Bing Crosby (90 page)

Ken: Fred, I’m sure it’s gonna be fun, it’s gonna be like a party. We’ve got the band there. You’ll like the songs and you’ll
like Bing.

Fred: I
love
Bing, he’s great. But he’s gonna crucify me. He’s a much better ad-libber than I am. And these parts, I don’t know what I’m
looking at.

Ken: Well, look, it says Bing, very clearly there, and then Fred, and then both.

Fred: I know how to fix that.
³¹

Whereupon Fred took out two colored pencils and proceeded to underline his own lines in red and Bing’s in blue.

On the morning of the session, Bing arrived to run down the material with Fred, accompanied by Pete Moore on piano. As they
sang, Bing looked over Fred’s shoulder at the red and blue lines, then down at his own part, and kept singing. “I could see
he was up to something,” Barnes recalled. When they finished, Bing said, “You know, I think it would be much better if I sang
these lines and you sang those. It’s better for your personality, Fred.” “Oh my God. Are you sure?” Fred asked. Bing reassured
him. So Fred took out the pencils and scratched out the blue and replaced it with red and vice versa. They sang it again.
Bing said, “No, I think it was better the way it was before.” Fred said, “I can’t see anything now.” Ken offered a clean copy,
but Fred declined, asking, “Now, Bing, are we gonna stay with those lines?”
³²

They proceeded to the studio, where the forty-three-piece orchestra awaited them, and handled the material like the pros they
were, completing most numbers in two takes. Fred was so loosened up by the morning’s experience that he parried every Crosby
thrust with aplomb, answering each in kind. “It was just beautiful,” Barnes said, “and I can tell you Fred’s ad-libbing on
that record was genuine.” Bing made him laugh several times, cracking him up at the finish of “Pick Yourself Up,” with an
improvised spiel about teaching him to sing; you can hear the musicians roaring as well. “Ken, what a lovely album,” Fred
enthused at the end of the day. Bing invited Fred to dinner and asked him to appear on his next Christmas special, telling
him, “We got on so well.”
³³
As to billing on the jacket,
A Couple of Song
&
Dance Men,
Fred overruled Barnes’s inclination and insisted that Bing’s name come first.

Bing’s penchant for duets resounded in 1937 and 1938, when he recorded the Gallagher and Shean parody with Johnny Mercer and
several numbers with Connie Boswell. “He loved Johnny Mercer,” Rosemary Clooney recalled, “got along with him brilliantly.
He liked Johnny’s patterns of speech.” Clooney explained a technique Bing used for duets, adapted from his radio work: dummy
lines at rehearsal to mask the real lines. “For example, we did ‘You Came a Long Way from St. Louis,’ and on the verse, I
say, ‘You breakfast with Bardot,’ and he says, ‘Oh, my, she’s something,’ so I know he has a line there.
But when we get down to the final take, he says, ‘You know, somebody ought to knit that girl a hug-me-tight,’ which is a little
shrug old ladies used to wear in the South. Well, I started to laugh, you know, because it was just so out of left field —
a hug-me-tight for Bardot. He would do a dummy line until you were close to the take and then hit you with the one he had
worked out.”
³⁴

One of Bing’s most compatible partners was Connie Boswell, who embarked on a successful twenty-five-year career as a soloist
in 1935, after her sisters Martha and Vet married and left show business. Struck by poliomyelitis at three, she performed
in a wheelchair rendered invisible by lighting and the drapery of her gowns; she disdained sympathy. After her death in 1976,
Bing remembered her as “a dear woman, a brave woman.”
³⁵
Connie (she changed her name to Connee during the war so she would not have to dot the
i
while signing countless autographs for servicemen) played cello, piano, and saxophone, and her instrumental skills enhanced
her rhythmic poise, as did her admiration for Louis and Bing, whose slurs and syncopations suited her sultry timbre. She was
a singer’s singer and a favorite of musicians. Ella Fitzgerald acknowledged Connie as her idol, and Harry Belafonte once called
her “the most widely imitated singer of all time.”
³⁶
Bob Crosby’s band accompanied her at her first solo engagement and on many of her best Decca records, evading the radar of
Kapp, who tried to tone down her jazziness.

