Bing Crosby

• 1. Introduction

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  Bing Crosby's recording of "White Christmas" has sold over 50 million copies worldwide, making it the bestselling single of all time. That fact alone might seem to define the man, but it barely scratches the surface. Harry Lillis Crosby Jr. was born on the 3rd of May 1903 in Tacoma, Washington, and by the time he died on the 14th of October 1977, he had recorded more than 1,600 songs, appeared in over 70 feature films, and amassed an estimated 500 million records sold worldwide. In 1948, American polls declared him the most admired man alive, placing him ahead of Jackie Robinson and Pope Pius XII. What turns a boy who preferred whistling to singing into a force that reshaped radio, film, the recording industry, and even television technology? The answers lie in a life built on an intimacy the microphone made possible, a stubbornness that rewired broadcasting, and a range of obsessions that ran from thoroughbred horses to magnetic tape.

• 2. Spokane Beginnings

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  The house at 1112 North J Street in Tacoma, Washington, where Harry Lillis Crosby Jr. was born, was built by his own father. Three years after his birth, the family relocated to Spokane in Eastern Washington, where Crosby spent his childhood as the fourth of seven children. His father, Harry Lillis Crosby Sr., was a bookkeeper, and his mother Kate was a singer of second-generation Irish-American descent. The family phonograph was a constant presence; his father would fill the house with music from their Edison player while his mother sang, and most of the Crosby children developed musical ability as a result. Young Harry's preferred outlet was not singing but whistling, which he did constantly wherever he went. The turning point came in 1917, when Crosby took a summer job as a property boy at Spokane's Auditorium. There he watched Al Jolson perform, and Crosby later described Jolson's delivery as "electric", crediting that encounter with igniting something in him. After graduating from Gonzaga High School in 1920, he enrolled at Gonzaga University, where he played baseball as a freshman. His teammates were fond enough of him that when he failed to qualify for road trips, they would sneak him onto the train and hide him, and he would entertain them with his guitar in return. He left after three years without a degree, though the university awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1937. Gonzaga now houses more than 200 artifacts from his life, including his Oscar, in the house his father built at 508 E. Sharp Avenue.

• 3. From Rhythm Boys to Radio Star

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  In 1923, Crosby joined the Musicaladers, a group of younger high-school musicians that performed at dances and on Spokane radio station KHQ. After the group disbanded, Crosby and Al Rinker found work at the Clemmer Theatre in Spokane before heading to Los Angeles in October 1925. There the Fanchon and Marco Time Agency hired them at $75 each a week for a revue called The Syncopation Idea. Their lively style caught the attention of the Paul Whiteman organization, and by 1926 they were hired at $150 a week, debuting with Whiteman on the 6th of December at the Tivoli Theatre in Chicago. Success with Whiteman nearly collapsed when they reached New York, where Whiteman considered letting them go. The addition of pianist Harry Barris saved the arrangement and created The Rhythm Boys, whose extra voice carried more easily in large New York venues. On tour, Crosby performed and recorded alongside Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey, and Hoagy Carmichael, maturing rapidly as a performer. In 1928, he registered his first number one hit, a jazz-influenced rendition of "Ol' Man River". When Mack Sennett signed Crosby to a solo contract in 1931, the Rhythm Boys chapter effectively closed. On the 2nd of September 1931, his nationwide solo radio debut, 15 Minutes with Bing Crosby, began broadcasting, and ten of the top fifty songs of 1931 featured Crosby either as a solo act or with others. He signed with Jack Kapp's new label Decca in late 1934, and Kapp would prove decisive in shaping what Crosby became: by talking him out of his jazzier mannerisms, Kapp pushed him toward a clear vocal style and a diversified repertoire that stretched from Christmas music to Hawaiian, country, Irish, and rhythm and blues, generating number one hits across all of them.

