Bing Crosby
| Bing Crosby | |
|---|---|
 Bing Crosby displays golfballs for the scrap rubber drive during World War Two
| |
| Background information | |
| Birth name | Harry Lillis Crosby |
| Born | May 3, 1903 Tacoma, Washington, USA |
| Died | October, 14 1977 Madrid, Spain |
| Genre(s) | Jazz, Pop standards, Dixieland |
| Occupation(s) | Singer, Actor |
| Years active | 1926 - 1977 |
| Label(s) | Brunswick, Decca, Reprise, RCA Victor, Verve, United Artists |
| Website | BingCrosby.com |
Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby (May 3, 1903 – October 14, 1977) was an American singer and actor whose career lasted from 1926 until his death in 1977. One of the first multi-media stars, from 1934 to 1954 Bing Crosby held a nearly unrivaled command of record sales, radio ratings. and motion picture grosses.
Crosby's recording of Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" has sold over 100 million copies around the world, with at least 50 million sales as singles. Crosby is also credited as being the major inspiration for most of the male singers that followed him, including the likes of Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, and Dean Martin.
Crosby also exerted a massive influence on the development of the postwar recording industry. In 1947, he invested $50,000 in the Ampex company, which developed the world's first commercial reel-to-reel tape recorder. Crosby became the first performer to prerecord his radio shows and master his commercial recordings on magnetic tape. By giving one of the first Ampex Model 200 recorders to his friend, musician Les Paul, Crosby facilitated Paul's invention of multitrack recording. Along with Frank Sinatra, he was one of the principal backers behind the United Western Recorders studio complex in Los Angeles.
In 1962, Crosby was the first person to receive the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. His is usually considered to be the most electronically recorded human voice in history.
Early life
Crosby was born in Tacoma, Washington on May 3, 1903 in a house that his father built. His family moved to Spokane, Washington in 1906 to find work. He was the fourth of seven children: five boys and two girls. His parents were English-American Harry Lowe Crosby (1871-1950), a bookkeeper, and Irish-American Catherine Harrigan (1873-1964), (affectionately known as Kate), the daughter of a builder from County Mayo in Ireland. His paternal ancestors were born in England and immigrated to the U.S. in the sixteenth century; Brewster's family came over on the Mayflower.
The six-year-old Harry Lillis was a fan of a humorous newspaper column called "The Bingville Bugle." An older neighbor boy shared Crosby's enthusiasm for "The Bugle," and began called Crosby "Bingo from Bingville." The last vowel was later dropped and the name shortened to Bing, which stuck.
In 1917, Crosby took a summer job as property boy at Spokane's Auditorium where he witnessed some of the finest acts of the day, including Al Jolson who spellbound the young Bing. Crosby would later say, "To me, he was the greatest entertainer who ever lived."
In the fall of 1920, Bing enrolled in the Jesuit-run Gonzaga College in Spokane, Washington with the intent to become a lawyer. While in Gonzaga, he sent away for a set of mail order drums. After much practice he soon became good enough and was invited to join a local band, made up of mostly high school students, called the Musicaladers. He made enough money doing this that he decided to drop out of school during his final year to pursue a career in show business.
Popular success
Music
In 1926, while working at Los Angeles Metropolitan Theatre, Crosby caught the eye of Paul Whiteman, arguably the most famous bandleader at the time. Hired for $150 a week, he and singing partner Al Winker—with whom he had worked since his Spokeanne days—made their debut on December 6, 1926 at the Tivoli Theatre in Chicago.
Crosby and Rinker were a popular duo, but Whiteman added another member to the group, pianist and aspiring songwriter Harry Barris. Whiteman dubbed them The Rhythm Boys and they joined the Whiteman vocal team, working and recording with Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey, and Eddie Lang, and singers Mildred Bailey and Hoagy Carmichael.
Crosby soon became the star attraction of The Rhythm Boys , and in 1928 had his first number one hit, a jazz influenced rendition of "Ol' Man River." However, growing dissatisfaction with Whiteman caused him and the other Rhythm Boys to leave the band and join the Gus Arnheim Orchestra. After signing with Brunswick and recording under Jack Kapp, The Rhythm Boys were increasingly pushed to the background with the vocal emphasis on Bing. Shortly after this the members of the band had a falling out and split, setting the stage for Crosby's solo career. However, fellow member Harry Barris did write most of Crosby’s subsequent hits including "At Your Command," "I Surrender Dear," and "Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams."
As the 1930s unfolded, Crosby rose to the top of ranks of American vocal artists. Ten of the top 50 songs for 1931 featured him either solo or with others. He signed long-term deals with Jack Kapp's new record company Decca and starred in his first full-length film feature, 1932's The Big Broadcast.
