Bing Crosby Page 10
In 1830 a showman named Joel W. Sweeney perfected and popularized the modern banjo, an instrument he had learned to play from slaves on his father’s Virginia plantation; it would become minstrelsy’s dominant instrument. That same year, Thomas “Daddy” Rice happened to see a black Louisville stablehand do a whirling dance while singing about a character named Jim Crow; Rice made off with the step and the song, and embarked on a prominent career. For the sake of authenticity, Rice also blacked his face with cork, a custom that lasted a century — until the introduction of Pan-Cake makeup, which facilitated the tradition just as it was drawing to an end. (Cork was arduous to remove, and the pros soon learned to use soap and cold water only, as warm water or cream pressed it into the pores like gunshot.)
The first successful blackface company, the Virginia Minstrels, debuted in New York in 1843. (One of its four members, Dan Emmett, would later adapt a black melody for his most durable song, “Dixie.”) The next year, 1844, William Henry Lane, a black trick dancer who performed under the name Master Juba, humbled the popular “Ethiopian imitators” in a dancing competition. It did him no good: the blacked-up imitators dominated minstrelsy in the decades before Reconstruction, rallying American songwriting to its first ereative and commercial peak. That summit was symbolized in 1848 by the publication of Stephen Fosters “Oh! Susanna,” described by cultural historian Constance Rourke as “a fiddler’s tune with a Negro beat and a touch of pathos in the melody.” 16
Minstrelsy was a theatrical mode premised upon the conceit that slave life could be illuminated and prettified by a gallery of grotesques. Its performers had to balance parodic intent with sincere imitation. Caricatures became standardized: the shiftless plantation layabout, Jim Crow; the fatuous urban dandy, Zip Coon; the addled pickaninny, Sambo. Yet many minstrels thought of themselves as actors communicating truths about Negro life, as if the stereotypes were roles as valid as Othello and Aida. 17 In time, the caricatures took on lives of their own, removed from the original intent. “The function of this mythology,” Ralph Ellison observed, “was to allow whites a more secure place (if only symbolically) in American society.” 18 But for the last generation of white blackface performers, the Negro-ness was all but forgotten. Bob Hope, who did a blackface act in vaudeville, said of the genre’s passing, “People thought they were making fun of blacks, but it was just a way of playing characters, you know? Minstrel shows were very large. At one theater where I was playing and getting very little money, I got to the theater late and I didn’t have time to put the black on and so I walked out with my regular face. After the show, the theater manager came back and said, ‘Don’t put that stuff on your face, You got a face that saves jokes.’ In those days, you did blackface but you downplayed the minstrel aspect.” 19
In the mid-nineteenth century, as Stephen Foster and other songwriters improved the musical fare, crude dialect songs were replaced by a genteel but equally pernicious type of song, expressing yearnings for the protective hand of dear ol’ massa. After the Civil War the minstrel palette became much broader. “If the Negro was set free,” Constance Rourke realized, “in a fashion his white impersonators were also liberated.” 20 With other minorities streaming into the country, minstrel conventions broadened to include caricaturing Italians, Irish, Jews, Germans, Dutch, Scottish, Indians, Chinese (Asians provided the most durable actors’ mask of all) 21 — any group sufficiently different or mysterious enough to warrant parodic deflation. Even women, long imitated by male actors, were invited to participate, although female impersonators never lost their box-office seduction. “In fantasy, the American types seemed to be joining in a single semblance,” Rourke wrote. “But Negro music and Negro nonsense still prevailed,” 22
At its height, minstrelsy was a stylized, codified, and even ritualized variety show. At center stage was the stout announcer, Mr. Interlocutor, who kibitzed with the end-men comics, Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones. Between them sat the company — as many as seventy men in the larger companies, all corked, bewigged, and attired in loud, mockingly overstated costumes. After an introductory segment of jokes and songs, the olio (variety acts) got under way, presenting dancers, singers, mimics, monologists, sketches, mini-plays, guest performers, and so on. The climax was a walk-around finale, when the entire company let loose on unison banjos or tambourines for a rousing send-off. As an idiom that squelched individuality, minstrelsy inevitably inspired fantasies about disguise. Jolson’s film Mammy concerns a murderer hiding out in a minstrel troupe. (Well, Officer, he had coal black skin, a huge mouth, kinky hair, and white gloves.) In The Jolson Story Al gets his big break by impersonating another performer who can’t go on; no one notices the substitution. In dozens of Hollywood comedies, many starring Bugs Bunny, a faceful of soot triggers a total racial makeover. Before Bing can scrub black paint off his face in Mack Sennett’s Dream House, a black director hires him as a black actor.
