A sentimental journey and beyond

According to Lenny Kaye, the three great pop crooners of the early 1930s constitute a trinity. Bing Crosby, the affable domesticator of every idiom from light jazz to Hawaiian music, plays the universal dad. Randy, rambunctious Rudy Vallee enacts the misbehaving son. And, by default, Russ Columbo (1908-1934), the least known, the handsomest, the most vocally gifted and soulful, assumes the role of Holy Ghost. Ghost, indeed and alas: He’s remembered mostly as the victim in a Hollywood mystery, accidentally shot to death by his best friend on the eve of his engagement to Carole Lombard. Kaye is so moved by his martyred saint that he dreams of rewriting his fate. As the book ends, he resolves to take the bullet himself. Greater love has no fan than Kaye’s for his Columbo.

Kaye, best known for being Patti Smith’s guitarist, quickly tells Columbo’s story: the son of Italian immigrants, raised in California, a musician from childhood, gifted at both violin and piano, freelancing in Hollywood until he joins Gus Arnheim’s band in his late teens. Shortly after, molded and shaped by a calculating New York agent and the loving ministrations of his best friend, Lansing Brown, he steps out on his own. Capitalizing on his swarthy good looks and a voice blessed by the microphone, he becomes famous as a soloist and composer of future standards such as “You Call It Madness but I Call It Love” and “Prisoner of Love.” Whereby he becomes the most dangerous threat to the slightly older Bing and Rudy, both of whom patronize his talent and question his virility. Within two years, his record sales have slumped (as do everyone’s; it’s 1932). He attempts various career moves, from commandeering an orchestra fronted by Benny Goodman to having a nose job. He makes an underwhelming impression in undistinguished movies, dies an early, terrible death and is thenceforth, Kaye writes, “dispersed, like his records, reissued every few years when the format changes.” He never lived, he never dies. Except for a few fans, loyal Italians and gay men, almost nobody takes him seriously.

But in Kaye’s ecstatic meditation, Russ’ croon provides the soundtrack for an America on the cusp of every imaginable change -- racial, sexual, economic. His study leads him from the Albigensian heresies to Pearl Harbor, from Chopin to Tupac Shakur, Flo Ziegfeld to Ernst Lubitsch, George Sand to Patti LaBelle. It examines shifts in relations between the sexes and generations and, most eloquently, cultural miscegenation (the guitarist Eddie Lang, for example, offering a piquant, plucky -- and hook-heavy -- accompaniment to Bessie Smith, and a union of the Boswell Sisters and the Mills Brothers, “siblings learning to share”). And when the book steers, and occasionally wobbles, into a nonfiction novel, Russ becomes his Orpheus through the bright shades of Broadway and Hollywood.

The word “croon” appears in song lyrics as early as 1900 and has its origins in lullaby. But the croon identified with Bing and Russ is not just a softly sung soporific. It’s a wordless vocal and, as such, an obvious adaptation of the moans of blues and gospel. A moan can be formed from a hum or any vocalized sound -- ah, ee, oo, eh, hey. But it is always a deeper expression of the lyric. That’s how Russ nursed his croon. And why not? By the early 20th century, most of the characteristic devices of the black church -- moans, falsetto hollers, growls -- had entered the public domain. Consider that Irving Berlin’s “Revival Day” was introduced by Al Jolson in 1914.

Jolson would be the greatest star of the 1920s, the significant other in most singers’ imaginations. Viewed today, his style appears generated as much by his cantorial baritone as by his reckless blackface. Rhythmic spunk and effeminate grace underwrite his career: He shames all his putative descendants, including Elvis, with his chameleonic chutzpah.

Russ was something else. As a solo performer, he would leave the clowning to Crosby and Vallee. He would be, first and foremost, a singer. From the start, his style was authoritative. His diction was crystalline yet never quite academic, more period gesture than affectation. In radio serials such as “The Goldbergs” or “The O’Neills,” mothers might still sound as caricatured as Amos and Andy but their sons all spoke like Rudy Vallee. The ethnic trace in Julia Columbo’s vocally assimilated son is the residue of light opera, the quenched sob a la Caruso. Though his range is not immense, the notes are so fully inhabited that it sounds huge, the low tones almost as resonant as Paul Robeson’s, the higher floating as sweetly as John McCormack’s. He never breaks the way Bing does when negotiating the spangled-banner intervals of “Stardust.” His vowels and consonants are so emphatically sung that Kaye proposes a new form of musical notation: Ba sharp, da flat.

Best of all, his phrasing is supple, relaxed, conversational with the playful empathy of a partner dancing cheek to cheek. As ideally in poetry, each verbal and acoustic detail conveys an aesthetic intent. Even the recorded sound contributes. The compression robs him of air, but he never sounds breathless. Instead he achieves a kind of monolithic intimacy. An exquisite calibration of melody, sentiment and meter defines his vocal art, a combination rarely heard outside the black church. Indeed, by the time he reaches the croon in “When the blue of the night meets the gold of the day” -- a wistful pastiche of Irish ballad and Tin Pan Alley -- his initial hum verges on a moan, approximating the craft of a gospel hymnodist.

