The Book on Bing Crosby

Mike Connor (Frank Sinatra): I have heard, among this clan/ You are called the forgotten man.
C. K. Dexter Haven (Bing Crosby): Is that what they’re sayin’? Well, did you evah?/ What a swell party this is.

This musical badinage, from the film “High Society,” refers to the Bing Crosby character, a Newport aristocrat on the outs with his fellow swells. But it might also refer to the status, then and now, of the original Groaner. In the early ’30s Crosby had created, or certainly synthesized, the craft and tone of modern pop vocalizing. The summer of 1956, however, when “High Society” premiered, was the sweltering season of “Hound Dog.” Genteel warbling of the Crosby stripe was two generations passé. First it was supplanted by Sinatra’s aggressive poignance; then it expired in the steam Elvis’ and Little Richard’s Afro- eroticism. At 53, Crosby had become a superstar emeritus, a genial irrelevance, a golfer and a duffer — the Ike of pop music.

Since then, Crosby’s star has not disappeared, but it has dimmed. In “The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz,” a standard reference, Crosby gets less space than his younger brother Bob, who fronted a Dixieland band in the ’30s and beyond, and who may be the only bandleader of the time who could not play an instrument. Bing is hardly to be seen in Ken Burns’ 19-hour documentary “Jazz,” though he employed many jazz masters on his records and radio shows, and teamed with Louis Armstrong more often than any star except Bob Hope. Ask people over 40 to describe Crosby in a few words, and the words might be “crooner,” “White Christmas,” “toupee,” “Bob Hope and the ‘Road’ movies” and perhaps, thanks to a rancorous autobiography by his son Gary, “child beater.” Which is about as fair as remembering Eisenhower the golfer and forgetting Eisenhower the top general of World War II.

Not that Crosby would care. His worldview was famously imperturbable (say the word as Bing would, with the blowfish p’s and b’s). He’d most likely respond to the rare slur or setback with a blithe “Well, did you evah?” Crosby’s last words, before the heart attack that killed him in 1977, at the conclusion of a foursome on a Madrid course, were “That was a great game of golf, fellas.”

Even in 1956, it was still a swell party for Bing: “True Love,” another song from “High Society,” gave him a No. 3 hit and a gold record (his 21st). And in his duet with Sinatra, he teaches Young Blue Eyes a thing or two about the ease of musical and movie-star mastery. “Well, Did You Evah,” an old Cole Porter tune dusted off for the occasion, is a clever thrust-and-parry duet, and Crosby effortlessly gets in the best jabs. In one bridge he ends the phrase “baba au rhum” with his trademark “bu-bu-bu-bu-bum.” When Sinatra sing-snarls, “Don’t dig that kind a croonin’, chum,” Crosby speaks his response with a withering vagueness, “You must be one of the newer fellas.” The Crosby-Sinatra animosity is, of course, all banter — the Hope-Crosby rivalry set to bubbly music — and exquisitely realized.

By the way, none of these asides appears in the published text (as printed in “The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter”). Like so many of the “ad libs” in the “Road” movies, these were doubtless carefully devised by Bing and his writing team. But the point was never that the gags should be spontaneous; it was that they should seem spontaneous — the little inspiration that springs from conviviality, a modernist, ironic commentary on trivial proceedings, a way to keep the performers fresh and make the audience believe they were in on a verbal jam session — improvs that achieve a casual perfection. And that’s Bing.

The Most
In 1956, then, Crosby was in the late summer of perhaps the most popular and enduring career of any American entertainer of the 20th century. As Gary Giddins notes in his comprehensive critical biography “Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams, The Early Years, 1903-1940” (Little, Brown; $30) Crosby notched an unequaled number of milestones: most No. 1 records ever; and most records on the American pop charts (nearly twice as many as Sinatra).

Did we mention that he made the most popular record ever? “White Christmas” was on the charts every year but one between 1941 and 1962. And we’ll bet you heard it more in the last few months than the official all-time top seller, “Candles in the Wind.” The success of the Elton John disc was due to a convulsive spasm of Di-die worship; Der Bingle singing Berlin is, better or worse, for the ages.

Giddins enumerates a few Crosby firsts you may not have known. When he joined Paul Whiteman in 1927 he became the first full-time vocalist signed to an orchestra. In 1946 he presented the first transcribed radio show and thus, according to Giddins, “single-handedly changed radio from a live-performance to a canned or recorded medium.” Crosby also “financed and popularized the development of tape, revolutionizing the recording industry.”

Still, this towering stack of popular and technical distinctions would not have spurred Giddins — jazz critic of The Village Voice, author of “Visions of Jazz: The First Century” and the commentator who logs the most time on the recent Ken Burns project — to spend a decade researching and writing a 728-page study that takes Crosby only 15 years into a half-century career. (The book ends with “Road to Singapore,” Bing’s first movie with Bob Hope; volume two will cover the big movie years, “White Christmas,” his second family and charges of son-whupping, which in interviews Giddins has minimized.)

