Bing Crosby Read online

  The great cultural critic Constance Rourke identified the three regional stereotypes of nineteenth-century American humor as the Yankee, the backwoodsman, and the minstrel. 13 Bing remains the only entertainer to embody all three, producing in the bargain a twentieth-century composite, often described in his day as the Common Man. Bing’s discography, a compilation of 1,668 songs (not including hundreds more he sang on radio), is astonishingly comprehensive. It enfolds the Yankee’s Tin Pan Alley, the backwoodsman’s western laments, and the minstrel’s Old South ballads. It explores every idiom, class, and precinct of American song, from hymns, anthems, spirituals, and novelties to Hawaiian, Irish, light opera, and r&b; he even took a fling at rock ‘n’ roll. No other performer’s catalog is comparable.

  During his most prominent years, from 1934 to 1954, Crosby held a nearly unrivaled command over all three key entertainment media, racking up legendary phonograph sales, radio ratings, and motion-picture grosses. At no time was he marketed to one generation or faction of the audience. He may have begun as a Jazz Age emoter for the College Humor set, but by the mid-thirties, he was America’s troubadour. Bing’s influence can be heard in the work of numerous singers in diverse idioms, including Armstrong, whose first foray into popular songs in 1929 was in part a response to Bing’s achievement, Jimmy Rushing, Connie Boswell, Perry Como, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Wakely, Roy Rogers, Herb Jeffries, Billy Eckstine, B. B. King, Mel Tormé, Ella Fitzgerald, Rosemary Clooney, Johnny Hartman, Tony Bennett, Ruth Brown, Dean Martin, Ray Charles, and Elvis Presley, who recorded more than a dozen of Crosby’s signature hits. Instrumentalists from Jimmy Dorsey to Sonny Rollins have attempted to mimic a semblance of the Crosby cry.

  Popular culture, like sports, is beset with statistics, a fixation on chart and box-office rankings, grosses and salaries, and prizes. But whereas sports statistics live forever, pop stats are ultimately transitory and meaningless — no recitation of past sales figures can incline us to listen to Billy Murray records or to read Lloyd C. Douglas novels or to buy Walter Keane paintings. The only pop stats that continue to matter involve artists who continue to matter.

  It is impossible to regard Bing Crosby as a historical figure without considering some of his statistics. If nothing else, they reveal his dominance over popular entertainment from Prohibition until the mid-1950s, when his decline as the nation’s preeminent muse was signaled by the comeback of a newly charged Sinatra and the arrival of Elvis — the former marketed to adults, the latter to their children. During Crosby’s reign, that split did not exist.

  He was the first full-time vocalist ever signed to an orchestra.

  He made more studio recordings than any other singer in history (about 400 more than Sinatra).

  He made the most popular record ever, “White Christmas,” the only single to make American pop charts twenty times, every year but one between 1942 and 1962. 14 In 1998, after a long absence, his 1947 version hit the charts in Britain.

  Between 1927 and 1962 he scored 368 charted records under his own name, plus twenty-eight as vocalist with various bandleaders, for a total of 396. No one else has come close; compare Paul Whiteman (220), Sinatra (209), Elvis (149), Glenn Miller (129), Nat “King” Cole (118), Louis Armstrong (85), the Beatles (68).

  He scored the most number one hits ever, thirty-eight, compared with twenty-four by the Beatles and eighteen by Presley.

  In 1960 he received a platinum record as First Citizen of the Record Industry for having sold 200 million discs, a number that doubled by 1980.

  Between 1915 and 1980 he was the only motion-picture star to rank as the number one box-office attraction five times (1944-48). 15 Between 1934 and 1954 he scored in the top ten fifteen times.

  Going My Way was the highest-grossing film in the history of Paramount Pictures until 1947; The Bells of St. Mary’s was the highest grossing film in the history of RKO Pictures until 1947.

  He was nominated for an Academy Award for best actor three times and won for Going My Way.

  He was a major radio star longer than any other performer, from 1931 until 1954 on network, 1954 until 1962 in syndication.

  He appeared on approximately 4,000 radio broadcasts, nearly 3,400 of them his own programs, and single-handedly changed radio from a live performance to a canned or recorded medium by presenting, in 1946, the first transcribed network show on ABC — thereby making that also-ran network a major force.

