Bing Crosby

by Gary Giddins

  Two days after “Changes,” another Donaldson tune defined the band’s stylistic divisions. In Malneck’s mischievous arrangement, “Mary” entangles Busse and Bix much as “Changes” connected the sweet and hot singers. After an ensemble introduction, Busse’s muted trumpet states the theme in damp staccato over a starchy bum-cha bum-cha rhythm. Then Bix takes over the brasses for the verse, delivering them and the entire ensemble into the sunshine of swing. Toward the end of the performance, Bix begins his flaming eight-bar improvisation with an impatient rip and, leading the brasses in contrapuntal figures, all but drowns out Busse’s reprise of the theme.

  Yet Bix isn’t the key soloist. Bing is. Voice restored, he sings his chorus with exemplary finesse, articulating details at a cantering tempo and balancing rhythmic heat with vocal cool. He reshapes the melody, improving Donaldson’s cadences, displaying a jazz license all his own. The kind of liberties he took, however subtle, were not often appreciated by songwriters and publishers, who were known to threaten legal action over an altered note or word. Bing shows no trace of the Jolson influence, but he avails himself of an influence that had lain dormant: the upper mordent, also known as a pralltriller, that wavering catch in the voice preserved in the folk singing of Ireland, Scotland, and northern Africa. In his final phrases (“You wouldn’t let my castles come tum-tum-tumbling down…. What are you waiting for, Mary?”), Bing employs mordents on down and Mary.

  Unlike “Changes,” “Mary” was not a hit with the public but was a triumph with the new guard in Whiteman’s band. Challis and other members lobbied for more Crosby features. To insiders, Bing was becoming something of a Bixian hero. Just as Bix proved that a white musician could be an expressively nonconformist jazz player, Bing showed that a white male vocalist did not have to sound like a Floradora girl. Bing thought like a musician; he had his own sound; he improvised; he had time.

  Throughout the year, carbon microphones were increasingly replaced by new condenser microphones, which favored singers with an intimate approach. In Bing’s case, the mikes registered his fetching throatiness and nuanced phrasing. By the end of 1927, they were used with greater frequency in theaters, too, thanks in part to two show-business milestones that fall. On September 18 CBS Radio began broadcasting, giving NBC some badly needed competition and emphasizing improvements in the electrical reproduction of sound; on October 6 Jolson’s picture The Jazz Singer opened on Broadway, justifying the Warner brothers’ faith in Vitaphone and hastening further advances in audio technology.

  Two days after Christmas Show Boat opened at the Ziegfeld, a turning point for the American musical theater and, as it happened, a milestone for Bing. Whiteman assigned Challis “Ol’ Man River” from the magnificent score by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. Challis went to work, preparing the chart for Bing. That week Whiteman debuted on NBC with his own show. Scheduled to sing, Bing alerted his family. But those in Spokane who huddled around their radios were disappointed when he sang and was not identified — an indication of how inside his reputation was. “01’ Man River” would help change that. Challis and Malneck worked at a hotel piano, trying different voicings for the song. Malneck tuned the strings “a la Venuti,” 18 a nod to Joe Venuti’s method of playing with the bow under the violin’s soundboard and the horsehairs tied over the strings, enabling him to play four-note chords. The inevitable dissonances were incorporated in ensemble passages backing Bing. Whiteman himself chose the buoyant tempo; he emphasized to Challis that he was making a dance record, not a semiclassical piece. On Broadway, Jules Bledsoe sang it an octave lower than Bing, who delighted the rehearsing musicians when he took it up. Challis recalled, “He could do that and make it sound good. He had good intonation. Took the whole tune and went right on up. You didn’t have to tell him what to do, he just did it and did it nicely.” 19

