Bing Crosby

Bing Crosby: The Voice That Rewired Broadcasting

In 1948, *Music Digest* estimated that Bing Crosby's records accounted for more than half of the 80,000 hours a week that North American radio devoted to recorded music. The same year, American polls named him the most admired man alive — ahead of Jackie Robinson and Pope Pius XII. He had already won an Academy Award, sold more discs than anyone in history, and, almost as a side project, written a $50,000 cheque that would change how every broadcast in the world was made.

Bingo from Bingville

He was born Harry Lillis Crosby Jr. on 3 May 1903 in Tacoma, Washington. The nickname came from a neighbour, Valentine Hobart, who around 1910 started calling the boy "Bingo from Bingville" after a comic feature in *The Bingville Bugle*. It shortened, and it stuck.

Crosby graduated from Gonzaga High School in 1920 and enrolled at Gonzaga University, playing freshman baseball but never taking a degree; the university awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1937. In 1923 he joined a local band, the Musicaladers, on drums and vocals, and by 1925 was working Spokane's Clemmer Theater. That October he and Al Rinker drove to California. Within a year they were with Paul Whiteman's orchestra, and with pianist Harry Barris they became the Rhythm Boys, sharing bandstands with Bix Beiderbecke, Tommy Dorsey and Hoagy Carmichael. His first number one arrived in 1928 with a jazz-inflected "Ol' Man River."

Singing at Conversational Volume

The technical fact that made Crosby possible was the electrical microphone, and he was the first major singer to grasp what it meant. Everyone before him had been trained to fill a hall. Crosby worked out that amplification let a singer behave as if he were in a room with one listener — and built a whole vocabulary out of restraint, breath and timing. The critic Henry Pleasants described it as something genuinely new in American music: a style that might be called "singing in American," delivered with conversational ease. The word the press reached for was "crooner."

His other governing principle was the lyric. Tommy Dorsey's advice to a young Frank Sinatra was blunt: "there's only one singer you ought to listen to and his name is Crosby. All that matters to him is the words." Louis Armstrong was the formative influence on his phrasing, and the two became friends; when Columbia's Harry Cohn balked at the expense of casting Armstrong in *Pennies from Heaven* (1936), Crosby threatened to walk off the picture, forced the issue, and insisted Armstrong receive billing equal to his white co-stars.

Signing with Jack Kapp's Decca in late 1934 gave him an industrial platform. Kapp pushed him across genres — Christmas, Hawaiian, country, Irish, French, rhythm and blues — and Crosby's presence helped keep the label solvent through the Depression on thirty-five-cent singles. The numbers are barely credible: 396 charting singles, roughly 41 of them number ones, twenty-four separate hit singles in 1939 alone, and an unbroken run on the charts from 1931 to 1954. Billboard's statistician Joel Whitburn rated him the most successful American recording act of both the 1930s and the 1940s.

White Christmas and the War

He first sang Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" on a Christmas Day radio broadcast in 1941. Released as a single in October 1942, it hit number one on 31 October and stayed there eleven weeks, returning to the charts in 1945 and 1947 and again in Britain after his death. It has sold more than 50 million copies and is generally reckoned the best-selling single ever made. Crosby's own verdict was characteristic: "a jackdaw with a cleft palate could have sung it successfully."

The war made him more than a hit-maker. He performed for American troops in the European theatre and learned German phonetically from written scripts to record propaganda broadcasts aimed at enemy forces — the London-based journalist Bob Musel coined the name "Der Bingle" in 1944. *Yank* magazine called him the person who had done most for the morale of servicemen overseas, and a poll of US troops at the war's end put him ahead of Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Bob Hope.

Hollywood

*The Big Broadcast* (1932) began a screen career of nearly eighty pictures, with top billing in fifty-five. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor as Father O'Malley in *Going My Way* (1944) and was nominated again for *The Bells of St. Mary's* (1945) and *The Country Girl* (1954). Four songs he introduced won Oscars: "Sweet Leilani," "White Christmas," "Swinging on a Star" and "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening." Between 1940 and 1962 he and Bob Hope made seven *Road* comedies, from *Singapore* to *Hong Kong*, whose entire engine was the two men insulting each other. He was the number one box-office attraction in America for five consecutive years, 1944 to 1948.