Russ had a band musician’s time sense, but, at least on records, he seldom swung. His death prevented an expansion of his talent. Only a few of his imitators (Don Cornell, for example, and Tony Martin) came remotely close to duplicating his sound. What thrills this listener is the adoption of Russ’ technique in the black church, a beautiful instance of cultural barter. If you listen to the male stars of 1930s gospel -- R.L. Knowles, Norsalus McKissick, and, particularly, Robert Anderson -- you’ll hear his intonation and luxuriant vibrato.

The man whose gun accidentally discharged and killed Columbo was his mentor and confessed soul mate Brown, a portrait photographer. Columbo was half Lansa’s creation; his pal had first thought to depict him as a teenage Valentino. After the accident, Brown disappeared into a reclusive existence, shattered, but not before reporting visions of his holy ghost. Kaye’s gloss? Friendship has its own passions. Maybe this is the last gasp of that “nineteenth-century friendship” that Queer Theory critics celebrate -- but probably not. To most readers, these details will comprise a gay story, even if no murder occurred. (It was rumored that Lansing, jealous of Carole Lombard, had killed the man he loved; Hedda Hopper thought Columbo was too narcissistic to be straight and considered his affair a fine romance with no kisses.) A gay spin could also be put on Russ’ relation with his black valet, Gordon K. Reid, who used to give him nude rubdowns and address him sometimes with a Sambo-like dialect, sometimes quoting Shakespeare.

Of course, this is all speculation. But since Kaye loves codes -- reprising, for example, the familiar analysis that in the “Road” movies Crosby and Bob Hope are figurative lovers while Dorothy Lamour is their sisterly chaperon -- it’s startling that he evades a similar analysis of his book’s central event. Or he may wish to avoid the homoerotic implications. A gay Russ would break the spell of Kaye’s conceit: no longer a genius of masculine intuition but a comrade in arms. Kaye is much happier diagnosing women’s hearts, analyzing the makeup of Columbo’s audience, mostly shopgirls and secretaries for whom dreams of romance were both a token of class mobility and an assertion of independence.

Kaye writes best about music, presenting passages about performance technique that take one’s breath away, statements about the interplay between musicians that only a pro could have composed. But at times the holy ghost of Columbo spins him out of control. He imagines Russ’ dying thoughts: fair, I guess. After Russ’ death, his siblings inform their mother that he is touring abroad, and she dies happy 10 years later. This allows Kaye to imagine Columbo’s ghost stranded in an Italian town in 1938, reading about the death of Gabriele d’Annunzio, which enables a quotation from that inspired charlatan that may pertain to any of the book’s several themes but elucidates none of them. Now, I’m a sucker for a good tangent. But there are swerves that make you happy and snags that make you blue. He is so mercilessly allusive that I braced myself with the introduction of each new proper noun.

Almost every page is riddled with solecisms, typographical games and puerile puns (intriguing Columbo becomes the “in-trigger”; a mother’s dream is a “momory”; Russ’ luck with the ladies is a “cornucopulata”). Apparently the most lucid historian becomes a euphuistic clown when he tries on his rock ‘n’ roll shoes. Very late, thinking that Julia must have known that Columbo was no longer alive, Kaye writes about mother songs, although her son never recorded one. All these fustian titles lead to a discussion of rock mothers dead (John Lennon’s mother was another Julia) and alive (he quotes Eminem’s matricidal rants). You may wonder what’s the payoff, that every fella’s got a mom? Or why he doesn’t cite Blind Willie Johnson’s 1928 “Motherless Children,” the first gospel blues on record, much less the most famous of such tributes, McCormack’s “Mother Machree,” referred to by Jolson as the queen of “mammy songs.”

Yet, like so many of Kaye’s oblique speculations, this chapter evoked one of my most precious memories. The last time I saw Jackie Wilson at the Apollo Theater, after performing his Al Jolson routines, and crooning “Danny Boy” (with a soprano high C), he invited a stout older woman onstage, and while he pranced about, half-Golden Glove boxing jab, half-balletic pirouette, his mother sang in a huge church voice, “You better stop dogging my Jackie around.” I know, I know. It sounds like something Lenny Kaye dreamed up. *

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Wedding Song V Judith Vollmer

Judith Vollmer

She married ink, she married water,

who was she? Look down

by the river, the blue bench barely

blue anymore, the wood polished

to wet wind stilled. There’s a note taped

underneath and inside a piece of her wedding cloth

stitched with looking-glass. Place it on her grave

if you find her.

Excerpt of “Five Wedding Songs”

From “Reactor: Poems by Judith Vollmer”

(University of Wisconsin Press: 72 pp., 26.95 cloth, $14.95 paper )