by Gary Giddins
His first major hit of the New Year, recorded the previous December, four years after he turned it down as too high-class, was Victor Herbert’s “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life.” It was a fitting beginning to the year of The Star Maker, a year largely consecrated to a revival of old styles of show business Bing had so decisively helped bury. Beyond movie and vaudeville songs, he recorded a few good standards; a couple of terrible songs, as favors; six remakes of youthful Crosby classics (plus two from the Whiteman period); and brief returns to Hawaii and the West. The patriotic songs added a new flavor to the mix. In all those sessions, he added only one number to the catalog of enduring pop standards, “What’s New?”
Yet 1939 was a good year for new songs. Among those Bing did not record that might have suited him to a T were “Day In — Day Out,” “All the Things You Are,” “I Thought About You,” “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” “Some Other Spring,” “If I Didn’t Care,” “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” “South of the Border,” and “Over the Rainbow.” Instead, he enriched Decca’s coffers with the likes of “Little Sir Echo” (an adaptation of the Boy Scouts’ anthem), “Whistling in the Wildwood,” and the inscrutably maudlin “Poor Old Rover,” which one would like to think was intended as a jape — after all, it was cowritten by Del Porter, an architect of Spike Jones’s City Slickers, and recorded with Spike himself on drums. 14 Audible evidence fails to support that hope.
Beyond the dubious material was the issue of John Trotter’s one-an-a-two-an-a arrangements and a clique of soloists who, outside the Hollywood studio system, would have made no bandleader’s A-list. Compared with Bob Crosby’s band, for example, which enjoyed an outstanding year with its new trumpet star, Billy Butterfield, and clarinetist Irving Fazola, Trotter’s regulars (trumpeter Andy Secrest, saxophonist Jack Mayhew) were also-rans, and while they served his arrangements proficiently, the question remains: in an era of phenomenal musicianship, why was its most prized vocalist (voted, in January 1939, number one crooner of the United States by song promoters and, more democratically, best male singer by the readers of Down Beat) so rarely challenged by his peers?
“What’s New?,” one of Bing’s two mightiest hits that year, resulted from a distant collusion with his baby brother’s band. While experimenting with a cycle of chord changes, Bob Haggart devised a melody and arranged it as a concerto for Billy Butterfield, whom he and Bob Crosby discovered playing in a Kentucky band shell. The record, “I’m Free,” made Butterfield a jazz star and convinced many that, with a lyric, the song could be a smash. Johnny Mercer, who wrote the band’s greatest success of the year, “Day In — Day Out,” tried his hand and, for once, was stumped. “He worked on it for two months,” Haggart remembered, “but he said, ‘I keep coming up with the same thing — I’m free, free as the birds in the trees, da da da da.’ And so he just never did it, and then along comes Johnny Burke, who changed the whole idea.” 15
Burke liked the tune and, as Haggart later learned, had a conversation at the time with Larry Crosby. Larry told him, “You know, I love your lyrics, but they’re all very poetic. Couldn’t you write something more conversational?” “Like what?” he asked. Larry said, “Like ‘what’s new?’ ‘how’s things?’ something like that, one-on-one.” 16 Haggart, who never met Burke, did not know he had written a lyric until he heard Bing’s record, arranged for Trotter by the gifted bandleader Claude Thornhill. As Bing’s record took off, other bandleaders (Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet, Hal Kemp) adapted the song as a feature for their vocalists, and it endured as a standard, cropping up decade after decade in versions by Louis Armstrong, Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra, Linda Ronstadt, and many others. Bing’s performance is piquant in its conversational tact: the coolly interrogative “what’s new?” belying the difficulty of a phrase that changes key after the first bar, from C to A flat; the atypical dropped-g on treatin’; clipped consonants on bit and admit; all contrasted with polished mordents and mellifluous high notes.