  The record was a sensation; months later Whiteman sought to extend its success by recording another version with Paul Robeson, for whom the song was originally conceived, and a choir. But Bing’s triumph was singular. Coming on the heels of such sentimental Whiteman bestsellers as “Together” (vocal, Jack Fulton) and “Ramona” (vocal, Skin Young), it created a stir among musicians and fans, expanding Whiteman’s following among younger listeners. Cultural historian James T. Maher, in high school at the time, believed Bing’s version spoke specifically to his generation. Johnny Mercer was transfixed by it: “It seemed to me he employed a completely new and different style which sounded more natural and effortless than any I’d ever heard.” 20 Britain’s young were mesmerized as well. As Alistair Cooke recalled, “Word ran through the English underground that a genuine jazz singer — and a white man! — had appeared in the unlikeliest place: breezing along on the ocean of Paul Whiteman’s lush ‘symphonic’ sound.” 21 Even an older Bing, notoriously parsimonious with praise for any of his records, begrudgingly mentioned “01’ Man River” as one of two favorites (along with his 1939 “My Isle of Golden Dreams”): “I made a good record of ‘Ol’ Man River’ when I was with Whiteman. It was a good arrangement anyhow and I thought what I had to do on it was adequate.” 22 He surely recognized the source of the climactic line in Hammerstein’s lyric: “I was at the same time,” confessed Saint Augustine, “thoroughly tired of living and extremely frightened of dying.” 23

  Bing was elated to be surrounded, finally, by some of the country’s most admired white jazz players. He roomed with Bix at New York’s Belvedere Hotel, where many of Whiteman’s musicians were quartered. The two friends listened to and discussed music constantly, whether they were sober or spinning. Bix held his liquor better than Bing, who frequently fell into a stupor. Of the men he most often named as musical influences — Jolson, Armstrong, and Beiderbecke — Bing was personally closest to Bix. He memorized his cornet solos, scatted his phrases, and was particularly taken with Bix’s devotion to modern classics, from Eastwood Lane and Cyril Scott to Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky. As critic Larry Kart would observe, Bix’s blend of American jazz and European classicism was “a romantic sound — gentle, intimate, and tinged with nostalgia. And those were the qualities that soon would mark Crosby’s style.” 24

  Bing and Bix spent a lot of time at a speakeasy down the street from the Whiteman club’s old spot. The place had a piano on the balcony, where, despite the speak’s loud goings-on, Bix and other musicians exchanged ideas. “I didn’t contribute anything but I listened and learned,” Bing recalled. “I felt my style then was a cross between Al Jolson and a musical instrument. I was now being influenced by these musicians…. Bix, Bill Challis, even Frank Trumbauer would make suggestions to me for my vocalizing and I’d give it a try.” 25 When Trumbauer organized a session for OKeh Records early in 1928, he hired Bing along with Bix, Malneck, Chester Hazlett, Jimmy Dorsey, Min Leibrook, and pianist Lennie Hayton, among others (paying Bix fifty dollars, Hazlett thirty dollars, and the rest twenty-five). He even selected two numbers created by the Rhythm Boys. Trumbauer’s recording of “From Monday On” was never issued, but “Mississippi Mud” is a jazz classic, albeit one often found distasteful because of the patter between Tram (as Trumbauer was known) and Bing. Though they avoid heavy dialect, their routine is decidedly in the idiom of blackface vaudeville acts like Moran and Mack, with Tram stuttering his lines. The only soloists are Bix (a resplendent chorus) and a strikingly relaxed Bing, upholding his end of the patter without missing a beat of the song.

  With his jazz players pressuring him to feature Bing as a soloist, Whiteman made him a regular at recording sessions, though he buried him in the choir almost as often as he brought him into the limelight. Yet Whiteman was canny enough to give Bing numbers that suited him — especially after “01’ Man River” topped sales charts in March. Remarkably, Bing participated in more sessions in 1928 — about three dozen — than he would again until 1940. Those record dates track the artist in development, as he jettisons the Jolson flutter and the stiffness that marred “Muddy Water.” Bing developed a uniquely spirited sangfro
id. No matter how jazzed-up the setting, he negotiated the words, rhythm, and melody with a polished timbre and flawless enunciation. Even on off days Crosby’s instrument radiated confidence. Most of his predecessors who were not belters belonged to the genteel school and sang with effete head tones. Bing conveyed a chest-tone approach, making full use of his diaphragm. His vocal mask was complete and mature. But his most extraordinary gift was to communicate naturally. While other pop singers employed ponderous or flaccid tones, Bing sang the same way he spoke. His style avoided the mannerisms of style; his art seemed artless, even effortless.

