Bing Crosby

by Gary Giddins

  He toured briefly with Gus Edwards’s revue School Days and played for a short while in Paul Ash’s orchestra in Chicago, but mostly he toured as a single for Paramount-Publix with his Blu Blowing Baby Grand. Along the way, he married and a daughter was born. Variety caught up with his twelve-minute act in St. Louis and acclaimed his showstopping “nut songs,” which had the audience “tied in knots.” The reviewer concluded, “Young, peppy, and goofy is this young man Barris. And he can help any show.” 3 Harry tried to convince Whiteman of that when he arrived in New York, but the bandleader was full up with pianists and singers. He soon found a job at bandleader George Olsen’s club, where his hotcha style of banging the piano lid on the beat and mix of ragtime and nonsense songs won him a modest following, though not enough income to support a family. Bing would later remember his act as “sort of a metropolitan type Fuzzy Knight” — a reference to the western actor who started out as a hillbilly pianist and bandleader. 4

  One of the first people Barris looked up in New York was an old friend, Jimmy Cavanaugh, who toured in vaudeville performing original material, none of which caught on. After the two downed a few beers, Cavanaugh showed Harry a lyric he was working on and asked whether he could do anything with it. Harry walked to the piano and fashioned a melody; they called their song “Mississippi Mud.” Mal-neck, determined to help three fish out of water, told Harry about Bing and Al, suggesting they might team up. Harry was initially skeptical: if one of them played piano, what would he do? But Matty arranged a meeting at which Harry banged out his new tune, and the rapport was instant. “The next day we went over to Barris’s apartment,” Al recalled, to work out a routine:

  We fooled around with some ideas and we tried out some three-part harmony. We were all baritones but I had the highest voice so I sang the top part. Barris sang the middle part while Bing sang the low part…. One of Harry’s tricks in his solo act was to slam the top of the piano for an effect and make the sound of a cymbal with his mouth. This sounded great and all three of us were getting our kicks at the way we sounded. We all came up with ideas. Bing took most of the solo parts and Barris and I would fill in with answers or a rhythmic scat background. Although we weren’t conscious of it, we were creating an entirely new style of singing pop songs. We were far more jazz oriented than any other singing group of that time…. We were greatly influenced by the great jazz musicians we had heard and were working with. We were very free and uninhibited. We had a solid beat in our rhythm numbers, but we could also give a pretty ballad an individual and personal feeling. In two more days we had put together two complete songs, “Mississippi Mud” and “Ain’t She Sweet.” We sang the songs for Matty Malneck and he was bowled over. He said, “If Whiteman doesn’t flip over you three guys, he’s gotta be nuts.” 5

  Whiteman flipped. He installed them in his dying club the next Saturday night, bringing in a second white spinet to match the first. The house was nearly full. Paul introduced them as the pianos were wheeled out. Bing stood between them with his cymbal. According to Rinker, they “slammed the piano lids and carried on. You can bet the audience at the Whiteman club could hear us now.” 6 The crowd not only listened but stopped dining, drinking, and talking, and applauded enthusiastically for both numbers. Barris had the least distinctive voice of the three, but his sizzle and high-strung energy inspired Bing and Al, whose curtain-pulling days were now over.

  Whiteman could not wait to get them into the studio — and not just them. Whiteman had never given up on his desire to hire bona fide jazz soloists, and Bing and Malneck made him more determined than ever. The best white players were in Jean Goldkette’s band, but Paul was reluctant to raid another orchestra; in any case, several of Goldkette’s stars were none too eager to wade into a sea of Whiteman strings. Instead, he co-opted four of the five musicians who worked in Red Nichols’s famous recording unit, the Five Pennies.

  Nichols was a competent but rarely inspired cornetist who had created a fascinating small band with timpani and a clever ratio of written to improvised music. Though Whiteman made a fuss over him, Nichols ultimately chafed at playing what he considered compromised jazz. He came on board in February and was gone by summer. Still, Whiteman managed to capture a couple of his best cornet solos on the same session that introduced Barris, on April 29. Max Farley orchestrated a new song by Harry Woods, “Side by Side,” with a vocal chorus worked out by Barris that incorporated a stutter — “Oh, we ain’t got plenty of muh-muh-money / Maybe we’re ragged and fuh-fuh-funny.” Bing sings the bridge solo, backed by the harmonizing of Al and Harry, and reasserts a touch of Jolson schmaltz in his quivering cadences.