“What’s New?” typified the evolution in Bing’s style from, as critic John McDonough wrote, the “husky baritone of the 1931 Brunswicks to the mellow pipe organ” 17 of the 1940s — an organ so seemingly unaffected that, to paraphrase Huey Long, it made every man a crooner, at least in his own mind. Even Time, in its give-and-take manner, was touched: “Once more Crooner Crosby illuminates a dull song by singing it as though it were the best song he had ever heard.” 18
But consider the other five sides recorded at that June 30 session. Bing did himself and Harry Barris no service by recording his former partner’s laborious “Neighbors in the Sky,” which Kapp buried on the B-side of a middling duet with Connie Boswell, “Start the Day Right.” (A few months before, Bing had done Barris the real kindness of reprising three of his great songs from the Cocoanut Grove.) He was similarly at a loss trying to mine something from Walter Donaldson’s “Cynthia,” recorded at the behest of his song publisher friend Rocco Vocco. Donaldson had ruled the roost in the 1920s, turning out dozens of enduring hits, but by the mid-1930s his style was outmoded, and despite Hollywood assignments, he wrote only a few important songs, notably “Did I Remember?” With its wordy imagery and disharmonious repetition of the name Cynthia, his new opus had no chance. Bing’s forgotten record is not without appeal, despite an error (he turns a verb into a gerund), but Kapp buried it until 1940, when Bing scored Donaldson’s last two hits, written with Johnny Mercer, who joined Bing for buoyant duets on “Mister Meadowlark” and “On Behalf of the Visiting Firemen.”
The rest of the session was devoted to Gus Edwards — two admirable collaborations with the Music Maids. The first is a medley set up by the Maids (“School Days”) followed by savory Crosby snippets of “Sunbonnet Sue,” “Jimmy Valentine,” and the nimble “If I Was a Millionaire.” The last two are so pleasing, he might easily have made entire records of them. In the case of “Jimmy Valentine,” that may have been the initial intention, as a fluff take, from the movie prerecordings, survives with an ominous spoken introduction in the manner of “Skeleton in the Closet.” Just as Bing was finishing the first chorus, he slipped up and, without breaking stride, sang it into oblivion:
Look out! Look out!
For when you see his lantern shine
That’s the time to jump right up and shout
uh, Help!, Oh Jesus Christ, I blew the time
And I’m a dirty son of a bitch
When Jimmy Valentine…
Edwards had learned his trade in the early years of Tin Pan Alley vaudeville, when topicality meant everything. The year he wrote “Jimmy Valentine,” O. Henry’s good-hearted burglar had been revived as the hero of a popular play. In 1905 Edwards wrote “In My Merry Oldsmobile,” in recognition of the two automobiles that traversed half the country, from Detroit to Portland, in forty-four days. Composing the first hit tune to glorify the horseless carriage did not get Gus the free Olds he tried to pry out of the company, but it made him enough money to buy several. In later years, though, radio stations refused to play the song because it was considered akin to an advertisement. The embargo hurt sales of Bing’s superb version with the general public (the BBC banned it outright), but Decca scored all the same when Oldsmobile bought 100,000 discs as part of a pact with Paramount to cross-promote its 1940 model and The Star Maker.
Bing’s recorded treatment is far superior to that in the movie. Trotter’s brisk arrangement starts as a waltz, permitting one chorus each for Bing and the orchestra; then it switches to four-four for the Music Maids, followed by Bing, who enters swinging. Accompanied by the rhythm section and the Maids, he peaks with a suavely injected “automo-bub-bub-bubbel-in’,” before finishing with a Barris-style shhh! Four choruses in less than two and a half minutes: imagine if Trotter had opened it up with soloists and given Bing another chorus. Bix Beiderbecke rescued a tedious version of the song back in 1927, but for sheer élan, his chorus had nothing on Bing’s.
The movie songs produced other gems, often alchemized from chancy material. T
hree days after wrapping East Side of Heaven, he insightfully interpreted the songs for Decca. In the title number, his pearly vowels and nuances — he makes the word same (“it’s the same old Manhattan”) a worldly sigh of routine — make more of the song than it’s worth. (The first orchestral interjection will be recognized by many as the four-note riff from The Twilight Zone.) Burke took the idea for “Hang Your Heart on a Hickory Limb” from a maxim his wife often repeated, and inserted a Jesuitical piece of advice he figured Crosby would appreciate: “For every bit of pleasure there’ll be pain / If you feel that’s no bargain, then abstain.” Bing capers through the verse and into the chorus, employing his old technique of squeezing in extra syllables toward the end, leading Crosby expert and singer Arne Fogel to comment, “Only Bing can be so funky, swingy, and funny at the same time.” 19 Jimmy Monaco used an unusual fortyeight-bar aba format for “Sing a Song of Sunbeams,” a song that ushered in a spate of Crosbyan odes to sanguinity, most famously the 1944 “Swinging on a Star.”