Doppelgàngers are at the heart of minstrelsy. Over time, they had a baleful influence: people confused racist stereotypes with real people, and those images remained rife in pop culture — especially Hollywood — well into the 1970s. In the short run, though, minstrelsy was considered a boon to the abolitionist movement. It humanized blacks for many whites who didn’t know any, undermining the assumptions of barbarism by caricaturing them as sentimental, clever, funny, pompous, stupid, and sexual — human. Minstrelsy embodied a subversive idea, that the distinctions between black and white ran no deeper than a layer of greasepaint. Hidden behind an impenetrably inky disguise, performers were permitted a certain liberality from puritanical constraints, underscored by the nattering horse laugh “yuk, yuk, yuk.” After Reconstruction, black troupes were as plentiful as white ones and introduced scores of actors and musicians into show business. They created their own kinds of satire and softened the more abhorrent clichés, greatly influencing succeeding generations of white minstrels. Jolson’s alter ego, Gus, is offensive as caricature but is invariably the smartest and gentlest character in the drama; foolish whites are lost without him. In Bombo Gus shows Columbus the way to the New World and wins a Moorish princess in the bargain.
The minstrel show was the first unifying form of entertainment America ever knew. Like the circus, the coming of a minstrel troupe was an event, but minstrels — undeterred by the seasons — appeared more frequently than the circus. Not unlike radio or TV, minstrelsy spread the same jokes, songs, dance steps, parodies, puns, and novelties all over the country. Its humor proved deathless: Why did the chicken cross the road? Who was that lady I saw you with last night? By the time the form began to morph into burlesque and vaudeville, many individual stars had emerged. To the comically melancholy black entertainer Bert Williams, cork was an indignity he was forced to accept as the cost of integrating the Ziegfeld Follies. White performers could afford to be more sanguine. No one who witnessed the graceful Eddie Leonard gliding across the stage singing “Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider” or Eddie Cantor leaping about like a rabbit in a shooting gallery thought of them as impersonators of Negro life. Minstrelsy had become a conduit for the American style. 23 It was buoyant, irreverent, outlandish, and voiced with an oddly alloyed accent that was widely construed as southern.
Bing was enamored of many things southern, personally as well as professionally; he married two southern belles. His longtime buddy Phil Harris used as a theme song “That’s What I Like About the South,” which comically enumerates the specifics. Bing liked the whole effect, the mystique, the humor, the songs, the speech cadences that chimed well with his bottom notes and vocal affectations. As the character Crosby plays in the movie Birth of the Blues tells his disapproving father: “Southern music makes you feel like the circus is coming to town.” He found inspiration in the South, in the first recordings by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and the Mound City Blue Blowers, and more profoundly in the triumphant art of transplanted southern blacks, most particularly Louis Armstrong.
To Bing’s generation, southern was a synonym for black: this
was blatantly the case in songs by Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer, and others — a euphemistic way of saying that the American style of music sweeping the world was rooted in a slave culture. The very cosmopolitan dancer Florence Mills, whom Duke Ellington eulogized in his stride nocturne “Black Beauty,” made the case succinctly in the title of her 1926 touring show: Dixie to Broadway.
On the occasion of Bing’s fiftieth anniversary in show business, an event extolled with a 1975 television special but not by the recording industry he had helped save from extinction, he led a small jazz ensemble into a studio, at his expense, to record the rarely heard LP A Southern Memoir. But whose memories were they? For the young Crosby, Dixie was a state of mind and his passport was the faded but inveterately popular minstrel show, which helped bolster his determination to venture beyond his immediate domain. However intuitive and urbane Bing’s understanding of jazz, he never lost his adolescent affection for the dese, dose, yowsuh, yuk-yuk relics of southernness ritualized in minstrelsy. His recorded performances are rife with words, airs, and slurred inflections that bespeak the show-business customs of his youth. They were especially apparent when he performed with his favorite southern singers, like Connie Boswell. Their 1940 record “Yes Indeed” begins with repartee:
Bing: Now has you got it, sister Constance? Tell me, has you got it?