  Bing was more himself on Malneck’s adaptation of “I’m Coming, Virginia,” the song he and Rinker had flubbed at a previous session, with Barris adding only a hot-cha-cha coda. Here Bing captures the originality of “Muddy Water,” combining his deft time with a full, relaxed articulation of the words. Contrary to Al’s suggestion of a diligent jazz influence, two surviving takes show that their scat routines were worked out to the last detail. Yet Bing’s imperturbable vocal, Matty’s writing, Nichols’s solo, and the band’s skill combined to make “I’m Coming, Virginia” the best and most authentic jazz record Whiteman had ever made.

  Harry did not participate in the May recording of “I’m in Love Again,” and Bing and Al were relegated to the choir, backing Charles Gaylord, except for a brief and undistinguished solo passage in which Bing reveals a hoarseness that would plague him for years, ultimately altering his sound and style. Two weeks later Whiteman presented his new vocal trio on an innocuous if cheerful Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson tune called “Magnolia,” a record that introduces their patter style, each spurring the others with spoken or sung interjections punctuated by Barris’s cymbal-like hahh! The song, replete with topical references to “sex appeal” and movie queens Clara Bow, Lillian Gish, and Gloria Swanson, was an excuse to focus attention on the band’s recent jazz recruits, now including Jimmy Dorsey, who solos on alto saxophone, and the innovative jazz and symphonic drummer Vic Berton, a Nichols associate, who bounces the ensemble with pedaled timpani and choked cymbals.

  By now they had decided to call themselves the Rhythm Boys, a play on the Happiness Boys, one of the first successful radio acts. The boss, presenting them as Paul Whiteman’s Rhythm Boys, arranged an independent recording contract for them at Victor and brought them back to the Paramount when the orchestra was hired for an unprecedented six-week engagement, at $10,500 a week. Not much attention was paid to the other acts or the film (Lois Moran in The Whirlwind of Youth). Whiteman’s first week was so successful that Sam Katz, the president of Publix, wanted to double the length of the band’s stay. Paul’s touring commitments prevented it, but to make each week special, Katz brought in Crosby and Rinker’s prior boss, Jack Parting-ton of San Francisco’s Granada Theater, to design the thematic productions. As the movie changed to W. C. Fields in Running Wild, so the band suddenly found itself wearing sailor suits aboard the USS Syncopation, while Whiteman conducted from a gun turret. The production changed weekly — among the titles were Rushia, Jazz a la Carte, and Fireworks — and the audiences were as receptive to the new singers as the Variety reporter, who lauded their spot as “a stellar opportunity in itself.” 7 In a succeeding notice, the reviewer pointed out that the show lacked comedy except for “the natural laughs in the delivery of the jazz vocal trio.” In the patriotic Fireworks, the band — including the two “blues yodeling plebes from Spokane” — performed a “cute” number with pop guns. 8

  Midway through the Paramount run, the Rhythm Boys formally debuted on records, singing the first two numbers they had rehearsed, now tricked up as medleys and accompanied only by Harry’s piano and Bing’s cymbal whacks. “Mississippi Mud” is oddly structured: a twenty-two-bar chorus with a sixteen-bar middle section. The lyric is catchy (though marred by the term darkies, which was eventually changed to people), and the melody is propelled by accents on the first beat of a
lmost every measure. Bing recorded it three times over the next seven months. Though the Rhythm Boys’ version is not as effective as those that followed, it confirmed the trio’s style as part music and part wisecracking comedy. A scat passage introduces them one at a time: Bing, then Al, then Harry, who finishes with a hahh. After a unison chorus in which Bing takes the lead in the middle section, the patter leads to an interpolation of “I Left My Sugar Standing in the Rain,” where Bing displays for the first time on record his sustained balladic tones as well as his humor and wordplay — in the spin he puts on the spoken phrase “I don’t know” and the spoonerism “irregardless and respective.” The second number employs “Ain’t She Sweet” as a rapid windup to Barris’s “Sweet Li’l.” Bing instructs the others at the outset, “If it’s gonna be good it must be fast,” and when they close with an exchange of scat breaks, he mimics a tuba (bub-bub-bub bub-a-bub-bub-bub), the modest beginning of a trait for future mimics.