Burke once explained his method for writing Bing’s lyrics, and it was no different than Carroll Carroll’s for writing radio scripts. “The most successful device,” he said, “was to listen to Bing’s conversation and either take my phrases directly from him or pattern some after his way of putting phrases together.” 20 An evident example among the four songs he and Monaco wrote for The Star Maker is “Go Fly a Kite” (he rhymes wind and chagrined), which in Trotter’s staid arrangement makes for a less than impassioned record — until Bing’s Armstrongian closing chorus. The flat sentimentality of “A Man and His Dream” and “Still the Bluebird Sings” are partly redeemed by “An Apple for the Teacher” — in the picture a Linda Ware nonentity, but on record a jaunty duet for Bing and Connie Boswell, whose pouty on-the-beat southern inflections show precisely why the youthful Ella Fitzgerald (whom Bing later named as the best singer alive) adored her. Propelled by Perry Botkin’s guitar, it preceded “What’s New?” as a top seller.
Jack Kapp’s instincts aside, Bing’s new style lent itself to old songs, an ironic circumstance for the man who not too long before embodied Jazz Age modernity. Bing plainly delighted in the simple diatonic melodies of the bygone era, and the songs brought out his most ingenuous charm. Frank Sinatra debuted on records in 1939, with Harry James’s band, though it was little noted at the time. Yet four years later, to exploit his momentous triumph as a single, one of those selections with James, “All or Nothing at All,” was re-released and rocketed up the charts to become his first million-seller. In retrospect, the irony was unmistakable: at the moment Sinatra had extended the interpretation of lyrics — patented by Bing on records like “What’s New?” — into a darker and more personal realm, Bing had reserved much of his most poignant work for the easier mercies of nostalgia.
Despite the rearguard repertory, Bing did not succumb to musical apathy. He continued to find ways to enliven the old with nuance and power. “If I Had My Way” is exemplary, a Crosby waltz in which phrases resonate like gongs, thanks to perfect parallel mordents, over a slow but pulsing tempo; the voice is lovely, the high notes exquisite, and the emotions deeply persuasive and of a sort no one else could have mustered. The romantic vulnerability of a Sinatra is unsuited to these elemental melodies. They demand a bounteous voice and temperament to avoid bathos while cutting through the cobwebs. Despite its egregiously antiquated minstrel lyric, Bing’s “The Missouri Waltz” is a neglected gem. It suggests that the king of technology and prince of jazz was also the last nineteenth-century man, an artist genuinely besotted by the past — that is, genuinely capable of extracting nuggets of beauty and sentiment where his contemporaries found only corn.
On a few sessions Bing’s accompaniment combined John Scott Trotter’s Frying Pan Five (a name that promised more steam than it delivered) and the Foursome, a vocal choir that doubled on a variety of instruments. Bing had casually met two of the singers, Ray Johnson and Del Porter, in Spokane, when he was a Musicalader and they were appearing with a band at the Davenport Hotel. They later teamed with two other singers, worked for Mack Sennett, and scored on Broadway in Girl Crazy. A few Hollywood films followed, but they were about to head East again when Bing invited them to appear on KMH; soon they became regulars on Bob Burns’s summer replacement show. What Bing and Trotter liked about the Foursome, beyond their efficient harmonies, was their unison playing of the ocarina, a potato-shaped wind instrument with ten holes that produces pure tones (no partials or overtones). The combination of ocarinas and Del Porter’s clarinet provided a catchy freshness to oldies (“Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider” and “Down by the Old Mill Stream”) and western songs (“When the Bloom Is on the Sage” and the bestselling “Alla en el Rancho Grande,” Bing’s first time singing in flawless Spanish). The sound inspired Burke and Monaco to write a song about the ocarina for Road to Singapore.
