Bing Crosby

During the opening decades of the twentieth century, no performer rivaled Bing Crosby for sheer popularity and cross-media dominance. Until rock music reshaped tastes, he held the position of top-selling recording artist by a wide margin, with more than five hundred million discs in circulation, while simultaneously serving as the most listened-to radio personality ever and the highest-grossing movie attraction of the 1940s. From the Depression years through the mid-1950s he commanded the entertainment landscape, matching his commercial reach with artistic influence. Because he matured in tandem with radio rather than following earlier vocal traditions, his relaxed, conversational delivery suited the new medium’s domestic reach perfectly. Electrically amplified recording, perfected only months before his first sessions, also proved decisive; unlike prior singers compelled to belt in an elevated register to register on acoustic equipment, his warm, robust baritone produced effortless, intimate performances.

The music itself further amplified his impact. Early exposure to jazz supplied an easy rhythmic feel and broad song selection quite different from the formal, classically tinged repertoire favored by singers of the 1910s and 1920s. Although jazz never remained his sole focus after the 1930s, he fused current popular successes with strong material drawn from many sources, occasionally including theme pieces by nonspecialists such as Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In.” His catalog embraced Broadway numbers, motion-picture songs, country & western tunes, patriotic anthems, sacred hymns, seasonal standards, and ethnic ballads, especially Irish and Hawaiian selections. This range never alienated listeners, since each number received his personal interpretive touch, broadening his audience without eroding his core following. He was among the first vocalists to treat lyrics as texts to be read and shaped, stressing particular words or phrases according to his own judgment.

Vocal skill and command of American popular song accounted for much of his stature, yet his greatest asset proved to be the persona he projected, whether cultivated or instinctive. Crosby embodied the quintessential American everyman—resolute yet relaxed, open-minded while staunchly protective of faith and national values—exactly when the Depression and World War II made such a figure most reassuring.

Born Harry Lillis Crosby in Tacoma, Washington, on May 3, 1903, he acquired the nickname “Bingo” from a childhood comic strip. The fourth of seven children in a financially strained household that enjoyed singing, he received brief early vocal instruction from his mother before losing interest. An admirer of Al Jolson, he witnessed his idol onstage in 1917. During high school he performed in a jazz ensemble; later, while attending Gonzaga College on the edge of campus, he ordered a drum kit by mail and practiced diligently. Introduced to local bandleader Al Rinker, he joined Rinker’s Musicaladers, singing and drumming with the group throughout his college years.

Although the Musicaladers disbanded shortly after his 1925 graduation, Crosby remained committed to professional music. Having earned substantial income during the band’s run, he and Rinker—Mildred Bailey’s brother—set out for Los Angeles confident of success. They secured steady vaudeville work until Paul Whiteman, leader of the nation’s foremost jazz orchestra and widely known as the “King of Jazz” at a time when Black innovators were largely overlooked for commercial reasons, engaged them. Within Whiteman’s presentations, Crosby, Rinker, and pianist-arranger-vocalist Harry Barris performed as the Rhythm Boys. Their inventive material and stagecraft quickly made the trio one of the orchestra’s chief draws; Crosby also sang on Whiteman’s major 1927–1928 hit “Ol’ Man River.” The Rhythm Boys recorded independently as well, yet Crosby’s planned solo feature in the 1930 film King of Jazz never materialized after a drunk-driving arrest.

When Whiteman resumed touring in 1930, the Rhythm Boys remained on the West Coast. After engaging his older brother Everett as manager, Crosby began regular solo sessions for Brunswick Records in early 1931. By year’s end he had scored several major successes, among them “Out of Nowhere,” “Just One More Chance,” “I Found a Million-Dollar Baby,” and “At Your Command.” He appeared in three films that year and launched a popular CBS radio series in September. The program’s rapid ascent earned him a leading role in the 1932 film The Big Broadcast, which transferred radio personalities such as George Burns & Gracie Allen to the screen. By mid-decade he ranked among the ten most popular movie stars. His recording momentum produced further smashes between 1932 and 1934: “Please,” “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” “You’re Getting to Be a Habit With Me,” “Little Dutch Mill,” “Love in Bloom,” and “June in January.”

“June in January,” the largest hit of Crosby’s career to that point, marked a pivotal shift. Brunswick executive Jack Kapp had launched an American branch of British Decca Records and enticed Crosby with improved royalties. Although early Decca sides were drawn from film scores—“June in January” originated in Here Is My Heart—Crosby soon explored sacred repertoire, notably “Silent Night, Holy Night,” later estimated to have sold over ten million copies. Late in 1935 he signed with NBC for the long-running Kraft Music Hall. After initial musical director Jimmy Dorsey departed, Crosby’s songwriter friend Johnny Burke suggested John Scott Trotter, formerly of the Hal Kemp Orchestra. Trotter secured the post when his charts for the 1936 film Pennies from Heaven yielded that year’s biggest hit in the title song; he remained Crosby’s arranger and bandleader into the mid-1950s.

Following 1936’s chart-topper, Crosby promptly delivered 1937’s as well. “Sweet Leilani,” featured in the Hawaiian-themed Waikiki Wedding, pointed toward the expansive stylistic direction his work would take through the 1940s and 1950s. Having already recorded occasional cowboy and inspirational numbers in the 1930s, he now embraced hits across every contemporary genre. Many of his country & western covers became successes themselves, including “New San Antonio Rose,” “You Are My Sunshine,” “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” “Pistol-Packin’ Mama,” “San Fernando Valley,” and “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy.”

American entry into World War II coincided with the zenith of Crosby’s popularity. The first of the “Road” pictures with longtime friend Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour arrived in 1940, alongside three major hits: “Sierra Sue,” “Trade Winds,” and “Only Forever.” Crosby and Hope had met in 1932 during separate engagements at New York’s Capitol Theater; they later collaborated on a racetrack venture. After reviving vaudeville bits, a Paramount producer devised The Road to Singapore as a vehicle for the pair. Further triumphs followed in 1941 with the release of Crosby’s signature song, “White Christmas.” Irving Berlin wrote it for the 1942 film Holiday Inn, which paired a Berlin composition with each major holiday. Crosby premiered the number on his radio broadcast Christmas Day 1941, recorded it the following May, and watched it top the charts through the remainder of 1942. Reissued annually for two decades, it ultimately surpassed thirty million copies, becoming the best-selling single ever. Troops on USO tours favored both it and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” Crosby retained the top box-office position through 1948, his fifth straight year at number one.

Like other jazz-rooted artists of the era, Crosby’s chart standing declined with the mid-1950s arrival of rock & roll. Although “Now Is the Hour” proved his final number-one single in 1948, the drop in hit-making freed him to pursue album projects and collaborations with fellow vocalists and prominent bands—work he found more satisfying than repeatedly performing current pop material on radio. Taking cues from Frank Sinatra’s mature album concepts (themselves partly shaped by Crosby’s earlier example), he revisited hot jazz on well-received LPs such as Bing Sings Whilst Bregman Swings (1956) and Bing with a Beat (1957). Film and recording activity tapered in the 1960s, yet he completed several albums for United Artists in the mid-1970s, one of them with Fred Astaire, and resumed live performances in 1976 and 1977. While golfing in Spain on October 14, 1977, Bing Crosby suffered a fatal heart attack.