LEARN TO CROON: POPULAR MALE SINGERS OF THE
DEPRESSION ERA
The setting is a college classroom in the 1930s, and the
"professor" strutting in front of a chalkboard is Bing Crosby, the
most popular radio and recording star of that era. The subject of the
"lecture" Professor Crosby is delivering to his eager students is
"Learn to Croon":
http://youtu.be/-IeDofVzZJE
http://youtu.be/-IeDofVzZJE
Bing Crosby, from his initial prominence as the centerpiece of The Rhythm Boys, the jazz-singing trio of the Paul Whiteman orchestra in the late-1920s, until his last public performance a mere four days before his sudden death in Europe on October 14, 1977, was the embodiment of the "crooner," a vocal-music style characterized by a casual, relaxed, intimate, and often improvisational approach to the melody and lyrics of a song.
In the U.S., the rise of the crooner both coincided with and originated from the electrical amplification of recorded sound, which in turn stemmed from the engineering experiments of the Western Electric Company after World War One. By 1924, these experimental developments were sufficiently refined to convince both the Victor Talking Machine Company, which was then the dominant disc-recording corporation in America, and the Columbia Phonograph Company, Victor's major competitor, to equip their studios with the new Western Electric recording technology.
The recording equipment which the new Western Electric process replaced was a variant of the technology that Thomas Edison had devised in 1877, when he invented the phonograph. In the ensuing years, scores of other experimenters and technicians (and Edison himself) had improved his invention to a degree that enabled not only individual vocalists and instrumentalists, but also orchestras and choirs of moderate size, to be recorded with reasonable aural fidelity by the standards of what came to be called the "acoustical era" of sound recording. That era began in the early 1890s, when acoustical recordings were first marketed on a national scale, and ended in 1925 when most of the major American record companies adopted the new electrical-recording process.
Prior to 1925, male and female singers with strong voices and clear enunciation were in steady demand in the recording industry. Individually, their recorded performances followed a rather predictable pattern: a brief orchestral prelude comprised of woodwind and brass instruments, followed by the singer or instrumentalist performing the refrain of the song in a sonically clear and musically straightforward manner. Time permitting (with the typical length of a phonograph record then averaging slightly under four minutes), the performer might repeat part of the refrain near the end of the recording. The following Victor disc from 1911, performed by Harry Macdonough--one of the most popular and prolific singers in the early years of the recording industry, and later, under his given name, John S. Macdonald, an executive of the Victor Company--is typical of this straightforward singing style on phonograph records of the pre-World War One era:
http://youtu.be/uJOy4YstAyU
http://youtu.be/bcLqP1tFIZo
With the advent of jazz and its escalating popularity on phonograph recordings after World War One, a younger group of vocalists broke with the metronomic singing style of Henry Burr, Harry Macdonough and other male vocalists from the first generation of popular-music recording artists. Among this younger breed of performers was Jack Smith, or "Whispering Jack Smith" as he was known on early radio programs in his native New York City.
Born in the Bronx as Jacob J. Schmidt in 1896, Smith was a jazz-influenced pianist and cabaret singer whose career had begun at the Irving Berlin Music Publishing Company, where he was employed as a "song plugger," demonstrating new popular tunes issued in sheet-music form by Berlin's publishing house. In 1923, after leaving the Berlin company and performing in vaudeville, Smith was hired as a staff pianist by the WMCA radio station in New York City.