Around this time, Crosby made his solo debut on radio, co-starring with The Carl Fenton Orchestra on a popular CBS radio show. By 1936, he had replaced his former boss, Paul Whiteman, as the host of NBC's Kraft Music Hall, a weekly radio program where he would remain for the next 10 years.
During World War II, Crosby made numerous live appearances before American troops fighting in the European Theater. He also learned how to pronounce German from written scripts, and would read them in propaganda broadcasts intended for the German forces. In a poll of U.S. troops at the close of WWII, Crosby topped the list as the person who did the most for G.I. morale, beating out President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, General Dwight Eisenhower, and one Bob Hope.
Crosby's biggest musical hit was his recording of Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" which he introduced through a 1941 Christmas-season radio broadcast and the movie Holiday Inn. The recording hit the charts on October 3, 1942, and rose to #1 on October 31, where it stayed for 11 weeks. It became a perennial favorite, hitting the top-30 pop charts another 16 times, and even topping the charts again in 1945 and January of 1947. The song remains a holiday classic and the best-selling song of all time. According to the Guinness World Records, Crosby's White Christmas has "sold over 100 million copies around the world, with at least 50 million sales as singles."
Style
Crosby did not "belt out" his songs as many other top singers of the day did, but sang with a smooth, conversational ease. The oddity of this new sound led to the epithet "crooner." He perfected an idea that Al Jolson had hinted at, namely that the popular performer could be a genuine artist. Crosby projected his music with a majestic sense of intonation that afforded Tin Pan Alley the musical stature of European classics. His jazz-influenced sense of time and cadence made him the dominant voice of both in the Jazz age and the Swing era.
Crosby also elaborated on an additional idea of Al Jolson's, one that Frank Sinatra would ultimately extend even further: phrasing, or more specifically, the art of making a song's lyric "ring true." It is often said that Crosby made his singing and acting "look easy," or as if it were no work at all. His singing came just as naturally to him as talking or breathing.
Career statistics
Bing Crosby's sales and chart statistics place him among the most popular and successful musical acts of the twentieth century. Although the Billboard charts operated under a different methodology for the bulk of Crosby's career, his numbers remain astonishing: 1,700 recordings, 383 of those in the top 30, and of those, 41 hit number 1. Crosby had separate charting singles in every calendar year between 1931 and 1954; the annual re-release of White Christmas extended that streak to 1957. He had 24 separate popular singles in 1939 alone. Billboard's statistician Joel Whitburn determined Crosby to be America's most successful act of the 1930s, and again in the 1940s.
For 15 years (1934, 1937, 1940, 1943-1954), Crosby was among the top 10 in box office draw, and for five of those years (1944-49) he was the largest in the world. He sang four Academy Award-winning songs—"Sweet Leilani" (1937), "White Christmas" (1942), "Swinging on a Star" (1944), "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening" (1951)—and won an acting Oscar for Going My Way (1944). He also collected 23 gold and platinum records in his career, according to Joseph Murrells, author of the book, Million Selling Records. It should be noted that the Recording Industry Association of America did not institute its gold-record certification program until 1958 (by which point Crosby's record sales were barely a blip), so gold records prior to that year were awarded by an artist's record company. Universal Music, current owner of Crosby's Decca catalog, has never requested RIAA certification for any of his hit singles.
In 1962, Crosby became the first recipient of the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He has been inducted into the respective halls of fame for both radio and popular music. His overall music sales are estimated at between five-hundred million to nine-hundred million. Bing is a member of that exclusive club of the biggest record sellers that include Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and The Beatles.
Motion pictures
According to ticket sales, Bing Crosby is the third most popular actor of all-time behind Clark Gable and John Wayne. Crosby's most popular film, White Christmas, grossed $30 million in 1954, which when adjusted for inflation equals $233 million in 2004 dollars. Crosby also won an Academy Award as Best Actor for his portrayal of a good-natured priest in Going My Way in 1944. He also starred with Ingrid Bergman in the popular 1945 film, The Bells of St. Mary's and was critically acclaimed for his performance as an alcoholic entertainer in The Country Girl.
His long-running comic back-and-forth with comedian Bob Hope was played for laughs on their radio and television shows, and they co-starred in a popular series of movies that became known as the "road films": The Road to Singapore (1940), The Road to Hong Kong (1962), and five other such films. (Their co-star in many of the road movies was actress Dorothy Lamour.)
Crosby first sang the tune "White Christmas" in the movie Holiday Inn (1942); his recording of the tune remains a holiday favorite. Crosby made 55 such films in which he was top billed and appeared in a total of 79 pictures.
