Bing Crosby

Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby (May 2, 1903 – October 14, 1977) was an American popular singer, crooner and Academy Award-winning actor whose career lasted from 1926 until his death in 1977.

One of the first multimedia stars, from 1934 to 1954 Bing Crosby held a nearly unrivaled command of record sales, radio ratings, and motion picture grosses. He is often considered to be among the most popular musical acts in history and is currently the most electronically recorded human voice in history. Crosby is also credited as being the major inspiration for most of the male singers of the era that followed him, including Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, and Dean Martin. Yank magazine recognized Crosby as the person who had done the most for American G.I. morale during World War II and, during his peak years, around 1948, polls declared him the "most admired man alive", ahead of Jackie Robinson and the pope.[1][3] Also during 1948, the Music Digest estimated that Crosby recordings filled more than half of the 80,000 weekly hours allocated to recorded radio music.

Crosby exerted an important influence on the development of the postwar recording industry. In 1947 he invested US$50,000 in the Ampex company, which developed the world's first commercial reel-to-reel tape recorder, and Crosby became the first performer in the world to prerecord his radio shows and master his commercial recordings on magnetic tape. He gave one of the first Ampex Model 200 recorders to his friend, musician Les Paul, which led directly to Paul's invention of multitrack recording. Along with Frank Sinatra, he was one of the principal backers behind the famous United Western Recorders studio complex in Los Angeles.

In 1962, Crosby was the first person to receive the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Early life

Harry Lillis Crosby was born in Tacoma, Washington, on May 2, 1903 in a house that his father built (1112 North J Street, Tacoma, Washington).[4] His family later moved to Spokane, Washington in 1906 to find work. He was the fourth of seven children: five boys, Larry (1895–1975), Everett (1896–1966), Ted (1900–1973), Harry 'Bing' (1903–1977) and Bob (1913–1993); and two girls, Catherine (1905–1988) and Mary Rose (1907–1990). His parents were English-American Harry Lowe Crosby (1871–1950), a bookkeeper, and Irish-American Catherine Harrigan (1873–1964), (affectionately known as Kate), the daughter of a builder from County Mayo in Ireland. His paternal ancestors Thomas Prence and Patience Brewster were born in England and immigrated to the U.S. in the 17th century; Brewster's family came over on the Mayflower.

In 1910, Crosby was forever renamed. The six-year-old Harry Lillis discovered a full page feature in the Sunday edition of Spokesman-Review, "The Bingville Bugle". The "Bugle", written by humorist Newton Newkirk, was a parody of a hillbilly newsletter complete with gossipy tidbits, minstrel quips, creative spelling and mock ads. A neighbor, 15-year-old Valentine Hobart, shared Crosby's enthusiasm for "The Bugle", and noting Crosby's laugh, took a liking to him and called him Bingo from Bingville. The last vowel was dropped and the name shortened to Bing, which stuck.

In 1917, Crosby took a summer job as property boy at Spokane's "Auditorium" where he witnessed some of the finest acts of the day, including a blackface performer named Al Jolson who held Crosby spellbound with his ad-libbing and spoofs of Hawaiian songs that brought down the house. Crosby would later say that, "To me, he was the greatest entertainer who ever lived."

In the fall of 1920, Bing enrolled in the Jesuit-run Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, with the intent to become a lawyer. He maintained a B+ average. While in Gonzaga, he sent away for a set of mail order drums. After much practice he soon became good enough and was invited to join a local band which was made up of mostly local high school kids called the "Musicaladers", managed by one Al Rinker. He made so much money doing this he decided to drop out of school during his final year to pursue a career in show business.

Music

In 1926, while singing at Los Angeles Metropolitan Theatre, Crosby and his vocal duo partner Al Rinker caught the eye of Paul Whiteman, arguably the most famous bandleader at the time. Hired for $150 a week, they made their debut on December 6, 1926 at the Tivoli Theatre (Chicago). Their first recording, "I've Got The Girl," with Don Clark's Orchestra, was issued by Columbia, did them no vocal favors as it sounded like they were singing in a key much too high for them. It was later revealed that the 78rpm was recorded at a speed slower than it should have been, which increased the pitch when played at 78rpm.

As popular as the Crosby and Rinker duo was, Whiteman added another member to the group, pianist and aspiring songwriter Harry Barris. Whiteman dubbed them The Rhythm Boys and they joined the Whiteman vocal team, working and recording with Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey, and Eddie Lang and singers Mildred Bailey and Hoagy Carmichael.

