Books
The First Hip White
Person Bing Crosby:
A Pocketful of Dream
-- The Early Years 1903-1940
By Gary Giddins
(Little, Brown; 728 pages; $30)
People who remember
Bing Crosby mostly for his annual Christmas programs with the
clan gathered round the tree, or inevitably think of him as buh-buh-buh-buhing
off on the Road to Somewhere or forever crooning I'm Dreaming
of a White You-Know-What should meet the other Bing Crosby.
The one whom bandleader Artie Shaw called "the first hip white
person born in the United States.''
That Bing Crosby has
mostly been forgotten, but he was once the real thing in jazz,
and it is that part of his personality explored in the terrific
first volume of an extended biography by the music critic and
jazz authority Gary Giddins And to Giddins' great credit, he writes
about Crosby and his accomplishments as part of a rapidly changing
popular culture that was influenced as much by technology as it
was by personality.
The first thing you
have to know about Bing Crosby is that he was hard, if not impossible,
to know. That ought to give any biographer second thoughts, but
Giddins is a dogged and shrewd researcher and in his coverage
of Crosby's early years, he assembles from a multitude of sources
a multi-angled view of a famously likable and intensely private
man whose reign and influence in pop culture is unique. Recordings,
radio, films, TV -- Crosby ruled them all in his time, and without
seeming effort or ambition. But it is clear that young Harry --
his real name -- had ambition to spare.
The blue-eyed and fun-loving
boy of Spokane graduated from the Jesuit-run Gonzaga High School
in 1920 with a solid education in the classics and a marked affinity
for elocution. His affection for words and gift for phrase-making
constantly shows up in his singing and acting. He went on to Gonzaga
University, joined the college's dramatic club and sang with school
groups and worked part-time. He listened to records, saw touring
shows as they came through Spokane, and one fateful day bought
a drum set from a mail-order catalogue. He had already been singing
around the area with a buddy, but now he hooked up with a high-school
kid named Al Rinker who had put together a four-piece group called
the Musicaladers. Bing was an asset: not only could he play the
drums, he could sing.
The Musicaladers didn't
last long, and Rinker and Crosby, now on their own, decided to
head to California. The
drive from Spokane took more than three weeks, but they made it
to Los Angeles and it wasn't long before they found themselves
in show business, but not quite big time. As the Rhythm Boys,
they toured in vaudeville and played nightclubs, absorbing the
music around them, enjoying their freedom and a high life with
plenty of booze and gals.
Bing gained a reputation
as a heavy drinker, and he was, often showing up late for a session.
He became friends with Louis Armstrong, and they were members
of a mutual musical admiration society. "They began to inspire
each other,'' Giddins writes. "Bing had learned much from Louis
about style, spontaneity, time and feeling. Armstrong was the
fount from which Bing's swinging and irreverent but emotional
approach to song developed. Louis returned the admiration, picking
up on Bing's timbre and his way with ballads.''
The main thing Bing
learned from Louis was, according to Giddins, to be true to himself.
"That meant not simulating a black aesthetic but applying it to
who he was and what he knew as a Northwestern third-generation
Anglo-Irish Catholic, reared on John McCormack and Al Jolson,
Dixieland and dance music, elocution and minstrelsy, comedy and
vaudeville.''
This volume follows
Crosby through his days with the Rhythm Boys, performing on their
own and with the band of Paul Whiteman, a pop idol of his day,
and the marriage to a shy singer from the South named Dixie Lee.
At the time of the wedding she was the bigger star, and at her
insistence Bing cut back on the sauce. Tragically, left alone
much of the time as her husband's career zoomed and hers disappeared,
Dixie became a reclusive alcoholic.
Lest anyone dismiss
Crosby, Giddins lays out an impressive list of his achievements
including the fact that he made more studio recordings than any
other singer ever (about 400 more than Sinatra), and scored the
most number-one hits ever: 38. That's compared with the Beatles'
24 and Presley's 18. Nominated for three Oscars for best actor,
he won once.
If everything seemed
to come easy to Crosby, it was largely because he was lucky to
come along at the right time. His predecessor Rudy Vallee sang
stiffly (and nasally) into a megaphone; projected through the
microphone, Crosby's warm baritone sounded natural and intimate
and cozily at home in the radio listener's living room. Giddins
explains why and how the Crosby sound evolved from the jazz-inflected
Rhythm Boys' time to the later mellow and often bland crooning.
(Later, Woody Guthrie would blast Crosby as the commercial tool
of a soulless industry.)
Along the way, the
author presents a series of lovely, astute riffs on the changing
trends in American entertainment. Pop music was a craze fueled
by inexpensive sheet music and recordings, radio and the jukebox.
Radio demanded performers with a definable personality, and Bing
created one from his own persona: an informal, unassuming, heck
of a nice guy who played golf and like horse racing, used fancy
words in a joking kind of way and could whistle and sing.
As good a singer as
he was -- and he was damn good -- Crosby's true genius was for
popularity. He had a nearly perfect sense of what the public wanted
and as this fine biography makes clear, he knew how to give it
to them. The book ends, appropriately, with another felicitous
turn in the Crosby career: the union with Bob Hope and the first
of their many road trips together. Giddins whets the appetite
for the next installment about the life and times of Der Bingle.
Next:
Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees
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