Connie: Whoayeah, I got it, brother Bingstance. Now you knows I got it.
Bing: Now has you got that rhythm in you, hmmm?
“Yes Indeed,” characteristically enough, was a gospel-influenced pop tune written by the highly sophisticated, black northern orchestrator Sy Oliver for the white northern bandleader Tommy Dorsey It was no more southern than the dozens, if not hundreds, of southern songs turned out by Tin Pan Alley during Jolson’s glory years. Gerald Marks, the northerner who wrote “Is It True What They Say About Dixie?,” observed, “In those days, New York songwriters wrote about the South because they had a guy who knew how to sing ’em. All those mammies were written by songwriters who never went south of Fourteenth Street. But the minute Jolson got off his knees and left the Wintergarden Theater, the era of southern songs was done for.” 24
The minstrel style was thriving in various offshoots when Bing latched onto the entertainment world. The first broadcast variety show featured Dailey Paskman’s Radio Minstrels, in 1924; radio’s real triumph was certified five years later with the appearance of Amos ‘n’Andy. Bing’s audience would follow him into the modern world of ballad crooning and jazz while sharing his nostalgia for the old style. Bing appeared in blackface or drag (the minstrelsy of gender bending) in several pictures. Even his loquacious banter, including the lightning exchanges of insults perfected with Bob Hope, was rooted in the verbal contest between minstrelsy’s sly end man and the oratorical ringmaster. Bing was equally content to play the lackadaisical Mr. Bones or the inflated Interlocutor.
Gonzaga productions were occasions for fellowship, acceptable impiety, and escape, and Bing often took part. At a second-semester charity bazaar, he and his class erected a tepee and raffled Indian blankets in redface while his mother helped stock and supervise the tearoom. In April, in his own face, Bing and another boy sang solos at the annual Gonzaga Night, held at the Knights of Columbus Hall. Music was provided by the Dizzy Seven, a Gonzaga High School band that had caught Bing’s ear. Having already begun to study drums, he was chosen as one of three drummers (Leo Lynn, his future right-hand man, was another) for the Gonzaga band, playing assemblies and sporting events. Soon he began sitting in with the younger kids who made up the Dizzy Seven, though he did not sing with the group.
The pianist with the Dizzy Seven on Gonzaga Night was a high-school senior, Arthur Dussault, who would develop a long-lived, influential relationship with Bing. Dussault had come to Gonzaga in 1920 from Montana. He was the same age as Bing, and so (not having been enrolled in elementary school prematurely) was one grade behind. Dussault first noticed Bing during a football game between the high-school JYA and an unofficial frosh team, which made a lot of noise about teaching them a thing or two but lost. Writing about the game years later, he recalled that Bing played center with startling toughness, considering his small size, winning respect from the other kids. “He had what it took and could give as well as take.” 25 In many ways they were opposites. Like Frank Corkery, Dussault was bound for the priesthood, ordained in 1935. He was president of his class, a fabled football hero, and an exemplary student. He had little interest in jazz or dance music, preferring to play organ for the student choir and Gonzaga’s orchestra. Bing and Art were never close friends, but their admiration for each other developed in the Dizzy Seven (aka the Juicy Seven) as they lumbered through stock arrangements at school dances. A friend described them as “equals, both strong-willed.” 26 Dussault would serve Gonzaga as athletic director, glee club director, dean of men, public-relations director, and vice president; he was called Mr. Gonzaga. A successor remarked, “He was the most honest man I’ve ever known and an ideal contact for Bing — as was Father Corkery.” 27 One of his duties was to enhance ties with the school’s most celebrated alumnus, and he succeeded to the point of extracting nearly a million dollars. In so doing, he became something of a Crosby family confessor.
Shortly after publication of Barry Ulanov’s 1948 biography The Incredible Crosby, Father Art wrote down his remembrances of the first time Bing made his mark singing at Gonzaga. Ulanov had rendered the incident from Kate’s point of view, which Dussault dismissed as poetic license, for “Mrs. Catherine Crosby (whom I knew well) was never in our chapel.” 28 He remembered the date as December 8, 1922, a holy day of obligation — the Immaculate Conception, a holiday that required Catholic boys to attend mass. For Dussault and about 200 other boarders, that meant the school chapel. Though Bing lived only a block away, he was obliged as a day scholar to attend St. Aloysius.