  Those recordings are not especially good, and darkies aside, have not aged well. Barris is too jumpy, though Rinker proves fairly adept at scat, and the humor is intrusive. Still, “Mississippi Mud” became hugely popular, and they performed it nightly at the Paramount and at the Whiteman club, establishing it as their signature song. Everyone who saw them remembered the number as a Jazz Age anthem. It secured Barris’s role as the new brains of the outfit, supplanting Al, who was both grateful and annoyed. Bing was no less ambivalent. “Barris was and is remarkably talented,” Bing wrote. “He writes songs as easily as other folk write a letter. In addition he can sing and he’s a good comedian. But while he could do all of these things, he knew he could do them. And because he gave the impression of knowing all there was to know, Al and I called him Little Joe Show Business.” 9

  Their hard work on the arrangements is evident from the alternate takes, which are virtually indistinguishable from the masters. The Rhythm Boys never achieved anything approaching the buttery harmonies and unison drive of the Mills Brothers or the Boswell Sisters, but their inventiveness and pep influenced both of those groups and countless other vocal teams, some of them rank imitators. Donald Mills and his brothers heard Bing with the Rhythm Boys: “He had a great voice then and, actually, some of our music came from listening to what they were doing.” 10 Despite their burgeoning popularity, the Rhythm Boys were humbled when Jack Fulton’s falsetto la-di-da vocal in an otherwise upbeat arrangement of “My Blue Heaven” generated the biggest Whiteman hit of the year. Spokane’s Daily Chronicle stayed loyal to its hometown boys, however, commending “Mississippi Mud” and their new partner (mangled as Jack Barriss): “The variety of jazz put into these pieces is distinctive and unique and includes rapid fire patter, bits of solo work, minor chords and close harmonies with deft business on the piano and with the cymbals.” 11

  Yet Bing’s recorded work over the next three months provided him with few chances to shine. His hoarseness had worsened, and Whiteman felt it best to bury him in the choir. He is so off-mike and whispery in his solo on “The Calinda” — faux Africana tarted up with a weird haunted-house arrangement — that one is surprised Whiteman agreed to release it. On “It Won’t Be Long Now,” notable for Tommy Dorsey’s solos on trombone and trumpet, the Rhythm Boys add little to Malneck’s jazzy arrangement. In November the band toured the Midwest. When it arrived in Chicago, the trio was assigned a recording session of its own. Victor declined to release “That’s Grandma” (until 1942), a comical, swinging number with a unison scat chorus backed by Harry’s piano and Bing’s cymbal; the prattling lyric by Bing and Cavanaugh concerns a chipper grandma and relies on allusions to popular entertainers like Eddie Cantor and Moran and Mack. Far more intriguing is “Miss Annabelle Lee,” in which Bing huskily parodies sentimental balladeers of the day and improvises a six-bar passage — his first scat solo on records.

  It was a warm-up. The next week’s sessions represented a turning point, a crucial shift in the Whiteman band that led to the most durable music — along with “Rhapsody in Blue” — of Paul’s long career. Two selections recorded at the November 1927 dates, “Changes” and “Mary,” established Bing as the choice singer among Whiteman’s musicians, some of whom would now regard him as one of the band’s top soloists, period.

  Whiteman’s determination to hire first-rate jazz players paid off that fall. In August Whiteman, Jimmy Dorsey, the Rhythm Boys, Jimmy Gillespie, and Henry Busse had traveled to the Million Dollar Pier in Atlantic City to hear the Jean Goldkette orchestra. They were especially interested in its brilliant young arranger, Bill Challis, whom Dorsey had been pressing Whiteman to hire. The Goldkette organization, based at the Graystone Ballroom in Detroit, included more than twenty bands. Goldkette himself was a French-born failed concert pianist who did not much care for jazz and rarely appeared with the bands touring under his name. By mid-1927 he was devoting most of his time to his booking agency, and his most important band, the one with the great jazz musicians, was rumored to be on its last legs. In Atlantic City Challis invited Whiteman to guest-conduct a number. Afterward, Paul told several of the musicians that he did not want to be responsible for breaking up the band but that when the time was right, he hoped to hear from them.