By the late 1950s, however, Crosby's popularity had peaked, and the adolescence of the baby boomer generation began to deflect record sales to younger customers. In 1960, Crosby starred in High Time, a collegiate comedy with Fabian and Tuesday Weld that presaged the emerging gap between older Crosby fans and a new generation of films and music.
Entrepreneurship
Mass media mogul
Bing Crosby's desire to pre-record his radio shows, combined with a dissatisfaction with the available aluminum recording disks, was a significant factor in the development of magnetic tape recording and the radio industry's adoption of it. He used his power to innovate new methods of reproducing himself. In 1946, he wanted to shift from live performance to recorded transcriptions for his weekly radio show on NBC sponsored by Kraft. But NBC and competitor CBS refused to allow recorded radio programs (except for advertisements).
Crosby was always an early riser and hard worker. He sought better quality through recording, not more spare time. He could eliminate mistakes and control the timing of performances. Bing Crosby hired Jack Mullin and his German machine, a Magnetophon that he brought back from Radio Frankfurt, to start recording his Philco show in August 1947 with the same 50 reels of Farben magnetic tape that Mullin had found at a radio station at Bad Nauheim near Frankfurt while working for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. The crucial advantage was editing. As Crosby wrote in his autobiography, "By using tape, I could do a 35 or 40-minute show, then edit it down to the 26 or 27 minutes the program ran. In that way, we could take out jokes, gags, or situations that didn't play well and finish with only the prime meat of the show; the solid stuff that played big."
Crosby also invested $50,000 in Ampex to produce more machines. In 1948, the second season of Philco shows was taped with the new Ampex Model 200 tape recorder (introduced in April) using the new Scotch 111 tape from the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M) company. Mullin explained that new techniques were invented on the Crosby show with these machines: "One time Bob Burns, the hillbilly comic, was on the show, and he threw in a few of his folksy farm stories, which of course were not in Bill Morrow's script. Today they wouldn't seem very off-color, but things were different on radio then. They got enormous laughs, which just went on and on. We couldn't use the jokes, but Bill asked us to save the laughs. A couple of weeks later he had a show that wasn't very funny, and he insisted that we put in the salvaged laughs. Thus the laugh-track was born."
Crosby had launched the tape-recorder revolution in America. In his 1950 film Mr. Music, Bing Crosby can be seen singing into one of the new Ampex tape recorders that reproduced his voice better than anything else. Also quick to adopt tape recording was his friend Bob Hope, who would make the famous "Road to..." films with Bing and Dorothy Lamour.
Thoroughbred horse racing
Bing Crosby was a fan of Thoroughbred horse racing and bought his first racehorse in 1935. In 1937, he became a founding partner and member of the Board of Directors of the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club that built and operated the Del Mar Racetrack at Del Mar, California. One of Crosby's closest friends was Lindsay Howard, for whom he named his son Lindsay and from whom he would purchase his 40-room Hillsborough estate in 1965. Howard was the son of millionaire businessman Charles S. Howard who owned a successful racing stable that included Seabiscuit. Charles S. Howard would join Crosby as a founding partner and director of the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club.
Crosby and Lindsay Howard formed Binglin Stable to race and breed thoroughbred horses at a ranch in Moorpark in Ventura County, California. They also established the Binglin stock farm in Argentina where they raced horses at Hipódromo de Palermo in Palermo, Buenos Aires. Binglin stable purchased a number of Argentine-bred horses and shipped them back to race in the United States. On August 12 1938, the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club hosted a $25,000 winner-take-all match race won by Charles S. Howard's Seabiscuit over Binglin Stable's Ligaroti. Binglin's horse Don Bingo won the 1943 Suburban Handicap at Belmont Park in Elmont, New York.
The Binglin Stable partnership came to an end in 1953 as a result of a liquidation of assets by Crosby, in order to raise the funds necessary to pay the federal and state inheritance taxes on his deceased wife's estate.
The Bing Crosby Breeders' Cup Handicap at Del Mar Racetrack is named in his honor.
Personal life
Crosby was married twice, first to actress/nightclub singer Dixie Lee from 1930 until her death from ovarian cancer, brought on by alcoholism, in 1952. They had four sons (Gary, Dennis, Phillip, and Lindsay). Dixie was an alcoholic, and the 1947 film Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman is indirectly based on her life. After Dixie's death, Crosby had relationships with actresses Grace Kelly and Inger Stevens before marrying the much-younger actress Kathryn Grant in 1957 (It would have been Pat Sheehan had she not turned him down) and they had three children together: Harry, Mary (best known for portraying Kristin Shepard, the woman who shot J.R. Ewing on TV's Dallas), and Nathaniel.