The Man Who Rewired Broadcasting

By 1945 Crosby was tired of live radio and wanted his evenings back. NBC refused to let him pre-record; he refused to continue. ABC took him on the condition that recorded quality match live. In 1947 the engineer John T. Mullin demonstrated German AEG Magnetophon tape machines he had brought back from Europe and improved. Crosby heard them, ordered a test, and put $50,000 into Ampex to get American machines built, backing 3M as well to secure tape — the industry-standard Scotch No. 111.

The consequences were enormous and mostly invisible. Radio could now be edited, retaken, rehearsed and time-shifted like film. The laugh track was born when an editor, Bill Morrow, saved audience laughter from a cut segment and dropped it into a weaker show. Crosby gave one of the first Ampex Model 300 recorders to Les Paul, who used it to invent multitrack recording. In 1951 he set up an electronics division under Mullin to chase video; on 11 November that year, Bing Crosby Enterprises demonstrated the world's first videotape recording. He later sold the operation to 3M. Every recorded broadcast since runs on foundations he paid for.

The Private Bing

He married the singer Dixie Lee in 1930; they had four sons, Gary, Dennis, Phillip and Lindsay, and her alcoholism dominated the household until her death from ovarian cancer in 1952. Crosby, who had his own heavy drinking under control from 1931, conducted an affair with the actress Joan Caulfield in the later 1940s and considered divorce before dropping it. He married Kathryn Grant in 1957; their children are Harry, Mary and Nathaniel, who won the US Amateur golf title at nineteen.

In 1983 Gary Crosby published *Going My Own Way*, portraying his father as cold and abusive. The claim is contested within the family: Phillip disputed it, Lindsay called Crosby a good father, and the biographer Gary Giddins argued in 2018 that the memoir is unreliable. Two of the sons later died by suicide. Crosby's own passions were golf — a two handicap, entrant in the British and US Amateurs, founder in 1937 of the pro-am now known as the AT&T Pebble Beach — and the Pittsburgh Pirates, of which he owned a quarter share.

Why Bing Is Called a Genius

The claim for Crosby rests on two things, and neither is virtuosity. He was not a technically astonishing singer, and he said so himself.

The first is interpretive: he understood a new technology's aesthetic implications before anyone else did. The microphone was available to every singer of the late 1920s; Crosby alone reasoned from it to a complete style — low dynamic range, conversational phrasing, lyric over melody, the illusion of privacy at national scale. Pleasants's phrase, "singing in American," is the right one: he made popular singing sound like speech, and Sinatra, Perry Como, Dean Martin, Elvis Presley and John Lennon all worked downstream of that decision.

The second is genuinely inventive. His backing of magnetic tape was not celebrity patronage but a correct technical bet made against an entire industry's resistance, and it produced editing, time-shifting, the laugh track, multitrack recording and videotape.

The counter-case is fair. As an actor he had range but not depth, and coasted through many pictures on charm. His singing style, endlessly imitated, came to sound like the establishment it had once disrupted. He was a shrewd businessman whose "genius" partly consisted of buying the right engineers. And a man voted the most admired alive was, at home, more complicated than the public knew. Innovator is the safer word than genius — but very few twentieth-century entertainers changed two industries.

Legacy

Crosby recovered from a near-fatal lung infection in 1974 and returned to touring. He gave his last American concert on 16 August 1977 and died on 14 October 1977, aged 74, after a round of golf near Madrid. His final recording, a duet with David Bowie on "The Little Drummer Boy" and "Peace on Earth," was released in 1982 and reached number three in Britain. He holds a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1962), the first Grammy Global Achievement Award (1963), three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a place in the World Golf Hall of Fame. The voice is the memorial most people know. The tape running underneath everything else is the one he would have found funnier.

Achievements

• Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award — 1962
• Academy Award for Best Actor — 1945
• World Golf Hall of Fame
• Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award — 1960
• Notable work: White Christmas
• Worked as singer, actor and television personality