But put aside the imposing stats. Giddins is impressed by Crosby’s importance in the history of pop singing, his talent for vocal nuance and lyric-reading; rather than a bland stylist, the first easy-listening star, Crosby is promoted as, in Artie Shaw’s words, “the first hip white person born in the United States.” To Giddins, Bing was more. He embodied an attractive prototype: the casual, unflappable American, at ease in his eminence, who faces life with equanimity, win or lose — but who always wins. Giddins also dares to admire the fullness, longevity and ease of Crosby’s success: “He taught the world what it meant to live the American common man’s dream.”

The Best?
Harry Lillis Crosby (his nickname came from a newspaper comic, “The Bingville Bugle”) took a while to go solo. He was half, then a third, of a Whiteman vocal group called The Rhythm Boys; the other two were Bing’s Spokane, Wash., buddy Al Rinker and singer-songwriter Harry Barris (“Mississippi Mud,” “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams”). A novelty act, mixing smooth and hot vocals, jaunty and racy lyrics (the chipper miscegenation song “When the Bluebirds and the Blackbirds Get Together”), the Boys leavened the stately syncopation of Whiteman’s repertoire. When Pops went to Hollywood for the 1930 musical extravagance “King of Jazz,” they went along — though Crosby had to commute to the set from jail, where he was working off a month’s sentence for drunk driving. (He weaned himself from this addiction and replaced it with golf.)

Within a year, Bing was on his own and a star, perhaps the first star in a new galaxy. He broke the tradition of stentorian tenors, whose big voices and melodramatic high notes were needed to fill the concert halls and vaudeville houses. Crosby recognized the intimacy of the plug-in media: radio, records and the new talking pictures. His voice — music critic Henry Pleasants described it as “microgenic” — was made for the studio mike. With a mellow baritone that got richer as it aged, he gave an FM sonority to AM radio. It was a modern, all- American sound; as Crosby’s record producer Ken Barnes said, “Bing cut the silver cord to Europe.”

Giddins works overtime to give Bing his props and chops. He sees the Crosby style as an extension and domestication of Armstrong’s pioneering, growling scatmanship. He notes that in 1927 Bing haunted the Chicago boîtes where Satch was wowing the hip world with his innovations as a trumpeter and vocalist; and that the Rhythm Boys often interpolated scat, as comic relief, in their tunes.

All true. But Crosby’s early delivery has even more insistent echoes of Al Jolson’s, with its declamatory style and its tendency to end on an orgasmic high note (though Bing tended to moo his glissandi, where Jolson went “mwaaa”). Apparently skeptical of the appeal of his natural baritone, he forced it up into the familiar tenor range. It took a while for him to realize that the bu-bu-bu- boos were original, natural and, to his widening audience, deeply satisfying. It was also wonderfully adaptable to the musical genres he would investigate for the rest of his career: Irish songs, cowboy ditties and hymns, as well as the standard Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood pop of the day.

Giddins is an engaging, even seductive writer — a terrific synthesizer who makes passionate arguments sensible. His take on Crosby’s movies is knowledgeable, always erring (if this can be called an error) on the positive side. Bing may not be a true jazz singer, but Giddins makes a jazz symphony of his early life and career. “A Pocketful of Dreams” is an inspired improv on the familiar materials of that life; a righteous riff, with footnotes. The book makes Crosby hip by association, not with Armstrong, but with Giddins.

The Voice
The book makes an argument familiar to all proselytizing critics. Crosby, Giddins says, isn’t like all those people you don’t like (like Al Jolson); he’s like those people you like (Armstrong, Sinatra, Elvis). And, oddly, the argument is just about convincing. Crosby did indeed learn from Louis — a debt he would gleefully repay with dozens of recorded duets, frequent invitations to Armstrong to appear on “Kraft Music Hall” and the securing of star billing for Armstrong in Crosby’s 1936 film “Pennies from Heaven” (at the time a rare plum for a black performer).

If Bing helped Louis, he could be said to have given artistic birth to a generation of singing stars; baritones were the almost exclusive rage for the next two decades. Specifically, his example taught Sinatra that the pulp poetry in a good lyric could be enriched by honoring it, and showed Presley how the low range for his ballads could be as sexy as the squalling tenor of his rockabilly.

In the Presley era and beyond, stars made an impact by going too far, by affronting community propriety (when the community still had propriety), by translating the lewd and the crude into popular art. Bing was just the reverse. He didn’t outrage or astonish; he reassured. He was not on the edge; he created a new middle, which always should have existed but didn’t until he eased into it. Imagine that, far into the history of food — say, around 1930 — someone had come up with the potato. That was the eureka element to Crosby’s relaxed style. He was Everyman singing in the shower, or Everyman as he thought he sounded there. If it is a considerable achievement to rebel against the prevailing standard, surely it is a greater one to create that standard. Bing didn’t break the mold; he made it.

Part Two: Bing in the Movies