• 4. The Microphone and the Crooner

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  Paul Whiteman's observation that Crosby's phrasing echoed jazz, particularly his bandmate Bix Beiderbecke's trumpet work, points to the technical heart of what made Crosby's sound new. Crosby was, by his own definition, a "phraser", a singer who placed equal weight on lyrics and music rather than simply projecting volume. Before him, popular singing required reaching the back rows of vaudeville theaters without electronic aid, a style associated with Al Jolson and Billy Murray. Crosby exploited the microphone's intimacy instead, and the result was what music critic Henry Pleasants, writing in The Great American Popular Singers, called "singing in American": a conversational ease that had not existed in popular music before. Tommy Dorsey articulated the influence plainly, saying he told Frank Sinatra that the only singer worth listening to was Crosby, because "all that matters to him is the words". Louis Armstrong was a formative influence on Crosby's singing, and the two became warm friends, occasionally performing together in later years, including on "Now You Has Jazz" in the 1956 film High Society. In a more historically significant act, Crosby used his influence to insist that Armstrong receive equal billing with white co-stars in the 1936 film Pennies from Heaven, initially refused by Columbia's Harry Cohn. Crosby threatened to leave the production, Cohn relented, and Armstrong's appearance opened paths for other African American performers in Hollywood. Pleasants, writing in 1985, noted that Crosby's voice dropped over the decades: while the octave B flat to B flat was among the loveliest he had heard from any baritone in forty-five years of listening, by the mid-1950s Crosby was more comfortable in a bass range, with a recording from 1960 of "Dardanella" with Armstrong showing him attack a low E flat, lower than most opera basses care to attempt.

• 5. White Christmas and Screen Dominance

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  Crosby introduced "White Christmas" on a Christmas Day radio broadcast in 1941. His Decca recording hit the charts on the 3rd of October 1942 and reached number one on the 31st of October, staying there for eleven weeks. The song topped the charts again in 1945 and a third time in January 1947, charting another sixteen times through repeated re-releases. Crosby was obliged to re-record it in 1947 using the same musicians and backup singers because the original 1942 master had worn out from the pressure of manufacturing additional copies. His own assessment of the song's success was characteristically self-deflating: he remarked that a jackdaw with a cleft palate could have sung it successfully. At his screen apex in 1946, Crosby starred in three of that year's five highest-grossing films: The Bells of St. Mary's, Blue Skies, and Road to Utopia. He had already won the Academy Award for Best Actor for Going My Way in 1944 and been nominated for its 1945 sequel The Bells of St. Mary's, opposite Ingrid Bergman, becoming the first of six actors to be nominated twice for the same character. He received a third nomination for his performance as an alcoholic entertainer in The Country Girl. From 1944 to 1948, Crosby was the number one box office attraction for five consecutive years. He sang four Academy Award-winning songs: "Sweet Leilani" in 1937, "White Christmas" in 1942, "Swinging on a Star" in 1944, and "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening" in 1951. A 2000 survey found that with roughly 1,077,900,000 movie tickets sold, Crosby ranked as the third-most-popular actor of all time, behind Clark Gable and John Wayne. His partnership with Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour in the Road to films ran from Road to Singapore in 1940 through The Road to Hong Kong in 1962, the two men never declaring themselves a formal "team" in the manner of Laurel and Hardy or Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

• 6. Reshaping Radio and Tape

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  During the Golden Age of Radio, performers were required to perform their shows live, sometimes repeating them a second time for the West Coast time zone. In 1945, Crosby's attempt to pre-record his NBC programs brought him into open conflict with the network, which argued that listeners expected live performance and would not accept recorded broadcasts. He left NBC and remained off the air for seven months, setting off a legal dispute with his sponsor Kraft that was settled out of court. ABC, newly formed from the sale of the NBC Blue Network following a federal antitrust suit in 1943, was willing to experiment. ABC offered Crosby $30,000 per week to produce a pre-recorded weekly program for Philco, and around 400 independent stations paid a collective $40,000 for broadcasting rights. In June 1947, Murdo MacKenzie from Bing Crosby Enterprises watched a demonstration of the German-made Magnetophon, a tape recorder that engineer Jack Mullin had brought back from Radio Frankfurt after World War II. Originally developed in Germany by BASF and AEG in the 1930s, the machine used 6.5 mm magnetic tape coated with ferric oxide and could capture approximately twenty minutes of high-fidelity audio per reel. Crosby hired Mullin to record his Philco Radio Time show in August 1947, using fifty reels of I.G. Farben tape that Mullin had found at a radio station at Bad Nauheim near Frankfurt while serving in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Crosby invested $50,000 in the California electronics company Ampex to build improved copies. The ability to record and edit produced a practical side effect: during a session featuring comedian Bob Burns, the audience's laughter at improvised jokes could not be broadcast alongside the censored material they responded to. Writer Bill Morrow saved those laughter recordings and, weeks later, added them to an episode that lacked strong comedy. According to Mullin's 1976 memoir, this was the accidental origin of the laugh track. Crosby also gave one of the first Ampex Model 300 recorders to his friend Les Paul, which led directly to Paul's invention of multitrack recording. In 1956, Crosby sold his tape recording operation to 3M, which launched the Mincom recorder division in Camarillo with Jack Mullin as chief engineer.