Bing Crosby had an interest in sports. From 1946 until the mid-1960s, Crosby was part-owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates. In 1978, he and Bob Hope were voted the Bob Jones Award, the highest honor given by the United States Golf Association in recognition of distinguished sportsmanship in golf.
Crosby reportedly overindulged in alcohol in his youth, and may have been dismissed from Paul Whiteman's orchestra because of it. He later got a handle on his drinking, but his first wife Dixie Lee was an alcoholic. A 2001 biography of Crosby by Village Voice jazz critic Gary Giddins says that Louis Armstrong's influence on Bing "extended to his love of marijuana." Bing smoked it during his early career when it was legal. Crosby also smoked two packs of cigarettes a day until his second wife made him stop. He finally quit smoking his pipe and cigars following lung surgery in 1974.
Two of Bing's children, Lindsay and Dennis, committed suicide. It was widely published at the time of Lindsay's December 11, 1989 death that he ended his life the day after watching his father sing "White Christmas" on television. Dennis ended his life two years later, grieving over his brother's death, and battered, just as his brother had been, by alcoholism, failed relationships, and a lackluster career. Both brothers were subsisting on small allowances from their father's trust fund; both died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head.
Death
Shortly after 6:00 p.m. on October 14, 1977, Bing Crosby died instantly when he suffered a massive heart attack after a round of 18 holes of golf in Madrid, Spain. He was 74 years old. His last words were reported as, "That was a great game of golf, fellas." However, according to his companions and recorded by biographer Gary Giddens, Crosby then said, "Let's go get a Coke." Because of incorrect instructions from his family, the year of birth engraved on Bing Crosby's tombstone is 1904, rather than the correct date of 1903. He was interred in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.
Phillip Crosby died in 2004; the media reported the causes as "natural" or "unspecified." The coroner's decision not to publicly cite the specific cause of Phillip's death caused some to speculate if three, not two, of Bing's four sons from his first marriage committed suicide.
At his death, Bing was worth over $150 million because of his shrewd investments in oil, real estate, and other commodities, making him one of Hollywood's then wealthiest residents along with Fred MacMurray and best friend Bob Hope. He left a clause in his will stating that his sons from his first marriage could not collect their inheritance money until they were in their 80s. Bing felt that they had already been amply taken care of by a trust fund set up by their mother, Dixie Lee. All four sons continued to collect monies from that fund until their deaths. However, none lived long enough to collect any of their inheritance from their father.
Legacy
Bing Crosby transformed the role of the recording artist and musical performer from one of simply being a voice, able to reach as many listeners as possible, to that of being a fully rounded persona. Crosby blended art and pop, in ways that had never been done before, and in doing so, became the most electronically recorded singer of all time. More than any other singer, Crosby helped bring about the end of recording artists displaying strictly one-dimensional attitudes, and is credited with being the major inspiration for most of the male singers that followed him, including the likes of Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, and Dean Martin.
Further, as an entrepreneur, Crosby had launched the tape-recorder revolution in America in 1948 when he opened the door to Jack Mullin's German recording machine, the Magnetophon, and financed the early years of the Ampex company, its producer.
- In 1962, Crosby became the first recipient of the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
- Lifetime musical output: 1,700 recordings, 383 of those in the top 30, and of those, 41 hit number 1.
- His recording of Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" has sold over 100 million copies around the world, with at least 50 million sales as singles.
- Overall music sales are estimated at between five-hundred million to nine-hundred million. Crosby is a member of that exclusive club of the biggest record sellers that include Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and The Beatles.
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Giddins, Gary. Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams - the Early Years, 1903-1940, Back Bay Books, 2002. ISBN 978-0316886451
- Prigozy, Ruth, & Raubicheck, Walter. Going My Way: Bing Crosby and American Culture, University of Rochester Press, 2007. ISBN 978-1580462617
- Crosby, Bing. Call Me Lucky, Da Capo, 2001. ISBN 978-0306810879
- Grudens, Richard, & Kathryn Crosby. Bing Crosby - Crooner of the Century, Celebrity Profiles Publishing Company, 2002. ISBN 978-1575792484
External links
- Bing Crosby at the Internet Movie Database
- Bing Crosby's Official Site
- Bing Crosby's Music
- Bing Crosby Internet Museum
- Most Popular Entertainer of the Twentieth Century
- Most popular Singers of the 20th century
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Crosby, Bing |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Crosby, Harry Lillis |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Singer, Actor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 3 1903 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Tacoma, Washington, USA |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 14 1977 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Madrid, Spain |
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