Early in his tenure at WMCA, Smith began singing on the air to his own accompaniment, and was soon being advertised as "The Whispering Baritone." (Whether he borrowed the "Whispering" name from another radio performer, Art Gillham, who was billed as "The Whispering Pianist" on Columbia recordings shortly before Smith's were released by Victor, was a matter of dispute between the two performers.) As a complement to Smith's increasingly popular radio performances, he auditioned successfully for the Victor Company in the summer of 1925. With Victor's new Western Electric recording equipment in place and in use for nearly six months, Smith recorded the popular hit "Cecilia" on September 15, 1925:
http://youtu.be/XQ9seXH4vAk
In quick succession, Smith recorded a sizable number of popular songs for the Victor Company and for its affiliate, the English "His Master's Voice" (HMV) label, each one featuring his distinctive blend of talking and singing the lyrics of a song, as in his September 1928 HMV recording of "Crazy Rhythm":
http://youtu.be/WnNsI8tDdE4
Three years earlier, in 1924, a contemporary of Whispering Jack Smith, the pianist and jazz singer Gene Austin, had written a "novelty song" (as it was described in the parlance of the time) and had successfully "plugged" the song to the Victor Company. Essentially a self-taught pianist with an untrained singing voice, Austin had no prominence in show business and only minimal recording experience (he had made a few records anonymously for Vocalion, a low-priced record label, and had also made two recordings for the Edison label) when he auditioned his newly-written song for the Victor staff. As a result of the audition, Victor's musical director, Nathaniel Shilkret, paired Austin with a more experienced Victor artist, Aileen Stanley, when they recorded Austin's new song, "When My Sugar Walks Down the Street," on January 30, 1925:
http://youtu.be/4OWdljsAeNw
Decades later in a television interview, Austin recalled the rigors of the acoustical-recording process. "When we made those old-type records, we had to sing into an octagonal metal funnel, which was called the 'horn' because that's what it looked like," he recalled. "If two of us were singing, each of us had to project our voices into two separate horns so that the volume of our voices would be more or less the same. We had to sing everything pretty loud because the recording machinery wouldn't pick up anything that was played or sung softly. "I made several offbeat records for a while," Austin said in the interview. "I recorded some country songs, or 'hillbilly' music as it was called then, and I sang several more jazz tunes and even recorded a couple of blues numbers for the Victor Company. "But then the new electric-recording process came in, and I could sing into an electric microphone instead of the horn, and I could sing at the normal volume of my voice. That's when I changed my singing style and started concentrating on popular ballads.
"The head of the recording studios at Victor, Nat
Shilkret, was the one who talked me into making that change. He said,
'Gene, your singing voice has a soothing sound, and you ought to record
soothing ballads.' Well, I took Nat Shilkret's advice and I guess you could
say that I hit the jackpot in 1927. On the same day, I recorded two songs
that put me on top almost overnight."
Of the two ballads that Austin recorded at the Victor studios on Wednesday afternoon, September 14, 1927, the first, chronologically, was "My Melancholy Baby," a song that would be appropriated by generations of singers who came after Gene Austin:
http://youtu.be/h_C8aKIkdXE
The second recording Austin made on that September afternoon in 1927 swept the American public like no other phonograph recording had ever done previously:
Of the two ballads that Austin recorded at the Victor studios on Wednesday afternoon, September 14, 1927, the first, chronologically, was "My Melancholy Baby," a song that would be appropriated by generations of singers who came after Gene Austin:
http://youtu.be/h_C8aKIkdXE
The second recording Austin made on that September afternoon in 1927 swept the American public like no other phonograph recording had ever done previously:
http://youtu.be/J6YQ4etysBg
Gene Austin's performance of "My Blue Heaven" is a laid-back rendition with a seemingly improvised musical flow that seems uninterrupted, perhaps even enhanced, by Austin's impromptu interjections of "uh-huh" and "doo, doo, doo-doo" as a cellist plays the melody. His carefree vocal chorus, which was followed by a repetition of the melody in a bird-like warbling style, caught the immediate fancy of the record-buying public.
For all its popularity, "My Blue Heaven" was just the beginning for the ambitious, suddenly-in-demand Gene Austin: in rapid succession he recorded "There's a Cradle in Caroline," "The Lonesome Road" (which he wrote), "Bye, Bye, Blackbird," "Tonight You Belong To Me," "The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi," "Ramona," and "Girl of My Dreams," all of which added to his considerable fame and mounting royalties from his Victor recordings. His 1929 recording of "Carolina Moon" was among his best-selling recordings:
http://youtu.be/l6j4ofI6iLg
Although the initial popularity of Whispering Jack Smith slightly preceded Austin's, it was Gene Austin who "was the first crooner, the one who gave the rest of us our start," according to Rudy Vallee, whose popularity superceded Austin's in the early 1930s. A Yale alumnus (Class of 1927), Vallee, the son of a French-Canadian druggist, had spent his youth in Vermont and Maine, where he developed not only a passion for popular music but also a near-obsession with the saxophonist Rudy Wiedoeft. "What the electric guitar is to rock music," bandleader and television personality Ozzie Nelson said in a 1974 interview, "the saxophone was in the 1920s and 1930s. And the master of the saxophone was unquestionably Rudy Wiedoeft."