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Bing recorded every week in March, early April, and — after completing The Star Maker — every week in June. His radio show continued to wax in popularity with the usual guests, including Frances Langford, William Frawley, Bert Lahr, Joan Bennett, Matty Malneck, Pat O’Brien, Leo McCarey, Florence George (Everett’s new wife), Freddie Bartholomew, Rudolph Ganz, Jackie Cooper, John Wayne, Gladys Swarthout, Walter Damrosch, Basil Rathbone, Walter Huston, Lucille Ball, and so forth. Bing filled his downtime with sporting events. He played tennis at the Palm Springs Racquet Club (along with Errol Flynn, Frank Morgan, and other film stars); participated in the broadcast of a two-minute Joe Louis fight; and traveled to Boston to watch Ligaroti come in next to last at Suffolk Downs, ending a meteoric career. Bing had bad luck of a different kind when his horse Midge raced at Hollywood Park and he sent a friend to bet a large sum on the nose; Midge won, but the friend did not get to the track on time. Bing found a few days to join Dixie in Palm Springs, where they threw a party at Cafe La Maze for the Eddie Lowes, the Dave Butlers, and the Herb Polesies. Then it was back to The Star Maker and Jack Kapp.
Part of Decca’s invasion of the past focused on new versions of Crosby classics from before 1934, before Decca. Jack and Bing had several possible motives. For one, they were good songs and, as Bing’s style had radically changed, warranted new interpretations. For another, many of the songs were by Bing’s friends and associates, so he was doing them a favor. For a third, the idea of making a movie based on Bing’s life had been in the air for a couple of years, since the deal Bing attempted to broker for Ted Crosby and Grover Jones, and was thought more likely now, given the vogue for pictures about contemporary entertainers. In that event, Decca would want to own versions of the essential records Bing had recorded for Brunswick. That was the nub of the matter. Brunswick had recently been acquired by CBS, guaranteeing an impending rivalry.
In 1938 William Paley, who had declined to invest in Decca when the recording business was moribund, bought ARC (the holding company for Brunswick and Columbia), with the intention of reviving Columbia as a prominent label. RCA Victor’s executive, Edward Wallerstein, itching to leave the company, had convinced Paley to purchase ARC for $700,000. Paley did not need much convincing. As the economy revived, he looked with increasing jealousy at David Sarnoff’s NBC, which not only controlled two networks to his one but operated the profitable and prestigious RCA. The record business had rallied: Kapp’s visionary pricing, Crosby’s steady and increasing sales, and the tremendous commercial breakthrough of the swing craze brought the industry back to heights approaching the glory days of 1927. The turnabout would be complete by 1940. Yet Paley had more than business on his mind. He wanted revenge.
Paley and Sarnoff had competed bitterly for ten years, frequently over cultural programming. At a time when intellectuals disdained radio and Capitol Hill vetted its contributions to the national good, the networks strove for prestige; highbrow signings were essential, even if they could not attract sponsors. In 1930 Paley brought off a historic coup by hiring the New York Philhamonic, under the direction of Arturo Toscanini, for Sunday-afte
rnoon broadcasts. Toscanini remained a CBS staple until 1936, when he declined to renew his contract with the orchestra. Paley and the Philharmonic hoped he would change his mind but in the interim reluctantly accepted his no. Sarnoff and his programming chief, John Royal, did not. Toscanini was a prize catch, and they came up with an offer he could not refuse: NBC would create for him his own symphony orchestra. It was a stunning, buccaneering gamble, the kind Paley prided himself on making. Paley went to war. With RCA’s former chief, Waller-stein, in his camp and ARC in his pocket, he hoped to cut RCA off at the knees. His timing could not have been better.
By 1939 the synergy between records and radio had grown so significant, Variety initiated a new feature, “Network Plugs, 8 A.M. to 1 A.M.” — a list of the records most played on the flagship stations of the NBC (WEAF and WJZ) and CBS (WABC) networks, computed over a week. Twenty to forty plays in a week was considered high and certain to increase the sales of sheet music and records. The need for accurately tracked sales and playlists was answered in July 1940, when Billboard aced Variety and published its first chart of bestselling records, a signal tribute to a flourishing industry. By then, as Time reported in a September 1939 survey of the “Phonograph Boom,” it had “fattened into one of the fastest growing business in the U.S., with an annual gross of some $36,000,000.” 21 Time assigned most of the credit to “the five-year-old Decca concern, with Crosby as its Caruso.” 22 Decca sold 12 million records in 1939, second only to RCA (with 13 million), for an estimated annual gross of 4 million dollars. Bing accounted for a sixth of Decca’s sales — “a post-Caruso record record.” Fortune reported that Decca ceased to advertise because the company could no longer keep up with orders. In 1940 Decca sold 18 million records, still a close second to RCA.