• 7. Beyond Entertainment

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  Crosby bought his first racehorse in 1935, and two years later became a founding partner of the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club in Del Mar, California, serving on its board of directors. He formed the Binglin Stable partnership with Lindsay C. Howard, son of millionaire businessman Charles S. Howard, who owned Seabiscuit. The partnership raced and bred horses at a ranch in Moorpark, California, and at the Binglin Stock Farm in Argentina, where they raced at the Hipódromo de Palermo in Buenos Aires. On the 12th of August 1938, the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club hosted a $25,000 winner-take-all match race in which Charles S. Howard's Seabiscuit defeated Binglin's horse Ligaroti. From 1946 until his death, Crosby owned a 25% share of the Pittsburgh Pirates; the team won two World Series during that period, in 1960 and 1971. Crosby was too nervous to watch Game 7 of the 1960 World Series in person and went to Paris with his wife Kathryn to follow the radio broadcast instead. He had arranged for Ampex to record the NBC telecast on kinescope, and that film sat undisturbed in his wine cellar until it was discovered in December 2009, with the restored broadcast airing on MLB Network in December 2010. Crosby also pursued golf seriously, reaching a handicap of two at his best. He hosted the first Crosby Clambake pro-am tournament in 1937 at Rancho Santa Fe Golf Club, an event that resumed after World War II at Pebble Beach and now continues as the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am on the PGA Tour. He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1978. Bing Crosby Enterprises gave the world's first public demonstration of videotape recording in Los Angeles on the 11th of November 1951, a device developed by John T. Mullin and Wayne R. Johnson using a modified Ampex 200 tape recorder and standard quarter-inch audio tape moving at 360 inches per second.

• 8. Final Chapter

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  On the 20th of March 1977, after videotaping a CBS concert special titled Bing: 50th Anniversary Gala at the Ambassador Auditorium with Bob Hope in attendance, Crosby fell off the stage into an orchestra pit and ruptured a disc in his back, requiring a month in hospital. His first performance after recovering became his last American concert, on the 16th of August 1977 at the Concord Pavilion in Concord, California. When the electric power failed during that show, Crosby continued singing without amplification. In September, he began a British concert tour with singer Rosemary Clooney that included two weeks at the London Palladium. While in the United Kingdom, Crosby recorded his final album, Seasons, and taped a Christmas special on the 11th of September that included a duet with David Bowie: "The Little Drummer Boy" paired with "Peace on Earth". Crosby's last concert was at the Brighton Centre on the 10th of October 1977, with British entertainer Gracie Fields in the audience. The following day, he recorded eight songs at the BBC's Maida Vale Studios for a radio program that included an interview with Alan Dell, and his final recorded song was "Once in a While", performed with the Gordon Rose Orchestra. Three days later, on the 13th of October, Crosby flew alone to Spain to play golf. He died the next day, the 14th of October, after playing eighteen holes at the La Moraleja Golf Course near Madrid with World Cup champion Manuel Piñero. The Bowie duet was released in 1982 as a single 45 rpm record, reached No. 3 in the UK singles charts, and was later named by TV Guide as one of the 25 most memorable musical moments of 20th-century television, becoming the final popular hit of a career that had spanned more than five decades.