Crosby soon became the star attraction of The Rhythm Boys, not to mention Whiteman's Band, and in 1928 had his first number one hit, a jazz influenced rendition of "Ol' Man River." However, his repeated youthful peccadilloes and growing dissatisfaction with Whiteman forced him to leave the band along with The Rhythm Boys and join the Gus Arnheim Orchestra. After signing with Brunswick Records and recording under Jack Kapp, The Rhythm Boys were increasingly pushed to the background with the vocal emphasis on Bing. Fellow member of The Rhythm Boys Harry Barris did write several of Crosby’s subsequent hits including "At Your Command", "I Surrender Dear", and "Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams". However, shortly after this the members of the band had a falling out and split, setting the stage for Crosby's solo career.

As the 1930s unfolded it became clear that Bing was the number one man, vocally speaking. Ten of the top 50 songs for 1931 either featured Bing solo or with others. Apart from the short-lived "Battle of the Baritones" with Russ Columbo "Bing Was King", signing long term deals with Jack Kapp's new record company Decca and starring in his first full-length features, 1932's The Big Broadcast, the first of 55 such films of which he was top billed. He appeared in a total of 79 pictures.

Around this time Bing made his solo debut on radio, co-starring with The Carl Fenton Orchestra on a popular CBS radio show and by 1936, replacing his former boss, Paul Whiteman, as the host of NBC's Kraft Music Hall, a weekly radio program where he would remain for the next ten years.

He was thus able to take popular singing beyond the kind of "belting" associated with a performer like Ali Schuette, who had to reach the back seats in New York theatres without the aid of the microphone. With Crosby, as Henry Pleasants noted in The Great American Popular Singers, something new had entered American music, something that might be called "singing in American," with conversational ease. The oddity of this new sound led to the epithet "crooner."

Crosby gave great emphasis to live appearances before American troops fighting in the European Theater. He also learned how to pronounce German from written scripts, and would read them in propaganda broadcasts intended for the German forces. The nickname "der Bingle" for him was understood to have become current among German listeners, and came to be used by his English-speaking fans. In a poll of U.S. troops at the close of WWII, Crosby topped the list as the person who did the most for G.I. morale (beating out President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, General Dwight Eisenhower and one Leslie Townes Hope)

Crosby's biggest musical hit was his recording of Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" which he introduced through a 1941 Christmas-season radio broadcast and the movie Holiday Inn. Bing's recording hit the charts on 3 October 1942, and rose to #1 on 31 October, where it stayed for 11 weeks. In the following years Bing's recording hit the top-30 pop charts another 16 times, even topping the charts again in 1945 and January of '47. The song remains Bing's best-selling recording, and the best-selling single and best selling song of all time. In 1998 after a long absence, his 1947 version hit the charts in Britain, and as of 2006 remains the North American holiday-season standard. According to Guinness World Records, Bing Crosby's White Christmas has "sold over 100 million copies around the world, with at least 50 million sales as singles."

According to several sources, including Dictionary of Misinformation by Tom Burnam, however, "White Christmas" was not Crosby's biggest-selling record; it was "Silent Night." Crosby did not make any money off the sale of this recording — he said that since it was a religious song, he would, and did, donate all of his royalties on it to charity.

According to ticket sales Bing Crosby is, at 1,077,900,000 tickets sold, the third most popular actor of all-time behind Clark Gable and John Wayne. Crosby is also, according to Quigley Publishing Company's International Motion Picture Almanac, tied for second on the "All Time Number One Stars List" with three other actors: Clint Eastwood, Tom Hanks, and Burt Reynolds. Crosby's most popular film, White Christmas, grossed $30 million in 1954, which when adjusted for inflation equals $233 million in 2004 dollars. Crosby also won an Academy Award as Best Actor for Going My Way in 1944 and was critically acclaimed for his performance as an alcoholic entertainer in The Country Girl. Bing Crosby at the Academy Awards in 1945 won the Best Actor Oscar for Going My Way. Also shown is Ingrid Bergman with the Best Actress Oscar for Gaslight.By the late 1950s, Crosby's popularity had peaked, and the adolescence of the baby boom generation began to affect record sales to younger customers. In 1960, Crosby starred in High Time, a collegiate comedy with Fabian and Tuesday Weld that foretold the emerging gap between older Crosby fans and a new generation of films and music.