  One example is his stunning chorus on Grofe’s breakneck version of Show Boat’s “Make Believe.” The instrumental chorus is ornate, but Bing’s vocal, backed by Steve Brown’s stomping bass, marries rhythmic panache to pitch-perfect articulation and underscores the lyric’s meaning despite the charged tempo. Tom Satterfield reflected Challis’s influence in his finest arrangement, “There Ain’t No Sweet Man That’s Worth the Salt of My Tears,” a jazz classic with Bix driving the ensemble and Bing rattling his first word — a rhythmically italicized I’m — for a sensational entrance. The song’s unchanged gender reflects the obstinacy of song publishers, who would not allow singers to alter pronouns; Bing was not permitted to sing “there ain’t no sweet gal.” Since the great majority of songs were conceived as male entreaties to women, the sanctity of pronouns discouraged the employment of female singers, a convention Whiteman eventually breached when he hired Mildred Bailey.

  At a February session Bing sang the obscure “Sunshine,” notable only as his first recording of an Irving Berlin song — a handsomely executed but commonplace beginning for what would turn out to be a mighty collaboration. Within weeks he was also featured on Mal-neck’s strongest arrangement since “I’m Coming, Virginia” (perhaps his finest ever), the definitive version of “From Monday On,” for orchestra and all six singers. A Barris original, with input from Bing on the lyric, the song was first recorded by the Rhythm Boys in January. That performance marked Bing’s debut as a whistler and includes an awkward Al Rinker chorus that publicly revealed what everyone in Whiteman’s fold knew: a huge musical gap existed between the former Musicaladers. Malneck’s version, made six weeks later, was something else, an arranger’s fantasia.

  Matty devised an elaborate setting for “From Monday On,” beginning with Fulton and company mooing the introduction in tenor range. The Rhythm Boys scat an interlude, and Bix charges in with a high note and full chorus as the saxes carry the theme. Matty confined Al to the choir and let Bing carry the main vocal chorus. In the best-known of three surviving takes, Bing tags a couple of words (skies, on) with Jolsonesque vibrato, though he lightened up on the later takes. He is otherwise loose and robust, and the record has a joyousness that has lost nothing over the years. To a musician like Challis, “He sang a song right, in the register you wanted to hear it. If it was up to me who the singer would be, it was usually Crosby. He enunciated and he had presence. He could hit a low A flat, maybe a little lower, and his top note was F, but he didn’t have a preferred key. I always used my own judgment.” 26

  “High Water,” Whiteman’s pretentious attempt at a hymn, typifies what jazz players loathed about his music but is perversely amusing for Bing’s spoken interlude — a parody of Jolson — and for his evident relief when swinging the chorus. “What Price Lyrics?” by Barris, Bing, and Malneck, is a chatty send-up of moon/June rhymes (Bing offers Sammy/mammy) and finishes with a round of scat. “Lovable” is a negligible Richard Whiting melody, brightly arranged by Challis. Bing’s stellar chorus makes the most of Seymour Simons’s lyric (“others just imitate / kisses that you create”) and is characterized by canny breath control and minor embellishments, prefiguring his mature style. (For some reason, “Lovable” was released only in England.) Challis’s “My Pet” intrigues because three takes exist in which Bing improvises very different eight-bar segments, combining scat and words on the first, borrowing Armstrong licks for the second, and finding himself on the third.

  * * *

  Most of the songs of the period were not appreciably better than “My Pet,” and many that Bing tackled were worse, for example, “I’m Afraid of You” or “It Was the Dawn of Love.” But every so often a gem came along, suggesting another reason that Bing was the ideal man for the time. Songwriting was entering a new phase of sophistication and subtlety. Only parodies could accommodate the June/moon rhymes, mother worship, patriotic gibberish, and coon song outrages that had dominated Tin Pan Alley for nearly a quarter of a century. The 1920s brought talented songwriters able to embrace the Jazz Age blend of Prohibition, flaming youth, exotica, and sex. Among the most enduring were Walter Donaldson (“Makin’ Whoopee,” “Yes Sir! That’s My Baby”); Spencer Williams (“I Ain’t Got Nobody,” “Everybody Loves My Baby”); Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields (“I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” “Doin’ the New Low-Down”); Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby (“Nevertheless,” “Three Little Words”); and Buddy DeSylva, Ray Henderson, and Lew Brown (“Button Up Your Overcoat,” “The Best Things in Life Are Free”).

