Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [7]
It was the centerpiece of any bourgeois or aspiring-bourgeois household in the mid-1920s: the more elaborate and fine-furniture-like, the better. And the Sinatras owned not just one radio but two. For eleven-year-old Frankie had his own bedroom (at a time when entire families in Hoboken slept in a single room) and his very own Atwater Kent, an instrument he would later recall resembling “a small grand piano.”
Radio was just coming into its own as a medium. The linkage of local transmitters by telephone lines had led, in 1926 and 1927, to the formation of the first two networks, NBC and CBS. Suddenly a wondrous world of faraway news, drama, and sports opened up, emanating from the magical cabinet. Alone in his bedroom, young Frankie would have listened hungrily, passionately. But to his ears, the most miraculous sounds of all were musical: the operatic voices of Lauritz Melchior and Lily Pons and Amelita Galli-Curci; the jazz rhythms of the Roger Wolfe Kahn and Ted Fio Rito and Paul Whiteman orchestras.
And then there were the crooners.
The recent perfection of the electronic microphone had led to a sea change in the art of popular singing. Music had been recorded since the 1870s and broadcast since 1920, but prior to 1924 singers had to project through megaphones or into acoustical microphones that provided scarcely greater amplification than cardboard cones. The art of popular singing had therefore been an art of projection, and higher voices—female or tenor—simply carried better.
Now with the modern microphones came a new generation of baritones, men who leaned in and sang softly, intimately, to millions of listeners. There was Gene Austin and Art Gillham and Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards (later the voice of Jiminy Cricket) and Rudy Vallée and Russ Columbo. But most startlingly, there was Bing Crosby.
Crosby, out of Spokane, Washington, had come up through vaudeville, singing as part of a trio called the Rhythm Boys, first with Paul Whiteman, then with the Gus Arnheim Orchestra. But Crosby quickly overshadowed his singing partners—and then even the orchestras that accompanied him—by bringing something entirely new to the art of the popular song: himself.
Prior to the age of the new microphone, popular singing had been, of necessity, a declamatory art: singers literally had to reach the back rows. Crosby’s idol, Al Jolson, electrified the Jazz Age with his overpowering pipes and incandescent theatricality. Artifice was an essential part of show business.
The new crooners were more laid-back, but equally artificial. Under the old show-business conventions, a certain remove from the audience, in the form of “classiness,” as exemplified by heightened diction, was a quality to be cultivated. Bing Crosby captured America’s heart as no entertainer had ever done before by removing the remove, by seeming the most common of men.
Of course he wasn’t that by a long shot. He was a one-of-a-kind phenomenon, a single figure as transforming of the American cultural landscape as Jolson had been, and as Frank Sinatra himself—or Elvis Presley, or Bob Dylan—would be in decades to come. Crosby was, first and foremost, a musical genius, a quality that underlay all his other contradictions, which were plentiful. He was a Jesuit-educated intellectual and a ne’er-do-well; he was at once lovably warm and unreachably cool. He was, with his English-Irish background and ice blue eyes, the whitest of white men and, with his fondness for hard liquor (and, now and then, marijuana) and his incomparable talents for melodic and rhythmic improvisation, a great jazz musician to the core of his being. As Artie Shaw memorably put it: “The thing you have to understand about Bing Crosby is that he was the first hip white person born in the United States.”
In other words, Crosby came along (as Elvis would a quarter century later) at precisely the tick of time when the vast white music-listening audience of the United