Culture Watch
The First Hip White Person Bing Crosby:
A Pocketful of Dream -- The Early Years 1903-1940
By Gary Giddins (Little, Brown; 728 pages; $30)
People who remember Bing Crosby mostly for his annual Christmas programs with the clan gathered round the tree, or inevitably think of him as buh-buh-buh-buhing off on the Road to Somewhere or forever crooning I'm Dreaming of a White You-Know-What should meet the other Bing Crosby. The one whom bandleader Artie Shaw called "the first hip white person born in the United States.''
That Bing Crosby has mostly been forgotten, but he was once the real thing in jazz, and it is that part of his personality explored in the terrific first volume of an extended biography by the music critic and jazz authority Gary Giddins And to Giddins' great credit, he writes about Crosby and his accomplishments as part of a rapidly changing popular culture that was influenced as much by technology as it was by personality.
The first thing you have to know about Bing Crosby is that he was hard, if not impossible, to know. That ought to give any biographer second thoughts, but Giddins is a dogged and shrewd researcher and in his coverage of Crosby's early years, he assembles from a multitude of sources a multi-angled view of a famously likable and intensely private man whose reign and influence in pop culture is unique. Recordings, radio, films, TV -- Crosby ruled them all in his time, and without seeming effort or ambition. But it is clear that young Harry -- his real name -- had ambition to spare.
The blue-eyed and fun-loving boy of Spokane graduated from the Jesuit-run Gonzaga High School in 1920 with a solid education in the classics and a marked affinity for elocution. His affection for words and gift for phrase-making constantly shows up in his singing and acting. He went on to Gonzaga University, joined the college's dramatic club and sang with school groups and worked part-time. He listened to records, saw touring shows as they came through Spokane, and one fateful day bought a drum set from a mail-order catalogue. He had already been singing around the area with a buddy, but now he hooked up with a high-school kid named Al Rinker who had put together a four-piece group called the Musicaladers. Bing was an asset: not only could he play the drums, he could sing.
The Musicaladers didn't last long, and Rinker and Crosby, now on their own, decided to head to California. The drive from Spokane took more than three weeks, but they made it to Los Angeles and it wasn't long before they found themselves in show business, but not quite big time. As the Rhythm Boys, they toured in vaudeville and played nightclubs, absorbing the music around them, enjoying their freedom and a high life with plenty of booze and gals.
Bing gained a reputation as a heavy drinker, and he was, often showing up late for a session. He became friends with Louis Armstrong, and they were members of a mutual musical admiration society. "They began to inspire each other,'' Giddins writes. "Bing had learned much from Louis about style, spontaneity, time and feeling. Armstrong was the fount from which Bing's swinging and irreverent but emotional approach to song developed. Louis returned the admiration, picking up on Bing's timbre and his way with ballads.''
The main thing Bing learned from Louis was, according to Giddins, to be true to himself. "That meant not simulating a black aesthetic but applying it to who he was and what he knew as a Northwestern third-generation Anglo-Irish Catholic, reared on John McCormack and Al Jolson, Dixieland and dance music, elocution and minstrelsy, comedy and vaudeville.''
This volume follows Crosby through his days with the Rhythm Boys, performing on their own and with the band of Paul Whiteman, a pop idol of his day, and the marriage to a shy singer from the South named Dixie Lee. At the time of the wedding she was the bigger star, and at her insistence Bing cut back on the sauce. Tragically, left alone much of the time as her husband's career zoomed and hers disappeared, Dixie became a reclusive alcoholic.
Lest anyone dismiss Crosby, Giddins lays out an impressive list of his achievements including the fact that he made more studio recordings than any other singer ever (about 400 more than Sinatra), and scored the most number-one hits ever: 38. That's compared with the Beatles' 24 and Presley's 18. Nominated for three Oscars for best actor, he won once.
If everything seemed to come easy to Crosby, it was largely because he was lucky to come along at the right time. His predecessor Rudy Vallee sang stiffly (and nasally) into a megaphone; projected through the microphone, Crosby's warm baritone sounded natural and intimate and cozily at home in the radio listener's living room. Giddins explains why and how the Crosby sound evolved from the jazz-inflected Rhythm Boys' time to the later mellow and often bland crooning. (Later, Woody Guthrie would blast Crosby as the commercial tool of a soulless industry.)
Along the way, the author presents a series of lovely, astute riffs on the changing trends in American entertainment. Pop music was a craze fueled by inexpensive sheet music and recordings, radio and the jukebox. Radio demanded performers with a definable personality, and Bing created one from his own persona: an informal, unassuming, heck of a nice guy who played golf and like horse racing, used fancy words in a joking kind of way and could whistle and sing.
As good a singer as he was -- and he was damn good -- Crosby's true genius was for popularity. He had a nearly perfect sense of what the public wanted and as this fine biography makes clear, he knew how to give it to them. The book ends, appropriately, with another felicitous turn in the Crosby career: the union with Bob Hope and the first of their many road trips together. Giddins whets the appetite for the next installment about the life and times of Der Bingle.