In the early 1920s, Vallee even appropriated Wiedoeft's first name to replace "Hubert Vallee," his less euphonious christened name. Although Rudy Vallee never developed more than a nominal command of the saxophone, his idol Rudy Wiedoeft's dazzling playing was captured in an early Warner Brothers Vitaphone film in which he demonstrated his technique with his sometime rival, saxophonist Bennie Kreuger:
http://youtu.be/Db9P-u1_2bE
After befriending Wiedoeft and winning his encouragement, Rudy Vallee played saxophone with a number of dance bands (including a stint in London in 1924) until he formed his own band, which he named the Yale Collegians, after his alma mater. Vallee also began to sing to the patrons of the nightclubs and Broadway venues where he and his expanded band, now renamed the Connecticut Yankees, played regularly.
Because his small, untrained voice did not project well, he adopted a tool from his years as the director of the Yale University football band: a cheerleader's megaphone. "My use of the megaphone," he wrote in his 1930 autobiography, Vagabond Dreams Come True, "came through absolute necessity as, although my voice is very loud when I speak or shout, when I use it musically it is not penetrating or strong ... What I did was simply to risk the censure of public opinion by using [the megaphone] on every song ... because I believe that one of the biggest defects in most people who sing songs is that they get the melody out but not the words."
Throughout the 1930s, Vallee remained one of the most popular singers and radio personalities in the U.S. His weekly radio program, "The Fleischmann Hour," introduced new songs and new performers who came to enjoy highly successful careers in music, drama, and films. Originally broadcast from Manhattan's Heigh-Ho Club, which he owned at the time, Vallee's early radio performances began and ended with "Heigh-Ho, Everybody, Heigh-Ho," his first theme song, which he recorded for the Victor Company in 1929:
http://youtu.be/bPyJGWWcN8Y
Earlier that year, Vallee was offered a film contract by RKO Radio Pictures, to star in a movie based loosely on his public personality, and featuring the songs he had made famous on radio and recordings. The resulting film, The Vagabond Lover, released in 1929, featured a heavily-cosmetized Vallee playing and singing some of his early hit songs to actress Sally Blane, the sister of Loretta Young:
http://youtu.be/TWq2osNCqE0
Although Vallee's legion of fans ensured the box-office success of The Vagabond Lover, the film was panned by critics and proved to be a lifelong embarrassment to Vallee.
"According to the latest reports," he wrote in
the second of his three autobiographies, "that film is shown only in
prisons, and is otherwise used to fumigate theaters." Although his initial foray into film-making was a
personal disappointment, Vallee's radio popularity, coupled with the steady
stream of recordings he made for the Victor, Columbia, and the short-lived
Durium "Hit of the Week" labels, made him one of the highest-paid
entertainers in show business. The lyrics of one of the songs he
recorded, "Deep Night," were his own (with Charles Henderson writing
the music), and eventually would be used as the introductory music for Bonnie
and Clyde, Warren Beatty's classic film:
http://youtu.be/Uwis6Ev0fAQ
Rudy Vallee became especially identified with college-related songs in the 1930s, two of which became best-selling records for the Victor Company. Both of these hit recordings had their roots in Vallee's college years at the University of Maine, which he had attended initially, and Yale University, to which he transferred after returning from his dance-band engagements in England. This is his 1930 recording of the "Maine Stein Song":
http://youtu.be/BMV1ENiJjxE
The second of these college songs, which Vallee recorded in 1936, was his personal tribute to Yale, whose Whiffenpoof singers, a highly selective a cappella choral group of Yale seniors, had been a staple at the University since 1909. Although the Yale administration and alumni organization strenuously objected to Vallee's commercialization of the song (partly because he had not been a Whiffenpoof member at Yale), Vallee's recording drew more public attention to the University than most of its athletic teams at the time:
http://youtu.be/Uwis6Ev0fAQ
Rudy Vallee became especially identified with college-related songs in the 1930s, two of which became best-selling records for the Victor Company. Both of these hit recordings had their roots in Vallee's college years at the University of Maine, which he had attended initially, and Yale University, to which he transferred after returning from his dance-band engagements in England. This is his 1930 recording of the "Maine Stein Song":