  He financed and popularized the development of tape, revolutionizing the recording industry.

  He created the first and longest-running celebrity pro-am golf championship, playing host for thirty-five years, raising millions in charity, and was the central figure in the development of the Del Mar racetrack in California. 16

  * * *

  Such reckonings count for little and would mean nothing at all if Crosby’s art did not merit rediscovery. He was, first and foremost, a masterly, innovative musician — an untrained vocalist of natural charm and robust power with impeccable instincts about phrasing and tempo. He pared away the rococo mannerisms of bygone theatrical styles in favor of the clean melodic line. Lyricists thought him a godsend because he not only articulated words but also underscored their meaning. Crosby, who never learned to read music and could play no instrument except rudimentary drums, had an apparently photographic and audiographic memory. He had only to hear a song to know it.

  As an actor, Crosby broke the rules. He was the antithesis of a Hollywood matinee idol — small and average-looking with outsize ears, thin lips, pointed jaw, and a padded midsection that belied his graceful athleticism. He created a new prototype: the unflappable maverick with a pocketful of dreams, a friend to men and catnip to women. The immense success of his 1940s movies has overshadowed his often daring work in the 1930s, when he developed into an accomplished farceur and an exceptional improviser of physical shtick.

  A performer of such enormous popularity becomes, inevitably and in spite of himself, a social critic. Crosby, an unreasonably modest man who never took credit for anything musical, let alone social or political, nonetheless played a coercive role in the acceleration of civil rights. He encouraged and pioneered racial integration on stage, radio, and records and in movies; in 1936, after winning the contractual right to produce his own pictures, he hired Louis Armstrong and gave him star billing, a Hollywood first for a black entertainer. A Jesuit by training and temperament, Crosby had enjoyed the benefits of a classical education. He lived in a small parochial world until he was twenty-two. He was a classroom cutup and lover of old show business, not least minstrelsy, but by the time he dropped out of law school, he understood that American popular music was a stew of intermingling ethnicities. He absorbed the influences of performers so diverse that few would have mentioned them in the same sentence, among them, Al Jolson, John McCormack, the Mound City Blue Blowers, Ukelele Ike, Ethel Waters, Mildred Bailey, Van and Schenck, Bix Beiderbecke, and, most decisively, Armstrong.

  Perhaps the most telling aspect of Crosby’s neglected role in integrating American show business was his calculated decision to attach himself to an ethnic wing. At the time of his death, he was widely remembered as Irish American. Yet not until he reached his mid-thirties did Bing show any inclination to embrace that identity. His mother’s forebears had left Ireland for Canada three generations earlier, and his father’s Protestant family had been in the United States since 1635. Paramount Pictures had nurtured his persona as the all-American man, without ethnic attachments. The primary semblance of Irishness in his work was his signature vocal technique, the upper mordent, a broken-note adornment imported from Ireland and Scotland that became known as the Crosby cry. Not until 1939, on the eve of the war, did he truly embrace his Irish heritage. Thanks to the antisemitic venom spewed by the radio priest Father Coughlin, Irish American Catholics had come to be associated with intolerance. Bing quietly stepped up to embody a larger truth. As he began to sing Irish songs and play Irishmen and priests, he required no rhetoric to stres
s the point that nothing was more all-American than its minorities.

  Crosby rarely allowed stereotypical Catholic pieties to interfere with the scampish irreverence that informed much of his best work, from the romantic comedies to the Road movies. It was even present in his finest screen performances, as the golfing, imbibing, indulgent, yet determined Father Chuck O’Malley in Leo McCarey’s great films, Going My Wayand The Bells of St. Mary’s. Bing’s casual Huckleberry Finn demeanor as a pipe-smoking idler who never dresses up or removes his hat was portended by his odd name, which eclipsed cultural divisions with its unmistakably North American yet faintly Asian (the open-mouthed aw surrounded by two grin-making ees) arrangement of consonants and vowels: an Anglo-Danish surname modified by a nickname’s New World audacity. In a world of Skips, Whiteys, Blackies, Reds, Pinkys, Shortys, Macs, Butches, and Chips, Bing was a standout moniker, a name that underscored his easygoing modesty. He taught the world what it meant to live the American common man’s dream. Aside from his music, that was the best part of his art, perhaps the best part of himself.

