Most people think of Bing Crosby -- when they think of him at all -- as the ultra-square pop crooner who was overtaken by the very hip Frank Sinatra and eventually thrust aside by the raw power of rock and the growth of cynicism and distrust in American society.
Almost nobody knows that the young Crosby was one of the hottest jazzmen around. He was the first singer to popularize a gentle, conversational style speckled with held notes like groans, a pioneer who traded innovations with good friend Louis Armstrong and may very well have been the single most influential American musician of the 20th century.
His powerful yet unforced golden baritone and intense, emotional interpretation of songs were the standards against which almost every vocalist after him was measured.
His high-spirited comic relationship with Bob Hope, especially in the legendary Road movies, was the delight of viewers distressed by the lingering effects of the Great Depression and World War II. He was a Hollywood mainstay, the No. 1 box-office draw five years in a row during the '40s, and a member of the Top 10 for more than a decade.
He was also a brilliant businessman -- the force behind the American tape recorder industry, owner of a factory that built wings for B-17 Flying Fortress bombers, orange juice distributor, horseman, cattleman, property owner -- the list goes on.
Not to mention how Crosby, son of a fiercely Irish Catholic mother and laissez-faire English Protestant father, helped change the image of the Irish from boozing, brawling ne'er-do-wells into true-blue Americans.
The origin of 'Bing'
The full effect of this one entertainer's life on the America of the previous century is almost unknown and almost overwhelming. A conference that concluded yesterday at Hofstra University on Long Island, N.Y. -- "Bing! Crosby and American Culture" -- drew the usual scholarly papers -- "Saint Bing: Apatheia, Masculine Desire and the Films of Bing Crosby," "B(e)ing Modern: Crosby and Popular Modernity," "How Bing Crosby Helped the Irish Become White."
A large contingent of entertainers and their friends also attended. Widow Kathryn Crosby was to speak, sing and sign copies of her latest book, My Last Years With Bing. Son Nathaniel, grandson Steven, arranger Buddy Bregman, songwriter Ervin Drake, conductor Skitch Henderson, singer Margaret Whiting -- here too, the list goes on.
The singer was born Harry Lillis Crosby on May 3, 1903, in Tacoma, Wash. Biographer Gary Giddins writes that Crosby got the name he lived by when he was 10 and obsessed with a Sunday comic feature called The Bingville Bugle. Soon a friend was calling him "Bingle," which became "Bingo" and finally Bing.
Crosby revolutionized the role of the male singer. Before him, most male vocalists were tenors with high, androgynous voices who made no effort to put emotion into their songs. His magnificent baritone, powerful masculinity and the barely suppressed passion and eroticism of his interpretations changed everything.
"The Crosby influence is pretty hard to overestimate," said Giddins, whose Bing Crosby, A Pocketful of Dreams: The Early Years, 1903-1940 (Little, Brown, $30) is the first volume of an exhaustive history of a man who lived until 1977. That also was the year Elvis Presley died.
"Elvis evolved into some sort of posthumous life," Giddins said. "But Bing was not only forgotten, but ... [the stories] that unfolded about him afterward sort of cut him off at knees."
Those stories revolved primarily around allegations that he was an abusive father, made by eldest son Gary in his own biography, Going My Own Way. It was supported by the fact that two of the four children of Crosby's first marriage, to film star Dixie Lee, committed suicide. Gary Crosby did observe that his father seemed to learn from that experience. After Dixie Lee Crosby died of cancer in 1952, Bing was gentler with his three children with Kathryn Crosby.
"He was a very modest man," Kathryn Crosby said from the family home in Hillsborough, Calif. "I was always very comfortable with him."
Broadcast pioneer
Crosby eventually tired of having to stick close to Hollywood for his radio shows. He was eager to find a good recording medium.
On Sept. 29, 1948, after two years of experimentation, Crosby gave the first prerecorded radio broadcast for his show, Philco Radio Time, on the fledgling ABC Radio Network. It revolutionized the radio industry.
Crosby's use of tape brought about the invention of canned laughter. And his style began the splintering of a unified audience into what exists today: fragmented niche audiences.
"He never had a young as opposed to an old audience," Giddins said. "But for the first time, you begin to sense something new happening. Older people began feeling alienated by it. Now, all popular music is being considered only for young people."
Peter Goodman is a reporter for Newsday, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.