Style

Bing Crosby perfected an idea that Al Jolson had hinted at, namely that the popular performer didn't have to limit himself to a mere series of shticks but could be a genuine artist — in this case, a musician. Before Crosby, art was art and pop was pop; opera singers worried about staying in tune and reaching the upper balcony, vaudevillians concerned themselves with their costumes and facial expressions. Crosby rendered the difference between the two irrelevant. Where earlier recording artists had displayed strictly one-dimensional attitudes, Crosby not only perfected the fully rounded persona, but brought with it the technical wherewithal of a true concert artist. Crosby projected with a majestic sense of intonation that afforded Tin Pan Alley the musical stature of European classics and a jazz influenced time that made him both the dominant voice of both the Jazz age and the Swing era. Crosby also elaborated on a further idea of Al Jolson's, one that Frank Sinatra would ultimately extend further: phrasing, or more specifically, the art of making a song's lyric ring true. "I used to tell (Sinatra) over and over," said Tommy Dorsey, "there's only one singer you ought to listen to and his name is Crosby. All that matters to him is the words, and that's the only thing that ought to for you too."

The greatest trick of Crosby’s virtuosity was covering it up. It is often said that Crosby made his singing and acting "look easy," or as if it were no work at all: he simply was the character he portrayed, and his singing, being a direct extension of conversation, came just as naturally to him as talking, or even breathing. Journalist Donald Freeman said of Crosby, "There is only one Bing Crosby and — the time has come now to face the issue squarely — he happens to be that unique, awesome creature, an artist."

Vocal characteristics

Bing Crosby is usually considered to be among the most talented singers of his time. Crosby could, as musicologist J.T.H. Mize's asserts, "melt a tone away, scoop it flat and sliding up to the eventual pitch as a glissando, sometimes sting a note right on the button, and take diphthongs for long musical rides." J.T.H. Mize also inventoried the Crosby arsenal of vocal effects, including "interpolating pianissimo whistling variations, sometimes arpeggic, at other times trilling". While vocal critic Henry Pleasants states that "The octave B flat to B flat in Bing's voice at that time [1930s] is, to my ears, one of the loveliest I have heard in forty-five years of listening to baritones, both classical and popular. it dropped conspicuously in later years. Since the mid-1950s, Bing has been more comfortable in a bass range while maintaining a baritone quality, with the best octave being G to G, or even F to F. In a recording he made of 'Dardanella' with Louis Armstrong in 1960, he attacks lightly and easily on a low E flat. This is lower than most opera basses care to venture, and they tend to sound as if they were in the cellar when they get there." Mel Tormé concurred with Henry Pleasants stating that "(Crosby's) low notes could make your bass woofers beg for mercy."

Career statistics

Bing Crosby's sales and chart statistics place him among the most popular and successful musical acts of the 20th century. Although the Billboard charts operated under a different methodology for the bulk of Crosby's career, his numbers remain astonishing: 1,700 recordings, 383 of those in the top 30, and of those, 41 hit #1. Crosby had separate charting singles in every calendar year between 1931 and 1954; the annual re-release of White Christmas extended that streak to 1957. He had 24 separate popular singles in 1939 alone. Billboard's statistician Joel Whitburn determined Crosby to be America's most successful act of the 1930s, and again in the 1940s.

For 15 years (1934, 1937, 1940, 1943-1954), Crosby was among the top 10 in box office draw, and for five of those years (1944-49) he was the largest in the world. He sang four Academy Award-winning songs — "Sweet Leilani" (1937), "White Christmas" (1942), "Swinging on a Star" (1944), "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening" (1951) — and won an acting Oscar for Going My Way (1944).

He also collected 23 gold and platinum records in his career, according to Joseph Murrells, author of the book, "Million Selling Records." It should be noted that the Recording Industry Association of America did not institute its gold record certification program until 1958 (by which point Crosby's record sales were barely a blip), so gold records prior to that year were awarded by an artist's record company. Universal Music, current owner of Crosby's Decca catalog, has never requested RIAA certification for any of his hit singles.

In 1962, Crosby became the first recipient of the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He has been inducted into the respective halls of fame for both radio and popular music. His overall music sales are estimated at between 500,000,000 (five hundred million) to 900,000,000 (nine hundred million). Bing is a member of that exclusive club of the biggest record sellers that include Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and The Beatles.

Website: http://bingcrosby.com/

Source: Wikipedia