by Gary Giddins
Paley soon killed the various smaller ARC logos as well as Brunswick, reserving Columbia for his status signings, which included several symphony orchestras, along with such conductors as Stokowski (Toscanini’s rival), Mitropoulos, Rodzinski, and Stock, and just about any swing band with an open contract, including Goodman, Basie, Ellington, James, Krupa, Red Norvo and Mildred Bailey, and Kay Kyser. Then he borrowed a page from Decca’s playbook. Kapp’s reduced prices had revitalized the whole industry; Paley reduced the price of twelve-inch classical discs by half, to a buck apiece, driving a wedge into RCA’s dominance in the field (the one area Kapp neglected). Meanwhile, there was now the issue of who owned the Brunswick catalog that Kapp had nursed before leaving the company to create Decca. A deal was made. All Brunswick records made before Warner Bros. leased the company to ARC, in December 1931, would go to Decca — in which Warner Bros. maintained a financial interest. 23 All Brunswicks made after Warner Bros. had given ARC a ten-year lease, including most of the Crosby sides, would remain part of CBS’s ARC holdings.
With Columbia going toe-to-toe with RCA and the increased acceptance of reissues, it was only a matter of time before both companies would release old Crosby sides. At Kapp’s suggestion, Bing recorded new versions of his benchmark recordings, including a couple that remained in the Decca trove. Kapp believed that the Bing of 1939 was far more acceptable to audiences than the Bing who originally recorded “Star Dust,” “I Surrender, Dear,” “It Must Be True,” “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams,” “Home on the Range,” and “Just One More Chance.” Most of those songs had been hits in late 1930 and early 1931; however mannered or naive they may have sounded in 1939, they had been lanterns in the musical landscape of their day. Good songs ought to withstand many and diverse interpretations, as indeed these did. Yet Bing’s remakes could only display, at best, a great singer singing great songs. They could not recapture the novelty of brand-new songs rendered in a brand-new style. The originals helped define the time in which they were created; the remakes helped define the ripening of Crosby. 24
All the same, some were improvements over the originals. Bing was right to reclaim “Star Dust,” which had become one of the most performed of all songs in the eight years since he introduced the lyric. Unfortunately, he dropped the verse, but his entrance — after a spacey introduction with a long harp arpeggio (the kind Spike Jones later parodied in “Holiday for Strings”) — is alluring and his follow-through is flawlessly composed, if a bit stentorian. After East Side of Heaven, Bing invited Matty Malneck to record with him on this session, and passages in Malneck’s swirling arrangement would later be referenced by Gordon Jenkins in the setting he devised for a definitive 1956 Nat “King” Cole version. Malneck’s ensemble included Manny Klein and accordionist Milton DeLugg, both of whom are scored high so that Bing’s voice is the low instrument, an anchor for the others, especially on another strong tune from the session, “Deep Purple,” notable for Bing’s range and expansive low notes.
He was unable to replicate the magic of the 1933 “Home on the Range,” but he did bring a renewed authority to the Harry Barris remakes, ensuring their survival as standards. The new “I Surrender, Dear” is more deeply felt and conversational than the original. The long instrumental prelude and jazzy tempo changes of the Jimmy Grier arrangement are gone, but a comparison of the vocals reveals the greater finesse and weightiness he now brought to the song that had hastened his journey to network radio.
“Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” is more remarkable, supernally relaxed, especially in the effortlessly dramatized bridge. The song lends itself to Bing’s legato phrasing with a two-bar rhythmic pattern that occurs eleven times — that is, for twenty-two of its thirty-two bars: quarter note (wrap) quarter note (your) eighth note eighth note (trou-bles) quarter note (in) dotted half (dreams) quarter note (and). On every occasion, Bing expands the dotted half note, pushing the following quarter note into the next bar, producing a subtle syncopation and a canny example of his musical pulse at work. In a second take, sung at a brighter tempo, his embellishments are more overt, and it might have been chosen for release, except that an apparent change in the arrangement confused Bing as he headed into the final bridge, resulting in the most famous of Crosby fluffs, played out to the bitter end:
Castles may tumble, that’s fate after all
Life’s really funny that way
Sang the wrong melody, we’ll play it back
See what it sounds like, hey hey
They cut out eight bars, the dirty bastards
And I didn’t know which eight bars he was gonna cut
Why don’t somebody tell me these things around here
Holy Christ, I’m going off my nut.