  Yet by 1928, after Show Boat, even the songs of those progressive talents seemed transitional. Something new was going on. You heard it in the swinging ingenuity of Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers (“Manhattan,” “Thou Swell”), the sexy wit and minor keys of Cole Porter (“Let’s Do It,” “You Do Something to Me”), the invigorated melodies of the prophetic Irving Berlin (“Blue Skies,” “How About Me?”). With the arrival of book musicals on stage and later in film, American songwriting entered a golden age, an explosion of melody and harmony to rival the recently faded glory days of Italian opera. Crosby was the era’s first great voice and interpreter. He made lyrics understandable, worthy of attention.

  Good songs liberated Bing. On “Louisiana,” written by J. C. Johnson and Andy Razaf, Challis introduces him with a brassy fanfare and a “waaaah” from the vocal choir, launching a marvelous supple chorus in which Bing fulfills the promise of those elocution distinctions he earned at Gonzaga. Unfortunately, the exuberance of that performance was torpedoed the next afternoon by the mutiny of White-man’s old guard.

  Furious at the attention lavished on Beiderbecke, Henry Busse was at the boiling point. No one could recall exactly what set him off, but in the last hour of a recording session, he loudly berated Paul. The bandleader snapped back at him. Another old-timer, drummer Hal McDonald, sided with Busse. The dispute ended with the two stomping out of Liederkranz Hall and the Whiteman organization. With one scheduled tune left, a dejected Paul canceled work till the next day and put out a call for replacements. Despite the calamity, the postponed tune emerged as a Whiteman benchmark. Satterfield adapted Rodgers and Hart’s “You Took Advantage of Me,” a hit song introduced by Joyce Barbour and Busby Berkeley in the revue Present Arms. The record is celebrated for the riotous chase chorus (a conversational but formally precise exchange) by Bix and Tram and the vocal that follows. Bing had the unenviable task of upholding a high level of invention, but as Bix’s biographer, Richard Sudhalter, has observed, “Bing Crosby, entering immediately afterwards, catches the mood exactly, voice brimming with obvious pleasure at what has just gone on. 27

  That number represented not only the end of the old Whiteman band but the end of the orchestra’s historic eight-year association with Victor. Chiefly because of a perceived rivalry with another Victor bandleader (Nat Shilkret), Whiteman signed with the accommodating Columbia Records. He was so miffed at Victor that on May 12 he allowed a Fox Movietone newsreel crew to film him tearing up his contract at the stroke of midnight (when his association with Victor officially ended). Worried by the large number of records Whiteman had stockpiled at Victor, Columbia wanted him in the studio immediately. To underscore its commitment to the band, the company paid Whiteman the singular tribute of designing him his own disc label: a pale blue potato-shaped caricature of Paul set against an orange-and-green background. Yet a thorn lurked behind the pastels. Co
lumbia’s engineers were not as good as their Victor counterparts at capturing the band’s plush sound. Worse, the sessions were run by Eddie King, a jazz-hating producer who encouraged Whiteman to revive his old sound; the winged phrasing of a Bing or Bix gave him no pleasure.

  Meanwhile, Bing was enjoying the good life, whether on tour or at home base. The money was good and the booze was plentiful. Every city the band played — Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Erie — provided him with a golf course by day and speakeasies by night. In New York the Rhythm Boys were in demand for private parties thrown by or for such celebrities as Mayor Walker, Buddy DeSylva, and Beatrice Lillie. Other nights the guys headed for Harlem, for mixed-race jam sessions in Fletcher Henderson’s basement or shows at the Cotton Club and other venues starring such titans as Duke Ellington and Ethel Waters. On Broadway the boys soaked up songs in such shows as Oh, Kay I, with Gertrude Lawrence and a Gershwin score; Oh, Please!, with Bea Lillie and music by Vincent Youmans; Funny Face, with Fred Astaire and another Gershwin score; as well as Hit the Deck! (Youmans) and A Connecticut Yankee (Rodgers and Hart) and more — entertainment without end. Bing, Al, and Harry were present at Midnight Frolic, an exclusive show atop the New Amsterdam, when Maurice Chevalier made his American debut. They met Maurice Ravel at a Whiteman session and attended his concert at Mecca Auditorium. They spent numerous evenings doubled-up with laughter at the Parody Club, home to the vaudeville anarchy of Clayton, Jackson, and Durante. The great Durante never failed to convulse Bing. But maybe the Rhythm Boys spent too much time together; they were beginning to get on one another’s nerves.