Bing Crosby (14 page)

Doppelgàngers are at the heart of minstrelsy. Over time, they had a baleful influence: people confused racist stereotypes
with real people, and those images remained rife in pop culture — especially Hollywood — well into the 1970s. In the short
run, though, minstrelsy was considered a boon to the abolitionist movement. It humanized blacks for many whites who didn’t
know any, undermining the assumptions of barbarism by caricaturing them as sentimental, clever, funny, pompous, stupid, and
sexual — human. Minstrelsy embodied a subversive idea, that the distinctions between black and white ran no deeper than a
layer of greasepaint. Hidden behind an impenetrably inky disguise, performers were permitted a certain liberality from puritanical
constraints, underscored by the nattering horse laugh “yuk, yuk, yuk.” After Reconstruction, black troupes were as plentiful
as white ones and introduced scores of actors and musicians into show business. They created their own kinds of satire and
softened the more abhorrent clichés, greatly influencing succeeding
generations of white minstrels. Jolson’s alter ego, Gus, is offensive as caricature but is invariably the smartest and gentlest
character in the drama; foolish whites are lost without him. In
Bombo
Gus shows Columbus the way to the New World and wins a Moorish princess in the bargain.

The minstrel show was the first unifying form of entertainment America ever knew. Like the circus, the coming of a minstrel
troupe was an event, but minstrels — undeterred by the seasons — appeared more frequently than the circus. Not unlike radio
or TV, minstrelsy spread the same jokes, songs, dance steps, parodies, puns, and novelties all over the country. Its humor
proved deathless:
Why did the chicken cross the road? Who was that lady I saw you with last night?
By the time the form began to morph into burlesque and vaudeville, many individual stars had emerged. To the comically melancholy
black entertainer Bert Williams, cork was an indignity he was forced to accept as the cost of integrating the
Ziegfeld Follies.
White performers could afford to be more sanguine. No one who witnessed the graceful Eddie Leonard gliding across the stage
singing “Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider” or Eddie Cantor leaping about like a rabbit in a shooting gallery thought of them as impersonators
of Negro life. Minstrelsy had become a conduit for the American style.
²³
It was buoyant, irreverent, outlandish, and voiced with an oddly alloyed accent that was widely construed as southern.

Bing was enamored of many things southern, personally as well as professionally; he married two southern belles. His longtime
buddy Phil Harris used as a theme song “That’s What I Like About the South,” which comically enumerates the specifics. Bing
liked the whole effect, the mystique, the humor, the songs, the speech cadences that chimed well with his bottom notes and
vocal affectations. As the character Crosby plays in the movie
Birth of the Blues
tells his disapproving father: “Southern music makes you feel like the circus is coming to town.” He found inspiration in
the South, in the first recordings by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and the Mound City Blue Blowers, and more profoundly
in the triumphant art of transplanted southern blacks, most particularly Louis Armstrong.

To Bing’s generation,
southern
was a synonym for
black:
this was blatantly the case in songs by Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer, and
others — a euphemistic way of saying that the American style of music sweeping the world was rooted in a slave culture. The
very cosmopolitan dancer Florence Mills, whom Duke Ellington eulogized in his stride nocturne “Black Beauty,” made the case
succinctly in the title of her 1926 touring show:
Dixie to Broadway.

On the occasion of Bing’s fiftieth anniversary in show business, an event extolled with a 1975 television special but not
by the recording industry he had helped save from extinction, he led a small jazz ensemble into a studio, at his expense,
to record the rarely heard LP A
Southern Memoir.
But whose memories were they? For the young Crosby, Dixie was a state of mind and his passport was the faded but inveterately
popular minstrel show, which helped bolster his determination to venture beyond his immediate domain. However intuitive and
urbane Bing’s understanding of jazz, he never lost his adolescent affection for the
dese, dose, yowsuh, yuk-yuk
relics of southernness ritualized in minstrelsy. His recorded performances are rife with words, airs, and slurred inflections
that bespeak the show-business customs of his youth. They were especially apparent when he performed with his favorite southern
singers, like Connie Boswell. Their 1940 record “Yes Indeed” begins with repartee:

Bing: Now has you got it, sister Constance? Tell me, has you got it?