The fluff take was instantly bootlegged, and fifty or so copies were released on a label stamped Triple-X. Soon numerous bootlegs of the bootleg were pirated — an underground hit.
Other kinds of nostalgia permeated Bing’s 1939 recordings. Accompanied by Victor Young, he turned to Gershwin for the first time in three years to essay exceedingly slow and reflective versions of “Somebody Loves Me” and “Maybe.” He also returned, after three years, to Dick McIntyre for two of his best Hawaiian songs, “To You, Sweetheart, Aloha” and “My Isle of Golden Dreams,” displaying the candor that enriched his readings of songs from the Gus Edwards era. His affection for the melodies is unmistakable, as is his evident enjoyment in the sound of his voice. On two occasions, in 1955 and 1960, 25 Bing cited “My Isle of Golden Dreams” as his favorite record, an intriguing selection because Decca rarely saw fit to reissue it during the next sixty years. Say this much: it represents the purity of his voice and his agile control at a glorious peak. The phrasing is unerring, the high notes full and fair, and the mordents — varied in stress and duration — are never merely ornamental; they do something, advancing meaning and feeling.
Those qualities were no less apparent when, with Johnny Mercer’s lyric, he transformed “And the Angels Sing,” Benny Goodman’s jazzed-up fraylich — a Yiddish dance tune drawn from klezmer music — into a ballad. Goodman’s record propelled the jitterbugs with its heady two-beat interlude by trumpet player Ziggy Elman, who devised the piece. In turning it into a love song, Bing understates everything yet brings his own undulations into play: on the superb release, his mordents roll out like ripples in a stream.
For sentiment of another kind, in March Kapp recorded Bing singing Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” written in 1917 but suppressed by the composer because he thought it a shameless flag-waver, until Kate Smith asked him for a patriotic song on the eve of the Second World War. He also recorded Francis Scott Key’s “The Star Spangled Banner,” written in 1814 and decreed by an act of Congress as the national anthem in 1931. They were not chosen for musical or commercial value, though the convincingly sung Berlin song sold remarkably well — almost as well as Kate Smith’s. Bing’s take on the national anthem is unsurprising; he sings it straight and sober, as though he were standing in a ballpark. These records convey little significance today. They are musical heirlooms. But in their day they imparted a political meaning beyond rote patriotism.
In March 1939, when the Berlin and Key songs were recorded, patriotism was a sorely contested idea. In one of the strangest consequences of political opportunism, the far left (communists) and far right (American Firsters) snuggled together under the covers of isolationism. Hitler was not the problem, they agreed; it was either J. P. Morgan and Jewish bankers or commies and Jewish radicals, or the imminent invasion of an Asian horde (the Yellow Peril) sweeping westward to wipe out civilization, Christianity, and white people. Personalities as anomalous as Father Charles E. Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh were heard by millions on radio, arguing that Hitler was the last bulwark against greater evils. The country refused to consider war, and Roosevelt despaired of mobilizing aid for Europe. Even as he pushed through the Lend-Lease Act in 1941, providing credit for opponents of the Axis, the Almanac Singers sang, “Franklin D.,
listen to me /You Ain’t a-gonna send me ‘cross the sea.” 26
“The Star Spangled Banner” is not an isolationist song. Before Bing, the last singer to make a popular record of it was John McCormack, in the spring of 1917, as General Pershing’s American Expeditionary Forces headed for France. In the immediate weeks before Bing made his version, Franco marched on Madrid, and Hitler — after conscripting all German youth and refusing to meet with Roosevelt — invaded Prague and Memel. A couple of weeks before that, in the United States, 22,000 Nazis congregated in Madison Square Garden; anti-Nazi protests of equal size followed. Music was invariably caught in the crosshairs: the Daughters of the American Revolution declared Marian Anderson unfit to perform in Constitution Hall because of her color; Germany banned jazz and swing; Russia purged the leadership of the Komsomol for permitting music that encouraged the rumba, tango, and jitterbug; Italy allowed swing but barred Jewish music and musicians as well as most American movies. In 1940 the recently resigned ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, addressed fifty top Hollywood executives at a luncheon and told them to “stop making anti-Nazi pictures or using the film medium to promote or show sympathy to the cause of the democracies versus the dictators.” He warned them to “get those Jewish names off the screen.” 27
