"Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams" by Gary Giddins

A new biography tries to bring back to life the now-neglected, once absurdly popular crooner.

By Allen Barra

Feb 9, 2001 | The box sits in the corner of my record case, unopened for at least three decades. A collector once offered me $500 for it. The songs on the 10 records in the case -- "Pennies From Heaven," "Sweet Leilani," "Moonlight Becomes You," "San Fernando Valley," "Mexicali Rose," "Swinging on a Star" and, of course, "White Christmas" -- were probably the most popular songs of their time. They survive today as artifacts of a past still strongly felt but dimly remembered. I never knew this past, nor did I ever see the America for which Bing Crosby still serves as an avatar, but I have a vague nostalgia for it. It was an America of small towns ("Dear Hearts and Gentle People") devoid of prejudice, where white people and black people went fishing together ("Gone Fishin'" with Louis Armstrong) and gathered, late in the day, at the local tavern in faded golf slacks to sing college songs ("The Whiffenpoof Song"), whether or not they went to college. And, though everyone lived in the San Fernando Valley, they dreamed of a White Christmas.

I can't explain or justify this strange fact, but I know every song on 10 Bing Crosby records better than I know the music of my own generation that I loved the most, Van Morrison's "St. Dominic's Preview" or the Stones' "Exile on Main Street." My father, though ravaged by Alzheimer's, died remembering every lyric of every song on them easier than he could remember the names of his grandchildren. I think he liked the Irish songs best. The rest of his family sang along with Perry Como and Vic Damone, but my father, an Italian kid from South Philadelphia, walked around the house crooning "Danny Boy" and "Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral." I'd give the world if he could sing those songs to me today.

"Bing: A Musical Biography" was released in 1954. The cover painting shows a bodiless ghost dressed in sport shirt and checkered golf slacks sitting on a stool, with a pipe floating in the air and a golf club leaning against the ghost's knee and a brown felt hat on the imaginary head. In the background is a tiny racehorse; a microphone with the logo "Decca" hangs in front of the ghost. When I was born there were probably few Americans who couldn't have told you who that figure was supposed to represent; today, I doubt if one American in 20 could conjure up a scrap of information about the man whose voice, as the inscription on the inside case cover says, "has been heard by more people than the voice of any other human being who ever lived."

I don't know how that conclusion was arrived at, but surely no one in 1954 would have challenged it, and who has come along since then to replace him in the ears of the world? Put it this way: In 1934, Pu Yi, the boy emperor of China, the last inheritor of a 5,000-year civilization who spent most of his early life secluded in the Forbidden City, told a foreign journalist that, among other Western pleasures, he wanted to hear more Bing Crosby records. Who might he ask for today? Sinatra? Elvis? The Beatles? Garth Brooks? Whoever VH1 is featuring this week?

It's probably impossible for anyone under 40 to truly understand that Bing Crosby was, in the words of his new biographer, Gary Giddins, "the most influential and successful popular performer in the first half of the 20th century." Late in his career, after Crosby more or less relinquished the adult portion of his potential audience to Sinatra, while the teenagers invariably went to rock 'n' roll, the kind of real, monumental popularity Bing Crosby had enjoyed ceased to exist.

Here are some points on which you could get a solid consensus among historians: He was the most popular recording artist of all time, selling more records and earning more radio listeners than anyone else, and for longer than anyone else, nearly a quarter of a century. No one else was even close, and in terms of a share of the recording market, no one is close today. And the records represented only a part of Crosby's popularity. For nearly two decades he was a leading box office attraction, placing No. 1 for five straight years. He was the most popular radio singer of all time and probably created the idea of the "popular" singer as we know it.

Next Page: Lazy purveyor of pleasantries or an innovator who eroticized pop?

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