Yet it took the compound of her molasses drawl and Bing’s brisk virility to secure her a couple of chart-topping hits, the
winningly imaginative “Bob White” and an offhanded sprint through “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” The last, backed by a raucous,
swinging Victor Young band, was released with an Eddie Cantor speech asking for help to fight infantile paralysis. The performers
and Decca donated the disc’s royalties to the cause.

The first Boswell-Crosby encounter, “Basin Street Blues,” was a gift to Connie. She dominates the number while Bing plays
straight man, harmonizing or humming obbligato, never singing more than eight consecutive solo bars but blending dreamily
with her on the last unison chorus. When Bing sings a trombone-style counterpoint, his deep authority makes her shine. Their
comportment suggests a family affair, as they call each other by name and refer to John Scott Trotter, practically extending
an invitation to the listener to join them on “the street where all the light and dark folks meet.” Andy Secrest’s
fine trumpet solo pays homage to Louis Armstrong, incorporating figures from Louis’s two celebrated recordings of Spencer
Williams’s tune. Bing messed up a phrase, “where welcome’s free,” but let it ride, an instance of his credo (expressed to
Les Paul at another session) to “let them see I’m human.”
³⁷
Bing and Connie are more equal and ebullient on Johnny Mercer’s “Bob White,” a tantalizing confection packed with puns about
birds and singing.
³⁸
This time Connie plays it straight, and Bing turns in one of his most playful performances, indulging the staccato and vibrato
called for in the lyric.

Bing’s solo sessions of this period also produced gems, but sometimes you had to pan through a lot of silt to find them. The
biggest risk in taming Bing was the threat of a middlebrow blandness, imposed not through songs or arrangements but coming
from within Bing himself. As the all-purpose troubadour, he could no longer play the jazzman who subverts corny material with
the tact of his own musical impulses, who subordinates the “what you do” to the “how you do it.” Kapp didn’t want that from
him, and the Decca schedule, with its relentlessly diverse range of material, made such knowing detachment almost impossible
to sustain. Bing had a genius for popularity. His major achievement was to plait the many threads of American music into a
central style of universal appeal. But the price was exorbitant. To achieve universality, he had to dilute individuality.

Drawing from the payload Bing had helped strike a few years back with “Swanee River,” Kapp returned to the nineteenth century
for two classics, the abolitionist threnody “Darling Nelly Gray,” and the Negro spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” They
served Jack’s strategy to establish Bing as the American bard and suited his purposes in other ways: those tunes were known
to millions, spoke to a nostalgic longing for the past, and were in the public domain. The songs of Stephen Foster probably
never enjoyed greater popularity than in the 1930s, when they were not widely perceived as underscoring racial stereotypes.
Deeply ingrained in the American memory, like fairy tales handed down through generations, they, too, were sweet, sentimental,
and unprotected by copyright. Kapp revived many of them for his roster, as did producers at other companies, and the songs
were recycled in numerous movie scores. His initial selections for Bing were politically astute even by the standards of half
a century later.

“Darling Nelly Gray,” written by Benjamin Hanby, a twenty-two-year-old white minister, four years after
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
was published, similarly dramatizes southern barbarism in the form of a slave’s lament for his lover who had been sold off
and sent to the Georgia cotton fields. Louis Armstrong and the Mills Brothers recorded it for Decca a year before Bing, creating
a richly emotional performance, tender and defiant. In Trotter’s arrangement, the combination of soloist and choir is replicated
by Bing and Paul Taylor’s Choristers, but the result is studied and detached. The Choristers restore the darkest passage of
the lyric (“the white man bound her with his chain”), omitted from the Armstrong version, and Bing sings with much elegance,
especially on the verse. But the throaty warmth associated with his nodes has been replaced by a thin echo in his upper midrange,
and although he counters it with frequent low-note swoops, he is too remote from the material to engage it meaningfully. In
the last section of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” his voice softens to as low and hushed a level as he ever achieved on records,
but the effect is nonetheless dated.

