of the Bulge). They took very much the same routine to the big screen in the famous “Road movies” starting with Road to Singapore in 1940. Though working with a normal cast - including a female character who gadded about with them in every movie, played by Dorothy Lamar - Crosby and Hope ad-libbed almost all of the scenes, much like during Crosby’s days in Sennett’s film shorts. While the main run ran through 1952 (the year Road to Bali) came out, Crosby and Hope reunited for another in 1962, The Road to Hong Kong. To dish (the first of) a little dirt, Crosby pushed to keep Lamar out of the project, arguing she was too old for the part; someone had already hired Joan Collins and Peter Sellars for the foils. To his credit, Hope refused to do the movie unless Lamar came on, so, even though Collins and Sellars kept their parts, she wound up with a massive cameo. They actually talked about doing one more somewhere around 1977, the year that Crosby died, one that featured the original team, including Lamar, on the Road to the Fountatin of Youth.
3) He Killed Live Radio, and Good for Him
Sure, Germany gave America the (Nazi) scientists who helped build the space program, but they also introduced the country - and Crosby - to tele-magnetic tape, a technology that finally allowed radio stations to broadcast radio-quality from recorded sources - starting with an early version of the 33 1/3 RPM records we’ve all come to love. Prior to that time, hosting a radio show meant doing shows live, and twice a day, one for Eastern Standard Time, the other for Western. (Very) Shortly after seeing the technology, Crosby started pushing to record his shows. When Kraft balked, he stayed off the air for seven months in 1945-46. The sides eventually settled, which allowed Crosby to bounce to CBS Radio, who were only too happy to let him pre-record his shows, so long as they got him. Bing liked it too:
“I could do a thirty-five or forty-minute show, then edit it down to the twenty-six or twenty-seven minutes the program ran. In that way, we could take out jokes, gags, or situations that didn't play well and finish with only the prime meat of the show; the solid stuff that played big. We could also take out the songs that didn't sound good. It gave us a chance to first try a recording of the songs in the afternoon without an audience, then another one in front of a studio audience. We'd dub the one that came off best into the final transcription. It gave us a chance to ad-lib as much as we wanted, knowing that excess ad-libbing could be sliced from the final product. If I made a mistake in singing a song or in the script, I could have some fun with it, then retain any of the fun that sounded amusing.”
I know I’m going on, but that’s fascinating. And Crosby made a killing: $30K/week, plus another $40K in licensing fees to all the radio affiliates who paid for those 33 1/3 discs. And that only adds to the mystery of the next bit...
4) Dirt, Part I
Crosby’s gambling addiction has to be the most baffling thing I read in (briefly) researching this. During his early years, especially, he piled up debts large enough for the Mafia to threaten his life and for him to beg friends and competitors - Frank Sinatra, among them - to ask for loans to cover his, apparently, ample losses. You’d like to think he got ahead of that at some point, and he golfed with big-name mobsters like Bugsy Segal and Frank Nitti…then again, Crosby was batshit about golf, apparently...
5) Dirt, Part II, The Big One
Based on what I’ve read, Bing Crosby almost certainly hit his kids, but it doesn’t sound like he full-on beat/abused them. [Ed. - I appreciate that’s a sliding standard, but I grew up with corporal punishment in both my home and school, and it operated on very clear “crime & punishment” standards and never crossed over into hitting outside that context.] The heat of the rumors came from an autobiography titled Going My Own Way by Crosby’s oldest son, Gary, which, based on the excerpts, chronicled some highly-specific forms of physical and verbal abuse. Going the other way, Crosby’s youngest, Phillip vociferously disputes that account (e.g., “Gary is a whining, bitching crybaby, walking around with a two-by-four on his shoulder and just daring people to nudge it off.”). By way of silence and corroboration, respectively, the two middle sons -Dennis and Lindsay, who were twins - confirmed Crosby was “strict” and “a disciplinarian,” but neither called it abuse, and both understood it as a part of the way he grew up (his mother was a strict Catholic, reportedly). That means Crosby married, of course, the woman in question was Dixie Lee, a rising actress when they married in 1930…at which time Bing was something (or a lot) of a playboy. When she bolted for Mexico and fresh air six months into the marriage, Crosby flew down to make amends and won her back. He even wrote a song for her: “I Surrender Dear.” She died young, from alcoholism, ovarian cancer, and perhaps neglect from Bing, but he missed her something awful, by all accounts.
That takes care of the story, now…
About the Sampler
I decided to start the sampler with a couple pieces from one of Bing Crosby’s radio shows - first, an introduction featuring the Andrews Sisters, then them singing “You Don’t Have to Know the Language” with Crosby, followed by two clips of audio between Bing and Nat King Cole, followed by “Sam’s Song,” a duet between the two. [Ed. - Couldn't find the same snippets on Youtube, sorry!]
It goes…somewhat chronologically from there. To pick up songs I haven’t already linked to above, I included early hits from his Whiteman days like “Changes” and “Ol’ Man River,” plus some that I think[Ed. - Nope!] are early like, “Moonlight Becomes You,” “I’ve Got a Pocket Full of Dreams,” “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” (which will tweak modern ears a bit), and, one of his biggest hits/the anthem of the Great Depression, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime.” It’s pretty much a grab-bag between there and “White Christmas” and the “Road to Morocco,” so I’ll just list them: “Jingle Bells,” “Dinah” with the Mills Brothers (another massive hit), “Wrap Your Troubles in a Dream (And Dream Your Troubles Away),” “Pistol Packin’ Mama,” “Shoo Shoo Baby,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and “Don’t Fence Me In.”
I fully appreciate how long this has gone on, but I wanted to note two more things. A kind of relentless and loose optimism was a massive part of Bing’s appeal - something you’ll hear in most of the song’s above. For what it’s worth, I find him hard to listen to for the same reason: even if I know it’s not, it all sounds like the different versions of the same six songs after a while. Still, it took reading a stray passage I heard or read (can't remember the source right now) to appreciate his biggest innovation as a performer: his approach to phrasing. The arrival of amplified sound (e.g., microphones, speakers, etc.) meant he no longer had to project to the back of the room - they called it “belting” back in the day - and that gave Bing Crosby more freedom to control pitch and volume as he sang. That freed him to interpret the meaning of the lyrics into the song, to almost literally perform them as if reciting poetry to music. That style became the standard, even if the tens of singers who imitated him, and the thousands who carried that standard forward, couldn’t sing half as well as he could.
That’s plenty for this one. Like trying to shave a couple thousand feet off Mt. Everest, I tell you. Till the next one...
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