Connie: Whoayeah, I got it, brother Bingstance. Now you knows I got it.

Bing: Now has you got that rhythm in you, hmmm?

“Yes Indeed,” characteristically enough, was a gospel-influenced pop tune written by the highly sophisticated, black northern
orchestrator Sy Oliver for the white northern bandleader Tommy Dorsey It was no more southern than the dozens, if not hundreds,
of southern songs turned out by Tin Pan Alley during Jolson’s glory years. Gerald Marks, the northerner who wrote “Is It True
What They Say About Dixie?,” observed, “In those days, New York songwriters wrote about the South because they had a guy who
knew how to sing ’em. All those mammies were written by songwriters who never went south of Fourteenth Street. But the minute
Jolson got off his knees and left the Wintergarden Theater, the era of southern songs was done for.”
²⁴

The minstrel style was thriving in various offshoots when Bing latched onto the entertainment world. The first broadcast variety
show featured Dailey Paskman’s Radio Minstrels, in 1924; radio’s real triumph was certified five years later with the appearance
of
Amos
‘n’
Andy.
Bing’s audience would follow him into the modern world of ballad crooning and jazz while sharing his nostalgia for the old
style. Bing appeared in blackface or drag (the minstrelsy of gender bending) in several pictures. Even his loquacious banter,
including the lightning exchanges of insults perfected with Bob Hope, was rooted in the verbal contest between minstrelsy’s
sly end man and the oratorical ringmaster. Bing was equally content to play the lackadaisical Mr. Bones or the inflated Interlocutor.

Gonzaga productions were occasions for fellowship, acceptable impiety, and escape, and Bing often took part. At a second-semester
charity bazaar, he and his class erected a tepee and raffled Indian blankets in redface while his mother helped stock and
supervise the tearoom. In April, in his own face, Bing and another boy sang solos at the annual Gonzaga Night, held at the
Knights of Columbus Hall. Music was provided by the Dizzy Seven, a Gonzaga High School band that had caught Bing’s ear. Having
already begun to study drums, he was chosen as one of three drummers (Leo Lynn, his future right-hand man, was another) for
the Gonzaga band, playing assemblies and sporting events. Soon he began sitting in with the younger kids who made up the Dizzy
Seven, though he did not sing with the group.

The pianist with the Dizzy Seven on Gonzaga Night was a high-school senior, Arthur Dussault, who would develop a long-lived,
influential relationship with Bing. Dussault had come to Gonzaga in 1920 from Montana. He was the same age as Bing, and so
(not having been enrolled in elementary school prematurely) was one grade behind. Dussault first noticed Bing during a football
game between the high-school JYA and an unofficial frosh team, which made a lot of noise about teaching them a thing or two
but lost. Writing about the game years later, he recalled that Bing played center with startling toughness, considering his
small size, winning respect from the other kids. “He had what it took and could give as well as take.”
²⁵
In many ways they were opposites. Like Frank Corkery, Dussault was bound for the priesthood, ordained in 1935. He was president
of his class, a fabled football hero, and an exemplary student. He had little interest in jazz or dance music, preferring
to play organ for the student choir
and Gonzaga’s orchestra. Bing and Art were never close friends, but their admiration for each other developed in the Dizzy
Seven (aka the Juicy Seven) as they lumbered through stock arrangements at school dances. A friend described them as “equals,
both strong-willed.”
²⁶
Dussault would serve Gonzaga as athletic director, glee club director, dean of men, public-relations director, and vice president;
he was called Mr. Gonzaga. A successor remarked, “He was the most honest man I’ve ever known and an ideal contact for Bing
— as was Father Corkery.”
²⁷
One of his duties was to enhance ties with the school’s most celebrated alumnus, and he succeeded to the point of extracting
nearly a million dollars. In so doing, he became something of a Crosby family confessor.

Shortly after publication of Barry Ulanov’s 1948 biography
The Incredible Crosby,
Father Art wrote down his remembrances of the first time Bing made his mark singing at Gonzaga. Ulanov had rendered the incident
from Kate’s point of view, which Dussault dismissed as poetic license, for “Mrs. Catherine Crosby (whom I knew well) was never
in our chapel.”
²⁸
He remembered the date as December 8, 1922, a holy day of obligation — the Immaculate Conception, a holiday that required
Catholic boys to attend mass. For Dussault and about 200 other boarders, that meant the school chapel. Though Bing lived only
a block away, he was obliged as a day scholar to attend St. Aloysius.

