The Boss

About midway through the Paul Whiteman Orchestra’s 1928 Victor record of “Make Believe” comes a moment that must have flabbergasted unsuspecting listeners. Ferde Grofe’s gussied-up score has just set out chorus and verse in crinoline-quickstep tempo, and it’s time for some singing, but instead of an adenoidal operetta falsetto to complement all the ruffles and flourishes comes a thoroughly modern, jazz-flavored, coolly irreverent vocal romp through Oscar Hammerstein’s lyric.

Backed lustily by Steve Brown’s New Orleans-style slap bass, the chorus captures the imagination. Who is this guy, lilting gaily along without a care in the world? Jaunty, light on his feet, he’s never frivolous; he makes you listen, in fact, to his every word.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Harry Lillis Crosby, “Bing” for short. By Jan. 27, 1928, when he recorded “Make Believe,” he’d been with the “King of Jazz” a bit more than a year, the first solo singer to work regularly with a band. What strikes today’s ears most agreeably, even more than his unforced high baritone voice, is his utter assurance. He knows just what he wants to do and pulls it off almost casually; instead of straining for grandiloquence, pitching for the back wall, he’s just passing air lightly over his vocal cords, letting the sound roll out as naturally as it might in reasonable conversation.

Born in Tacoma, Wash., in 1903 and brought up in nearby Spokane, young Crosby had come up through West Coast vaudeville, half of a duo act with his boyhood chum, Alton Rinker. He’d played drums awhile but let that go after it became clear that his voice was going to be his ticket to the big time. Viewed historically, his joining Whiteman in late 1926 was the sort of divine accident that usually happens only once in most lifetimes. Electric recording was supplanting the old acoustic methods, and everyone--performers and record company execs alike--was busy retooling.

Like some omnisciently curious ear, the microphone overheard everything, concealed little. Brass sections could now play at a comfortable mezzo-forte and still come through full and lush. Bassists were putting their sousaphones in mothballs; banjo players were investigating the supple potential of the acoustic guitar. The time was right for a vocalist who could court the microphone, caress it, let it listen in--and it was Paul Whiteman’s eternal good fortune to have found that vocalist in Bing Crosby. At a stroke, this cocky young man put most of the contract singers who had made comfortable recording studio livings--Irving Kaufman, Scrappy Lambert, Smith Ballew--on notice that the rules had changed. You didn’t have to sing high or loudly to get your point across; just easily and well and above all naturally.

As Gary Giddins points out in “Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams,” the meticulously researched first volume of his two-part Crosby biography, Bing wasn’t quite alone in exploring the microphone’s potential. But his easy virility somehow made such early stars as Gene Austin, Rudy Vallee and other “crooners” sound androgynously insubstantial, even epicene. With neither strain nor sense of portent, Crosby changed popular singing forever, opening a brand-new future to generations yet unborn, performers who may never in their lifetimes know or hear his name.

Giddins has done his work diligently, cutting through the encrustation of myth and press-agentry surrounding Crosby in--and since--his lifetime, bringing welcome clarity to his rise as a singer, radio personality and movie actor and mapping his personal life with admirable objectivity.

No easy task, this last. For all his ease and lack of what he called “side”--the affectation that invariably accompanies fame and vast wealth--Bing Crosby was a hard man to know. Johnny Mercer, that warmest of characters, found him “distant,” a sentiment echoed despairingly by fellow-composer Hoagy Carmichael and others. Past biographers have run aground on subjective, often willfully skewed accounts by colleagues and friends, rivals and family members. Crosby’s own ghost-written “Call Me Lucky” was little help, portraying its subject as little more than a regular joe who’d had a couple of good breaks in life: “Every man who sees one of my movies, or who listens to my records, or who hears me on the radio, believes firmly that he sings as well as I do, especially when he’s in the bathroom shower.” Various books since Crosby’s Oct. 14, 1977, death on a golf course in Spain--including a particularly poisonous 1983 memoir by his first-born son Gary--have blurred perception even further.

Statistics, stubbornly spin-resistant, tell a clearer tale: more than 1,500 records including 368 charted singles, 39 of those making the No. 1 spot, far outranking would-be rivals Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and the Beatles. “White Christmas,” 20 times on the charts, remains the most popular pop record of all time. A natural actor, Crosby appeared in more than 70 feature films, introducing more Oscar-nominated songs (14) and more winners (four) between 1934 and 1960 than any other singer. For a while he was the highest paid male actor in movies, ranking five times as Hollywood’s top box-office draw. His radio appearances include more than 4,000 broadcasts over three decades, mostly his own shows; he was the first major performer to prerecord his programs, a pioneer in underwriting and using magnetic tape.

The numbers just reinforce what the records and movies suggest: from Prohibition days to the 1950s, when rock ‘n’ roll split the adolescent popular music market off from the mainstream, Crosby was America’s most admired entertainer. What they don’t show, and what Giddins explores in convincing detail, is Crosby’s role as a trailblazer, a pioneer not just for his time but for all time, a singer who fused all he heard, whether Al Jolson or Cliff Edwards, John McCormack or Ethel Waters, into one supremely flexible and winning style. He came of age with hot jazz (Artie Shaw once called him “the first hip white person born in the United States”) and worked comfortably with its major figures, including Bix Beiderbecke and Duke Ellington. Louis Armstrong, a lifelong friend and admirer, famously lauded Crosby as “a natural genius the day he was born. Ever since Bing first opened his mouth, he was the boss of all singers and still is.” Yet he was equally at home singing Hawaiian songs, cowboy ditties, polkas, folk anthems and nostalgic waltzes.