http://youtu.be/BMV1ENiJjxE
The second of these college songs, which Vallee recorded in 1936, was his personal tribute to Yale, whose Whiffenpoof singers, a highly selective a cappella choral group of Yale seniors, had been a staple at the University since 1909. Although the Yale administration and alumni organization strenuously objected to Vallee's commercialization of the song (partly because he had not been a Whiffenpoof member at Yale), Vallee's recording drew more public attention to the University than most of its athletic teams at the time:
http://youtu.be/gTXmF1Q4er8
Because of his radio success and the popularity of his recordings, Vallee returned to Hollywood in 1934 to reprise his role as a singer and bandleader. The resulting film, Sweet Music (which was also the title of one of his highly popular Victor discs), captured some of Vallee's best singing at the apex of his career, and also featured him conducting his band in a memorable performance by torch-singer Helen Morgan:
http://youtu.be/ffgOBSW5npc
By the late-1930s, Vallee was concentrating most of his time on his extraordinarily popular radio program, and as a result his output of recordings--of which he had made as many as forty during 1929, his first year with the Victor Company--dwindled to a dozen a year, on average. But in July 1937, after hearing a Corsican folk song during one of his frequent travels to the Mediterranean, he transformed the song into "Vieni, Vieni," which he recorded for Victor and which became one of his most popular recordings:
http://youtu.be/DhlOMXtOegI
A crooning career of much shorter duration than Vallee's was that of the previously-mentioned Ozzie Nelson, a self-avowed Rudy Vallee imitator who, after graduating from Rutgers University, where he played varsity football, had studied saxophone and had adopted Vallee's nasalized singing and phrasing:
http://youtu.be/fH5oek8TK1k
In a television interview in the 1970s, Nelson explained to an interviewer how he went about styling himself differently from Rudy Vallee. His comments begin at approximately 18:10 in the interview:
http://youtu.be/dO3HhFGfSog
Although Ozzie Nelson became a successful bandleader in the late 1930s, with his future wife, Harriet Hilliard, as his band's vocalist, his future fame lay in television as the producer, director and head writer of the popular television show, "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet," in the 1950s. In addition to Ozzie Nelson, several other singers cast themselves in the Rudy Vallee mold, including Will Osborne, a Canadian-born singer and bandleader. Osborne's band, which he formed in 1929, became especially known for the "slide" playing style of its six-piece brass section. This is the band's rendition of "Where Are You," with a vocal chorus by Osborne, which he recorded for the Decca label in November 1936:
http://youtu.be/Kss9wE6jS9o
Neither Will Osborne nor Ozzie Nelson during their brief singing careers, nor even Rudy Vallee at the peak of his massive popularity, was able to stem the fast-rising tide of Bing Crosby's prominence in the 1930s. Which is not to say that Crosby lacked for any rivals early in his career. Another young baritone, Russ Columbo, an Italian-American violinist who doubled as a singer, had a crooning style that for a time seemed to divide the radio and record-buying public between Columbo and Crosby.
Although Crosby's popularity was already established on radio and recordings, the voice and musicianship of Russ Columbo, coupled with his move-star looks and engaging personality, presented a considerable challenge to Crosby's pre-eminence. This is one of Columbo's performances from his 1933 film, Broadway Through a Keyhole:
http://youtu.be/biuEmB120nw
As had Gene Austin in the late 1920s, Russ Columbo regularly recorded and added new titles to his recorded output--songs like "Paradise," "Sweet and Lovely," "You Call It Madness (But I Call It Love)," which he wrote, and "I See Two Lovers," among others. But the song most associated with him was "Prisoner of Love," for which he wrote the music and which he recorded for the Victor Company in 1931:
http://youtu.be/MmUGy-GYXs8
Like Crosby, Columbo had has own network radio program, and off-the-air he was also seen frequently in Hollywood with Carole Lombard, whom he was rumored to be planning to marry. But fate intervened in the cruelest of ways: on September 2, 1934, while visiting a photographer friend who had an antique-gun collection, Columbo was shot in the forehead when his friend accidentally discharged an antique dueling pistol. Six hours later, after unsuccessful brain surgery, Columbo died at the age of 26.