Art was chosen to ask him to attend the chapel instead, in order to add his voice to a three-part hymn, “Panis Angelicus.”
The boys thought Bing’s baritone would blend with the high tenor (a student) and bass (“Hair-More” Gilmore). Art also hoped
he would sing with the choir and take the solo at Communion on “Oh Lord, I Am Not Worthy,” a hymn all the boys knew. Bing
was reluctant at first, but Art, who was to accompany him on organ, persuaded him: he was going to church anyway, so why not
attend a congregation that would consist only of fellow students? Besides, here was a way to please “his many warm friends
among the boarders.” Bing agreed to give it a try. “Of course, when he soloed, which was really impressive,” Dussault wrote,
“a goodly number of prayer-goers looked around to see who was soloing.”

Bing’s immediate reward was an invitation to breakfast with the boarders, the first of many as he made several subsequent
appearances
at the chapel on feast days, invariably singing a solo. “Bing sang nice,” Dussault recalled, “but in a different sort of way.”
²⁹
He usually sang the Communion hymn and then joined in with the trio, navigating between tenor and bass with his supple voice.
Dussault recalled as particularly beautiful the trio’s harmonizing on “Ave Maris Stella No. 2,” by A. H. Roseweig (from his
collection
Concentus Sacri).
He believed those performances boosted Bing’s confidence.

Bing received another shot of inspiration the summer after his freshman year, when he worked as prop boy at the Auditorium
and Jolson made his second visit to Spokane. Bing had been fourteen the first time Jolson passed through; he was eighteen
when
Sinbad
played two nights in town. “[Jolson] was amazing,” Bing said. “He could go way up high and take a soft note, or belt it,
and he could go way down. He really had a fabulous set of pipes, this fella.”
³⁰
He spoke of unconsciously imitating Al and of the lessons he learned: “I got an awful lot of mannerisms and I guess you could
say idiosyncracies [from Jolson] — singing traits and characteristics and delivery.”
³¹
Bing marveled at how he seemed to personally reach each member of the audience, a feat for which Bing would be credited as
a radio crooner. But the difference between working live and electronically was not lost on him. If Bing was inspired by Jolson,
he was also humbled. He nursed the lifelong conviction that he could not really hold a stage, not like Jolie. “I’m not an
electrifying performer at all,” he cautioned one admirer. “I just sing a few little songs. But this man could really galvanize
an audience into a frenzy. He could really tear them apart.”
³²

Yet they had much in common. Jolson, notorious for his braggadocio (he once followed Caruso with his trademark line, ’You
ain’t heard nothin’yet!”), had once lacked confidence and found it when an older player advised him to try blackface. It worked:
“You looked and felt like a performer,” he said.
³³
A conspicuous bravado, albeit greatly toned down, was no less crucial to Bing’s first Hollywood persona, that of the extremely
assured if somewhat petulant Romeo who never merely wins a girl but steals her from another. Like Bing, Jolson was of average
height, with thinning hair and a weight problem. Al perfected the pseudosouthern slur to the degree that critic John Crosby
(no relation to Bing) observed, “He managed to eliminate consonants almost entirely.”
³⁴
The formidable Ethel Waters, who shared Bing’s admiration for Jolson, could not help but parody his inflections:
“From the day he first stepped on a stage, Jolie always sang as though he expected the next note to be his last ‘wah wah’
or ‘bebee mine’ or ‘I loav you, honeh, loav, loav you’ or ‘Californyah, heah I come, Golden Gate/”
³⁵
Jolson was a baritone who scaled tenor highs and plumbed bass lows, as Bing would, but reigned during an era when most popular
singers — Billy Murray, Nick Lucas, Gene Austin — were tenors, often effeminate or sexually ambiguous. The bond between Jolson
and Crosby would be strengthened in the years ahead by songwriters, including James Monaco, Buddy DeSylva, and Irving Berlin,
who crafted Jolson’s signature hits and also played prominent roles in Bing’s career. In the end, the tables turned, as Jolson
learned from Bing how to handle ballads and exploit recording devices.