Giddins proves himself an alert, even trenchant, commentator. Bing, he says, “played the mike with a virtuosity that influenced every other singer to follow, grounding it as a vehicle of modernism.” Where Al Jolson “threw himself at his listeners; Crosby made his listeners come to him. Jolson inspired them to cheer him; Crosby seduced them into contemplation.” Bing “was able to mine a magical perquisite of old Hollywood, the power to remake oneself [sic]. He was free to choose and reject elements of his past, or images from his imagination, to concoct the better man he resolved to be.” In Giddins’ conclusion, “No other pop icon has ever been so thoroughly, lovingly liked--liked and trusted.”

During the mid-1930s, after Crosby followed Brunswick executive Jack Kapp to Decca Records, his style underwent a sanding and buffing process, which admirers have fought over for decades. Gone overnight, it seemed, was the heart-on-sleeve suitor of such early hits as “Please” and an ardent “Star Dust,” the first record of the Carmichael classic to include verse and chorus of Mitchell Parish’s great lyric. The new Crosby was less intense, more genial and above all more universal--”common denominator aesthetics,” in Giddins’ apt phrase--”creating a national popular music that pleased everyone.” That, in turn, opened the way to unprecedented acceptance by making him over as “a smoother, less mannered, ultimately less expressive singer, a kind of musical comfort food.” The smoothness extended to movies as well: “[H]is screen persona was not as ingenuous as [Gary] Cooper’s, or as manly as [Clark] Gable’s, or spirited as [James] Cagney’s, or funny as [Cary] Grant’s, but it had a matchless, overriding aplomb, a self-reliance that bordered on impertinence. It had always been there when he sang. Now it was evident when he acted.”

“His major achievement,” the writer concludes, “was to plait the many threads of American music into a central style of universal appeal. But the price was exorbitant. To achieve universality, he had to dilute individuality.” Giddins is similarly perceptive in discussing Crosby’s often bumpy marriage; his early drinking days; his often paradoxical relationship with Bob Hope, his co-star in Hollywood’s extravagantly successful “Road” pictures. The book stops just short of World War II: That time, and its aftermath, are the subjects of Vol. 2.

Curiously, perhaps, considering the author’s preeminence as a jazz critic, the shakiest moments of “A Pocketful of Dreams” are those dealing with Crosby’s development during the jazz-saturated ‘20s and early ‘30s. Too many factual errors, great and small, blemish an otherwise cleanly drawn portrait: Some, province of discographers and musicologists, are little more than misidentifications of soloists and songs, lapses of music terminology, technique and theory, but others have more substance. Giddins repeatedly misuses the German word singspiel, identifying a form of musical drama, when he means sprechgesang or sprechstimme, a blend of speaking and singing often used by Crosby. And when Giddins attempts to trace the origins of the upper or “inverted” mordent, a prominent decoration of Bing’s early style, he cites Africa and the British Isles while overlooking this embellishment’s most familiar occurrence in the cantorial tradition of Jewish Eastern Europe. He has Bing and Rinker in 1922-23 listening to records not yet made, parrots unsubstantiated chunks of mythology about such distant figures as New Orleans legend Buddy Bolden and black vaudeville singer Mamie Smith and misinterprets the careers of ‘20s hot music stars Red Nichols and Adrian Rollini. Inevitably, and regrettably, he bows to current PC fashion in discussing racial stereotypes in early popular song. To suggest that Crosby’s performance of “Old Folks at Home” is “enfeebled by [Stephen] Foster’s minstrel grammar and the allusion to darkies” is risible: The song, like so many others, reflects the conventions of its composer’s period, no more.

In the end, this half of “A Pocketful of Dreams” never quite addresses the stubborn question of how Bing Crosby’s immense fame could have evaporated so quickly and completely after his death. Apart from “White Christmas,” his name and voice are conspicuously absent, for example, from National Public Radio’s “NPR One Hundred,” billed by the network as “the hundred most important American musical works of the 20th century.” Evaluating the “entertainers of the century” for their 1999 year-end issues, neither Time nor Newsweek mentioned Crosby except in passing.

Is it simply, as columnist Nick Clooney and others have reasoned, that Bing made his mark and departed too early for the relentlessly solipsistic boomer generation to have taken much note? Or is Giddins right in suggesting that such evanescence was “the cost of having played Everyman too long and too well?” For now, at least, the mystery persists, awaiting Vol. 2.

In the meantime, let’s hearken well to Giddins when he declares that Bing Crosby’s was “the voice of the nation, the cannily informal personification of hometown decency--friendly, unassuming, melodious, irrefutably American.” Or just put “Make Believe” back on the turntable, drop the tone arm (it has to be a tone arm) into place and be astonished yet again by this daring, dazzling young man who challenged the world on his own terms and triumphed so hearteningly, and lastingly, well.