Art was chosen to ask him to attend the chapel instead, in order to add his voice to a three-part hymn, “Panis Angelicus.” The boys thought Bing’s baritone would blend with the high tenor (a student) and bass (“Hair-More” Gilmore). Art also hoped he would sing with the choir and take the solo at Communion on “Oh Lord, I Am Not Worthy,” a hymn all the boys knew. Bing was reluctant at first, but Art, who was to accompany him on organ, persuaded him: he was going to church anyway, so why not attend a congregation that would consist only of fellow students? Besides, here was a way to please “his many warm friends among the boarders.” Bing agreed to give it a try. “Of course, when he soloed, which was really impressive,” Dussault wrote, “a goodly number of prayer-goers looked around to see who was soloing.”
Bing’s immediate reward was an invitation to breakfast with the boarders, the first of many as he made several subsequent appearances at the chapel on feast days, invariably singing a solo. “Bing sang nice,” Dussault recalled, “but in a different sort of way.” 29 He usually sang the Communion hymn and then joined in with the trio, navigating between tenor and bass with his supple voice. Dussault recalled as particularly beautiful the trio’s harmonizing on “Ave Maris Stella No. 2,” by A. H. Roseweig (from his collection Concentus Sacri). He believed those performances boosted Bing’s confidence.
Bing received another shot of inspiration the summer after his freshman year, when he worked as prop boy at the Auditorium and Jolson made his second visit to Spokane. Bing had been fourteen the first time Jolson passed through; he was eighteen when Sinbad played two nights in town. “[Jolson] was amazing,” Bing said. “He could go way up high and take a soft note, or belt it, and he could go way down. He really had a fabulous set of pipes, this fella.” 30 He spoke of unconsciously imitating Al and of the lessons he learned: “I got an awful lot of mannerisms and I guess you could say idiosyncracies [from Jolson] — singing traits and characteristics and delivery.” 31 Bing marveled at how he seemed to personally reach each member of the audience, a feat for which Bing would be credited as a radio crooner. But the difference between working live and electronically was n
ot lost on him. If Bing was inspired by Jolson, he was also humbled. He nursed the lifelong conviction that he could not really hold a stage, not like Jolie. “I’m not an electrifying performer at all,” he cautioned one admirer. “I just sing a few little songs. But this man could really galvanize an audience into a frenzy. He could really tear them apart.” 32
Yet they had much in common. Jolson, notorious for his braggadocio (he once followed Caruso with his trademark line, ’You ain’t heard nothin’yet!”), had once lacked confidence and found it when an older player advised him to try blackface. It worked: “You looked and felt like a performer,” he said. 33 A conspicuous bravado, albeit greatly toned down, was no less crucial to Bing’s first Hollywood persona, that of the extremely assured if somewhat petulant Romeo who never merely wins a girl but steals her from another. Like Bing, Jolson was of average height, with thinning hair and a weight problem. Al perfected the pseudosouthern slur to the degree that critic John Crosby (no relation to Bing) observed, “He managed to eliminate consonants almost entirely.” 34 The formidable Ethel Waters, who shared Bing’s admiration for Jolson, could not help but parody his inflections: “From the day he first stepped on a stage, Jolie always sang as though he expected the next note to be his last ‘wah wah’ or ‘bebee mine’ or ‘I loav you, honeh, loav, loav you’ or ‘Californyah, heah I come, Golden Gate/” 35 Jolson was a baritone who scaled tenor highs and plumbed bass lows, as Bing would, but reigned during an era when most popular singers — Billy Murray, Nick Lucas, Gene Austin — were tenors, often effeminate or sexually ambiguous. The bond between Jolson and Crosby would be strengthened in the years ahead by songwriters, including James Monaco, Buddy DeSylva, and Irving Berlin, who crafted Jolson’s signature hits and also played prominent roles in Bing’s career. In the end, the tables turned, as Jolson learned from Bing how to handle ballads and exploit recording devices.