In that context, the act of recording patriotic songs was neither pro forma, sentimental, nor innocent. Any doubts that Bing’s recordings endorsed a particular vision of America were swept aside the following summer when Decca released his four-sided Ballad for Americans. Earl Robinson, who wrote the music for John Latouche’s libretto, was not a rote liberal preaching tolerance; he was a loyal communist who supported the Hitler-Stalin pact, though his personal politics ran largely to issues of racial equality. A prolific composer, he was best known at the time for the classic union protest song “Joe Hill.” In 1938 he and Latouche created a forerunner to Ballad for Americans, “Ballad of Uncle Sam,” for the Federal Theater Project, which was roundly vilified by Texas congressman Martin Dies’s committee investigating “un-American” activities — like racially integrated theater. He slandered their work as “an American version of the ‘Internationale.’” 28 “It died early,” Louis Untermeyer wrote in his notes to Bing’s LP release of Ballad for Americans, “with a noose of red tape around its neck.” 29
After Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the public grew resistant to native demagogues. Ballad for Americans debuted on CBS in November, introduced by Burgess Meredith and sung by the princely African American baritone Paul Robeson, and was a sensation. Variety described it as “a masterpiece of authentic American love of country.” 30 Reader’s Digest concurred: “the finest piece of American propaganda.” 31 Robeson recorded it in February. Numerous singers (hundreds according to Earl Robinson), including Lawrence Tibbett and James Melton, performed it over the next few years. But Bing was the only popular singer to record it, in four parts, accompanied by Victor Young conducting the Decca Concert Orchestra and the Ken Darby Singers. Robinson thought Tibbett’s version too operatic, but “Bing Crosby recorded the piece beautifully on Decca, and his version sold another twenty thousand copies. I remember gently exaggerating the Crosby style when I described his crooning to friends.” Robinson added, “By the way, he sang it in the lower Robeson key.” 32
Bing did not approach the project lightly. He studied the work before the session, and his concentration in the studio was painstaking; everything had to be right. In contrast to his usual speed (five tunes in two hours, rarely more than two takes), he devoted an hour to each of the four segments. If the reviews were not overtly political, political righteousness fueled the cheers of latecomers to the world of popular music. “Bing Crosby came of age, musically speaking, in his last week’s album, Ballad for Americans,” wrote New York Post critic Michael Levin. “This is the finest recorded performance Bing had done to date and shows that in the last few years he has gone far beyond binging and has really learned how to sing.” When he finished patronizing Bing, Levin chanced a risky comparison with Paul Robe-son’s Victor set that undoubtedly gladdened the hearts of Kapp’s team: “For all of Robeson’s magnificent voice, we prefer the Crosby version. The recording is better, the orchestration is better, and the chorus is better trained.”
Ballad for Americans is now antiquated: a rabble-rousing, melting-pot, bleacher-cheer oratorio, narrated and sung by a bard who identifies himself, at the very end, as the personification of America. It begins:
In ‘76 the sky was red,
Thunder rumbling overhead,
Bad King George couldn’t sleep in his bed,
And on that stormy morn,
Old Uncle Sam was born. (Some birthday!)
Old Sam put on a three-cornered hat,
And in a Richmond church he sat,
And Patrick Henry told him that,
While America drew breath,
It was liberty or death.
(Did they all believe in liberty in those days?)
Nobody who was anybody believed it.
And everybody who was anybody, they doubted it.
Nobody had faith, nobody — nobody but, uh, Washington, Tom Paine,
Benjamin Franklin, Haym Salomon, Crispus Attucks, Lafayette.