  Challis was the first to join, when Whiteman opened at the Paramount on September 10, a couple of weeks before the Goldkette band collapsed. Goldkette’s main jazz stars, including cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and saxophonist Frank Trumbauer, elected to go to New York and work in a big band organized by saxophonist Adrian Rollini. “I was offered a job with Rollini, too, but I liked the idea of the fiddles, all those reeds, all that brass,” Challis recalled. “I thought, well, that’s for me, that’s what I’ve been looking for, a lot of instruments, a lot of things to do. Plenty of records.” 12

  An admirer of Whiteman’s key arranger, Ferde Grofe, Challis spent his first weeks “watching and learning, finding out who did what and listening to all the shows.” 13 He was put to the test when Whiteman reached Indianapolis. That week other major Goldkette refugees drifted into Whiteman’s band, first bassist Steve Brown, then Beiderbecke and Trumbauer. While they rehearsed their opening at the Indiana Theatre, a very green piano player, singer, and songwriter named Hoagy Carmichael stopped by to visit his old friend Bix, who introduced him to Whiteman. Hoagy’s first piece, “Washboard Blues,” had recently been recorded by a local group, Hitch’s Happy Harmonists, with the composer on piano. Whiteman liked it. He told Hoagy that if the tune had lyrics, he would use him to sing them at the band’s next recording session in Chicago.

  Late that night Whiteman knocked on Challis’s hotel room, with Gillespie, Carmichael, and a pedal organ in tow. The organ passed from arranger to arranger, depending on who was working on deadline. Challis recalled, “Paul asked Hoagy to play ‘Washboard Blues’ and asked me to arrange it for when we got to Chicago.” 14 By the time the band opened at Chicago’s Uptown Theater, however, Paul had second thoughts about Hoagy’s singing and asked Bing to cover for him. Carmichael remembered Bing’s coming around while he rehearsed and casually asking to see the lyric, explaining that he simply liked the song and wanted to learn it. “Paul wanted some insurance,” Hoagy realized. “If I couldn’t do it, he wanted someone who could. Bing was being kind. He didn’t want me to know I might flop.” 15 Hoagy made the record, and though it failed to get him a job with Whiteman, it marked the beginning of his long and fruitful association with Bing. For his next assignment, Challis determined to use Whiteman’s regular singers, all of them — the hot trio and the sweet trio.

  Walter Donaldson’s “Changes” could not have been more aptly named. As Challis adapted it, the song embodied the changes in the Whiteman band: the old guard giving way to the new, the old dance-band aesthetic succumbing to the improvisational vitality of jazz. Of course, the title also suggested the bullish transformations in a nervous pre-Depression America that, during the previous six months alone, had witnessed Lindbergh’s flight, Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution, Babe Ruth’s sixty home
runs, and The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length talking picture. A song-plugger representing Donaldson’s publisher gave “Changes” to Whiteman, who handed it to Challis, who reversed the usual roles of the two vocal trios. The sweet trio sings the first theme in strong midrange unison; the Rhythm Boys follow with a high-voiced harmony, singing four bars and scatting four more. The third theme is all Bing, followed instantly by a glorious cornet improvisation from the astonishing Bix. Though Donaldson’s lyric concerns the changing of musical keys (with a gratuitous reference to “many babies that he can squeeze”), the melody employs few notes; Bing’s episode consists almost entirely of repeated Gs, which he caps with a trombonelike melisma. “What I liked about Bing,” Challis marveled, “was there were fast words in there and they came out beautifully — excellent enunciation.” Challis underscores the energy of the soloists with exchanges between the winds and strings and a deep bottom bolstered by three baritone saxophones. “Paul said use whatever I wanted and I did.” 16

  One man who was not happy with the changes was Henry Busse, Whiteman’s long-serving trumpet star whose rickety muted approach had once been considered “hot.” When Challis omitted him from his arrangement of “Washboard Blues,” Busse protested, pointing out that his contract guaranteed him a role in every Whiteman record. His jealousy would snowball as Beiderbecke increasingly usurped his position. He could not fail to notice that Whiteman treated the young and troubled newcomer like a son. (Paul and Bix had in common fathers almost Kafkaesque in their disapproving rage.) Bix was a heroic magnet for Chicago’s young white jazz musicians, who never gave a thought to the likes of Busse, and Bing was immediately accepted into that golden circle. They would hang out at a storefront speakeasy on State Street known as the Three Deuces, after the notorious brothel called the Four Deuces. Mezz Mezzrow recalled a midnight jam at the Deuces in November: “[Bing] beat time all night with his hands, like he was at a Holy Rollers meeting. Under Bix’s spell, everybody was a genius that night.” 17