Bing Crosby, whom the media had portrayed as a rival to Columbo in what their press agents labeled the "Battle of the Baritones," was among the celebrities who attended Columbo's funeral services. Some forty years later, on a New York late-night television show hosted by nostalgia specialist Joe Franklin, Crosby reminisced about his friendship with Columbo. His comments begin at 3:47 in this video, which is the only televisioninterview in which he spoke about Russ Columbo:
http://youtu.be/Mfl0JHE4D_E
Although the bandleader Paul Whiteman gave Bing Crosby his start when he hired The Rhythm Boys and helped transform the trio into a national phenomenon in the late-1920s, it was Rudy Vallee who predicted Crosby's success as a solo singer. In Baltimore in 1927, Vallee and his Yale Collegians were playing for a debutante ball in a college gymnasium when he heard The Rhythm Boys for the first time in person. "It was a crowded place," Vallee wrote, "and the trio, working only with a piano, was back against the wall of the gym, and nobody paid much attention to their performance. Suddenly, however, one of them walked to the center of the floor and delivered a popular song of the day, 'Montmarte Rose.' "When he finished, there was a deafening roar of applause that would have called for at least one or two encores. Instead, he walked off the floor where we sat, his classic features expressionless, his patrician nose just a little bit up on the air. You might have thought him deaf, so unaware he seemed of the sensation he had created. But then, this insouciance has always characterized Bing Crosby."
For fifty years, Crosby was a show-business star who, although invariably reluctant to talk about himself, was nevertheless an acute analyst and critic of his singing. "When I'm asked to describe what I do," he said in his autobiography Call Me Lucky, "I say, 'I'm not a singer; I'm a phraser.' That means that I don't think of a song in terms of notes; I think of what it purports to say lyrically. "Playing some of the records I made in the 1930s," he wrote, "I notice that in many of them I was tired, my voice was bad, and had a lot of frogs in it. The notes were generally in key, but sometimes I barely made them, and they sounded strained." These qualities are evident in several of Crosby's early recordings, as in this Brunswick recording of "Sweet Sue" from 1931:
http://youtu.be/nzqp3uMR_Ms
Throughout the early 1930s, Crosby alternated between singing ballads, which were a crooner's bread and butter, and popular tunes that lent themselves to scat-singing and an overall jazz interpretation. One such song was "Sweet Georgia Brown," which Crosby recorded with Bennie Krueger's band in April 1932:
http://youtu.be/FvnsxpghZeY
Six months earlier, at Brunswick Records, Crosby was paired with the Mills Brothers in an intricate arrangement of "Dinah," in which the Mills Brothers not only sang harmony but also imitated the bass violin and the muted cornet heard in the background:
http://youtu.be/UlPLXNsz4GA
While Crosby would have been satisfied with singing jazz arrangements of songs like "Dinah" and "Sweet Georgia Brown," he was persuaded by Jack Kapp, a recording director at Brunswick, to vary his repertoire by recording western songs and other folk music that Kapp began to suggest to him. "I thought he was crazy," Crosby said years later, "but I just did what he told me."