Nobodies.
One imagines Kapp leaping at the opportunity to record it with the man he had helped establish as the personification of American song. Surely no great political courage was required, because suddenly every political group wanted to claim the work as its private anthem. The Republicans hired Ray Middleton (after Robeson declined) to sing it at the convention that nominated Wendell Willkie as its 1940 presidential candidate. One week earlier it was sung at the Communist Party convention. The political significance of Bing’s version lay in his personal standing, specifically the ethnicity he was now intent on making a crucial component of his public persona. Bing’s radio audience was estimated as high as 50 million. But when most people thought of an Irish Catholic on the air, the figure brought to mind was the increasingly repudiated Father Coughlin, whose pro-Hitler tirades had grown so bellicose that they provoked Irish American gangs to descend on Jewish neighborhoods to start fights.
Coughlin’s family had come to America in the same pre-Famine era as the Harrigans and, like them, had settled in Canada, where he was born in 1891. He and Bing started their radio careers on CBS and were considered among the idiom’s first masters. (Wallace Stegner has described Coughlin’s delivery as “such mellow richness, such heartwarming, confidential intimacy.”) 33 William Paley refused to renew Coughlin’s contract after he accused CBS of censorship, but the relationship could not have survived the priest’s rabid antisemitism. NBC also refused to broadcast him, so Coughlin organized his own network of twenty-six independent stations and reached more people than ever before. By 1940 he was so far over the edge that Catholics turned from him in embarrassment (two years later Archbishop Edward Mooney, with the support of the Vatican, ordered him to cease publication of Social Justice, his noxious magazine). That same year Bing recorded the work in which the founding of America is traced to a family of patriots that includes a Jewish financier (Haym Salomon) and a runaway slave (Crispus Attucks). Ballad for Americans was American history as refracted by New Deal liberalism and served with a spoon. But it worked, and through it Bing spoke his piece and balanced the scales.
Bing had never made much of his ethnicity. Every aspect of big-time entertainment discouraged him, and in any case, it would have been a stretch; his paternal Anglican side settled in America well before the Revolution, and his maternal Irish side arrived in New Brunswick in the 1830s. Unlike minstrelsy and vaudeville, which were steeped in ethnic stereotypes, Hollywood and radio insisted upon common denominators. The thinking was that a picture about Jews would attract only Jews, and a picture about Catholics would attract only Catholics, and so forth. No all-Negro picture had ever earned much money. Leo McCarey’s affecting Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) flopped, it was argued, because it was ab
out old people, and they never turned out in sufficient numbers. The picture business was tough enough without deliberately limiting the number of ticket buyers. Since the end of the early-thirties gangster cycle, Hollywood’s product had steadily slouched toward the ethnically rinsed paradise of Louis B. Mayer’s beloved Carvel, MGM’s city on a hill, home to the confessor/jurist Judge Hardy and his son, Andy. Only character players could keep their accents, receding hairlines, noses, and names. In all the feature films he had made to date, Bing had never played a character with a name — Crosby, Danvers, Bronson, Williams, Jones (twice), Lawton, Grayson, Gordon, Crocker, Larabee, Poole, Marvin, Boland, Remsen, Beebe, Lawton, Martin, Earl — that could be construed as remotely Irish.
He now commenced a conversion, from all-American crooner to hyphenated-American nationalist, an ethnic in a land of ethnics, publicly and privately. At his behest, Larry and Ted began to investigate the family’s genealogy; in later years Bing would wear the emblem of his Irish forebears on his blazers. Yet long before that, as Coughlin’s name faded from public discourse and memory, Bing’s name became inextricably linked to the community of Irish American Catholics. American popular song derived from a motley of ethnicities; the one address where the efficacy of the melting pot could not be denied was Tin Pan Alley. It succeeded because the Jews, blacks, Italians, Anglos, southerners, westerners, midwesterners, and others refused to melt, all priding themselves on the particular heritages that fed their art. Bing, the prodigy of the Inland Empire raised on the diversity of recordings, found his cultural corner in rediscovering the Irish in his pedigree.