  Bing was a remarkably autobiographical performer. Yet while the public thought it knew him intimately, his intimates conceded that Crosby was, in many respects, unknowable. They would often remark on his intelligence, humor, and generosity, and then marvel at his contradictions: the melting warmth and chilly reserve, the conservatism and liberality, the piety and recklessness. Bing liked people who made him laugh (he expressed bewilderment that anyone might think him, as many did, a loner) but avoided public displays of affection and introspection. After he lost the soul mate of his early years, guitarist Eddie Lang, he could no more have bared his soul to another man than submit to psychoanalysis. Iron-willed and self-made, insouciant and obstinate, gregarious and remote, he was thoroughly enigmatic, yet hardly unknowable — no man with a legacy as large as Crosby’s could be that. Neither saint nor monster, Crosby survives his debunkers along with his hagiographers because the facts are so much more impressive than the prejudices and myths on either side. Bing Crosby was, after all, a poor boy from a Catholic working-class district in turn-of-the-century Spokane who caught the attention of the world and made it better. “Call me lucky,” he said. But it was never just luck or even talent. It was also the determination and brains of an alert young man who came along when American entertainment was at a crossroads. He showed it which road to take.

  Part One

  BINGO FROM BINGVILLE

  I will sing with my spirit, but I will also sing with my mind.

  — I Corinthians 14:15

  1

  THE HARRIGANS

  With a mother named Harrigan, you are Irish, I take it?

  — Ken Carpenter, Kraft Music Hall (1945) 1

  Late in the spring of 1831, Bing Crosby’s maternal great-grandfather, Dennis Harrigan, a fifty-one-year-old farmer and carpenter who lived in Schull parish, in the southwestern region of County Cork, Ireland, ushered his family aboard a timber ship bound for New Brunswick, Canada. 2 Leading his wife, Catherine, 3 and nine of their ten children onto the creaking deck, Dennis knew what to expect of the grueling voyage. Still, he counted himself lucky, for few members of his congregation were able to leave at all. Of the 65,000 emigrants who set sail in 1831, only ninety or so from tiny Schull could afford passage, not many of them Catholic. 4 A brave, resolute lot, they gazed westward with tenacious faith as the ship cleared Ireland’s southernmost point, the Mizen Head of southwest Cork’s Mizen peninsula, once a haven for smugglers and pirates who sought refuge in its impregnable coves.

  The Canadian-built vessels were designed not for carrying passengers but for transporting timber, New Brunswick’s primary export. To maximize efficiency, the shipbuilders hastily modified the holds and lowered passenger fares by more than two-thirds, allowing greater numbers of Irish families to emigrate and generating the slogan “timber in, passengers out.” Dozens of those ships were lost at sea, and many more were decimated by typhus, dysentery, and other diseases. All were cursed with conditions as barbarous as those of slave ships: insufficient food supplies, inadequate sanitation and gender partition, little if any ventilation, berths half as high as those required by law for slavers. The journey averaged six weeks, and the only music heard was the shrill wail of unceasing lamentations.

  The wilderness of Canada’s eastern provinces promised to be friendlier to the Harrigans. Dennis’s siblings had brought over their families the previous year. Now Dennis removed his own family (all but his married daughter, Ellen Sauntry, who arrived in New Brunswick twenty years later as a widow with seven children), fourteen years before the Great Hunger and before the tidal wave of Irish immigration that flooded America’s urban centers. His smaller generation of immigrants would explore and prosper in rural America, migrating from the Northeast to the Midwest to the Northwest, building successful farm communities with the logging skills they learned in the Canadian woods. The names of Mizen peninsula’s Catholic congregants who left that season and in harder ones to follow took root all across America: Fitzgerald, Driscoll, Reagan, Harrigan, Sullivan, Donovan, Coughlin, O’Brien, Hickey, Mahoney.

  They had abandoned a hellish place.