When Kapp left Brunswick to form a new company of his own, Decca Records, Crosby not only followed him but also became one of the founding investors and major stockholders in the new Decca enterprise. The resulting collaboration between Kapp and Crosby yielded most of the singer's top-selling recordings. In their first session together, which took place in Los Angeles on August 8, 1934, Kapp had Crosby record "Let Me Call You Sweetheart," a song that had been written in 1910 and had long since fallen out of fashion. During the recording, which became a best-seller for Kapp's new Decca label, Crosby not only sang the then-quaint lyrics, but also displayed his mastery as a whistler on the recording:
http://youtu.be/GgvDariuAN0
In 1937, three years into his partnership with Jack Kapp, Crosby was offered a starring role in the Paramount film Waikiki Wedding, co-starring Shirley Ross and set in what was then the territory of Hawaii. The film launched a new phase of Crosby's career:
http://youtu.be/y4vKzs0G3E4
Under Jack Kapp's direction, Crosby recorded not only "Blue Hawaii" for Decca, but also another hit song that was featured in the film. His Decca recording of the song, "Sweet Leilani," remains an idiosyncratic recording in that the first half of the record features the singing not of Crosby but rather of Lani McIntire, the director of a steel-guitar band (Lani McIntire and His Hawaiians) which provided the accompaniment for Crosby on his series of Hawaiian discs for Decca. McIntire, who had what might be charitably called an undistinguished singing voice, earned a measure of popular-music immortality when he recorded "Sweet Leilani" with Crosby at the Decca studios on February 23, 1937:
http://youtu.be/1_Kym-TTbV0
During the 1940s, Crosby's career took on new proportions as he became a major film star. His 1944 performance as a Catholic priest in the film Going My Way yielded another best-selling Decca recording, "Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral":
http://youtu.be/mc96aXTJFh0
In 1951, Crosby co-starred with Jane Wyman in the MGM film Here Comes the Groom, directed by Frank Capra, which yielded another best-selling recording for Crosby, Wyman, and Decca. By 1951, Wyman (who had recently divorced her second husband, future U.S. president Ronald Reagan) was an Academy Award-winning movie star when she was paired with Crosby at MGM, but she had begun her career as a radio singer when she was just a teenager. This is the scene from Here Comes the Groom in which she and Crosby sing "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening":
http://youtu.be/puSgWX4DbZ4
Crosby's next major film, The Country Girl, in which he co-starred with Grace Kelly and William Holden, earned him an Academy Award nomination (his third) for his moving portrayal of an alcoholic singer--a complete departure from his comedic performances in the highly successful "Road" films with Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour, and his priestly roles in Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's, the 1945 film in which he reprised his role as a priest. Although The Country Girl yielded no substantial hit songs for Crosby, his subsequent reunion with Grace Kelly in 1956 in the film High Society, which also co-starred Frank Sinatra and Celeste Holm, gave Crosby another best-selling record (this time for the Capitol label rather than Decca), and gave Grace Kelly her only musical performance on film in the duet "True Love":
http://youtu.be/KoLH3bevi8k
High Society, which Crosby had co-produced, also gave him and Frank Sinatra (who idolized Crosby) their only occasion to sing together on film:
http://youtu.be/7kq1JQUhwVQ
Even as he aged, Crosby retained the quality of voice and security of technique that enabled him to sing in his familiar, intimate style to the very end of his life. Only a few weeks before he died of a heart attack while traveling in Spain, Crosby persuaded his son, Harry Crosby, to sing a duet with him during a concert in Oslo, Norway. The song, which the elder Crosby had recorded in his prime with Louis Armstrong, showed that even at the end of his life, Bing Crosby was still in full possession of his artistry:
http://youtu.be/dOKe6E9d0lM
At the time of his sudden death in Spain at age 69, Crosby was still a major marquee name in the music industry, and a frequent guest on national television programs well into the 1970s. He had the longest career of any crooner of the 1930s, and in the ensuing years as his fame, popularity, and power grew exponentially, he outgrew the "crooner" label and essentially retired it as a relic of the Depression.
Neither the number of awards he won for his many top-selling recordings, nor his Academy Award as a film actor, seem to have given Bing Crosby an outsized ego. Everyone who performed with him genuinely liked him, and admired his artistry and his high standards as a professional. Behind the scenes, the corporation he founded, Bing Crosby Enterprises, funded experimental research for the development and improvement of sound-recording technology, including commercial magnetic-tape recorders and also video-recording technology. In the music industry, Crosby became not only an inspiration for Frank Sinatra but also for Perry Como, Tony Martin, Vic Damone, Dean Martin, and Tony Bennett, among others. "As with all the great singers," the critic and musicologist Henry Pleasants wrote in 1974, "when we hear Bing Crosby, we recognize the voice of an old and treasured friend."
James A. Drake