Still, those songs were preferable to newer creations like the nondescript “Let Me Whisper I Love You,” with a Trotter arrangement
that combines classical borrowings and a habanera beat, or the stupefying “When Mother Nature Sings Her Lullaby,” for which
Bing was backed by pipe organ — a throwback to his days at the Paramount Theater and Jesse Crawford, and no more enchanting.
Yet the same session that produced “Let Me Whisper I Love You” generated a memorable version of the Edgar Sampson swing anthem
“Don’t Be That Way,” three months after Benny Goodman opened his fabled Carnegie Hall concert with it. In place of Benny’s
thumping four-four, Trotter’s arrangement bounces not unpleasantly over a two-beat rhythm. Bing, slow and sinuous, glides
through the melody, smoothly mining the lyric for nuance: the low
way,
the drawn-out
sky,
the mordent on
me,
the jazzily enhanced “don’t break my heart.” Trotter provides a bona fide swing interlude, with Spike Jones’s splashing cymbals
setting up Secrest’s solo, until Bing ends the party with a decisive “Stop it!”

He proved no less masterly on “Summertime,” recorded at his first reunion with Matty Malneck, who had played so prominent
a role in establishing Bing with the Paul Whiteman band. Matty’s medium-slow arrangement has enough bounce to animate Bing,
who inflects
the descriptive, cautionary lyric for meaning, employing those bass-baritone swoops that were influencing numerous young singers
in the 1930s. After the ensemble plays a one-bar unison Bixian rip in the interlude, Bing closes with a surprise reprise of
the phrase “don’t you cry.”

“A Blues Serenade” also summoned recollections of days gone by, though the song itself was only three years old. It was written
by Frank Signorelli, whose Original Memphis Five kept Bing’s circle jumping in Spokane, and Mitchell Parish, who wrote the
lyric to “Star Dust.” The first try ended in a Crosby fluff take, which begins with a nice muted trumpet solo by Manny Klein
but is otherwise stilted. The botched take might have sufficed if Bing had not veered out of tune on the coda; holding fast
to the wrong pitch, he drones, “What the hell happened to me, son of a bitch,” and then tells Malneck, “Let them play the
melody.” The blunder snapped him to attention, and the second take is far more persuasive. He floats the dreamy melody, underscoring
the consonants in the phrase “one that I could kiss and cling to,” and employs a long rest to syncopate the reprise.

The quintessential Crosby ballad of 1938, however, emerged from the session that produced “I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams,”
as well as the less memorable
Sing You Sinners
songs and a mildly engaging Robin and Rainger cowboy song (“Silver on the Sage”). “Mexicali Rose” was written by bandleader
— and later California state senator— Jack Tenny, while working a border town in 1923. The piece languished until the mid-thirties,
when Gene Autry sang it on records and in a movie. It was brought to Bing’s attention by Carroll Carroll’s secretary at a
KMH
rehearsal, when Bing could not come up with a tune. “I heard my mother humming a pretty song,” she told him.
³⁹

Bing sang “Mexicali Rose” for four months on the air before making a record that infused it with the vivid and wistful melancholy
he had used to transform so many commonplace and even trite songs (“Home on the Range,” “Black Moonlight”). He made the song
resonate as a quasi-western hymn for the last days of the Depression. Autry reclaimed it a year later in a movie of the same
name, but in his or anyone else’s hands, it was merely a sentimental love song. Bing’s interpretation produced a frisson,
an eerily palpable suggestion of what the times sounded and felt like. We tend to recall 1938 with the images of swing — stomping
feet and flying skirts. “Mexicali Rose” renders the flip side, far from the ballrooms, where the night is black,
inert, and full of longing. The force of his reading transcends the lyric and its southwestern setting.

John Trotter’s clever arrangement, with its staccato wind instruments marching against a small contingent of strings, is more
polka than mariachi — a neat trick either way for a waltz. Aldous Huxley observed that the waltz was originally conceived,
in 1770, as a “jovial, bouncing, hoppety little tune” fit for a child’s nursery, “almost completely empty of emotional content,”
but that by a century later it had become the very rhythm of eros, “densely saturated with amorous sentiment, languor and
voluptuousness.”
⁴⁰
In waltzes such as “The One Rose” and “Mexicali Rose,” strong emotions are retained, but despite the romantic text, eros
— now the province of swinging four-four — is supplanted by chilling loneliness, relieved only by the cathartic identification
between the listener and singer. Bing admired Trotter’s arrangement and navigates it with confidence, holding back the sentiment
like a dam. Bing is in the details: the goldfish puckering on the
bs
in “big brown eyes”; the tender head tone on
hold
followed by the barrel-chested
me
in the phrase “kiss me once again and hold me”; the contrast between the distant hollow timbre on the first syllables of
crying
and
pining,
and the satisfying mordent on the suffixes.