  A hundred years had passed since Jonathan Swift offered his “modest proposal” to abate Ireland’s poverty, beggary, and congestion by cannibalizing its “Popish” offspring. “A most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or broiled,” he advised, “a delicacy befitting landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have best title to the children.” 5 Ireland, cherishing its brood not least as a defense against the privations of old age, tripled its population in the decades after Swift.

  But congestion was not the foremost source of Ireland’s sorrows. The nefarious Penal Code of 1695 barred Irish Catholics — three-quarters of the population — from owning land and businesses, from voting, and from building schools and churches or attending those that existed. 6 Informants, particularly those who turned in priests, were rewarded. The Act of Union, passed in 1801 amid a blizzard of bribes, threats, and hangings, promised to balance the scales between Ireland and England but in fact gave the dominant country a captive market — fortifying a corrupt system of absentee landlords, toppling what was left of Irish commerce, and dissolving the Dublin-based Parliament. While the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 did away with the code, it could not abate the long history of religious enmity.

  Ireland became a grim landscape of windowless mud-and-stone cabins, potato-and-milk diets, cholera. The Duke of Wellington observed, “There never was a country in which poverty existed to the extent it exists in Ireland.” 7 and the French traveler Gustave de Beaumont found in the Emerald Isle extremes of misery “worse than the Negro in his chains.” 8 In the year the Harrigans set out for New Brunswick, the Mizen peninsula was beset by cholera and famine.

  Most likely the Harrigans spoke Gaelic, not English, and could not read at all. They were tough, hardworking, close-knit, intensely religious, and musical. A legend passed down into the twentieth century traces the family’s genesis to John of Skibbereen (a town some twelve miles east of Schull), who may have been Dennis Harrigan’s father and was known as Organ O’Brien for his fine playing of the church instrument. 9 The importance of music and dance in nineteenth-century Ireland can hardly be overstated, for amusements provided as much solace as the church. After a visit in 1825, Sir Walter Scott described the people’s “natural condition” as one of “gaiety and happiness.” 10

  When the ship finally docked, the Harrigans made their way through the Miramichi section of New Brunswick to the outlying woods of the Williamstown settlement, six miles inland, where they learned to clear land for tillage and built log cabins that furnished little protection against the winter’s freezing temperatures. Dennis’s nine children ranged in age from one to twenty. He made capable carpenters of his sons.

  Most of Williamstown’s Catholic settlers were from Mizen peninsula and were powerfully un
ited by culture and custom. The strongest bond was religious, strengthened by the prejudices of the Irish Methodists who preceded them. A second bond was the tradition of aggregate farming, the sharing of tilled soil between families as in the Irish townlands. A third, consequent to the first two, was the observance of secrecy: the “sinister side” 11 of the Irish character that historian Cecil Woodham-Smith has traced to the days of the Penal Code. A fourth was the heritage of strong, venerated women (Ireland was that rare nation where husbands paid dowries for wives, instead of the reverse) who secured their households. A fifth bond was that of large families — small communes within the larger ones.

  Music — the public converse of the secret self — was the sixth bond, taking the form of Irish melodies and rhythms that became increasingly popular and influential in the last half of the nineteenth century, complementing styles developed at the same time by African Americans. It was the custom in Ireland and Africa, but not in Europe, to dance to vocal music; to favor the pentatonic scale, call-and-response phrases, and cyclical song structures; to employ expressive vocal mannerisms, including dramatic shifts in register, nasality, and most especially the upper mordent. 12

  The mordent — a fast wavering from one note to another and back, a fleeting undulation that suggests a mournful cry — was a vestige of the Byzantine influence that dominated European music in the Middle Ages. That influence vanished from most of Europe but endured in the plaintive folk music of Scotland and Ireland, owing to their economic and geographical isolation from the modernizing impact of the Reformation and Renaissance. A 1950s edition of Chambers’s Encyclopaedia defines the mordent as a “certain oscillation or catch in the voice as it comes to rest momentarily upon a sustained sound” 13 and goes on to qualify it as a basic attribute of “crooning.” Among young Celtic singers of the twenty-first century, the mordent-heavy approach is known as sean nos, 14 or old style, but it was new to Americans in the 1920s, when Dennis Harrigan’s great-grandson pinned the mordent to popular music like a red rose.