Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [8]
Meanwhile, truly transformational musicians, both black and white—the likes of Fletcher Henderson, Bix Beiderbecke, Duke Ellington, Bubber Miley, Chick Webb, and Benny Goodman—were creating genuine jazz. It was an age of intense cross-fertilization in popular music, and an age of great excitement, when anyone who was paying attention could hear new and wonderful things.
And Bing Crosby had big ears, literally and figuratively. He heard jazz, and for a few years at the beginning of his career he projected something earthshakingly new through the speakers of those Zeniths and Crosleys and Philcos, something that set him quite apart from all the other crooners.
First came the voice itself, deep and rich and masculine, though not ostentatiously so. Crosby was also pitch-perfect and wonderfully adventurous rhythmically—but again, these are the last things most listeners would have noticed. What was most thrilling about Bing Crosby’s voice to radio listeners of the 1920s and 1930s was its warmth and directness: unlike other singers, who seemed to be contriving a character as they vocalized, Crosby appeared to be himself, speaking straight to the listener in the most casual possible way. It sounded almost as if he were making up the song on the spot.
How did he accomplish this? Remarkably, his Jesuit education had much to do with it. Crosby had been born with a gift for language and a love for words, qualities that were especially encouraged at Spokane’s Gonzaga High and Gonzaga University. Giddins writes: “Bing Crosby is the only major singer in American popular music to enjoy the virtues of a classical education … Classes in elocution, in which he excelled, taught him not only to enunciate a lyric but to analyze its meaning. At Gonzaga High, education was idealized in the phrase eloquentia perfecta (perfect eloquence). Students coached in literature were expected to attain rhetorical mastery as well.”
Crosby did well in his studies; at the same time, he was a deeply ambivalent student who, lured by popular music’s siren call, dropped out of his pre-law course at Gonzaga in his senior year to go on the road—for the rest of his life, as it turned out. His intellectual half-heartedness forever saved him from pedantry and lent a sense of playfulness to his verbal theatrics.
That he was smart and funny on his own terms raised him above the pack. The popular music of Crosby’s early career was a very mixed bag, containing both great standards that would endure the test of time and some of the schmaltziest tunes ever written. As Bing approached the peak of his movie success in the 1930s, he would have the power and the good sense to simply command his songwriters to leave out the schmaltz. Early on, though, he had to sing plenty of it. This is where his fabled coolness stood him in good stead: Crosby possessed the unique ability to make a number like “Just One More Chance” (“I’ve learned the meaning of repentance/Now you’re the jury at my trial”) work by sounding wholehearted and ever so slightly skeptical at the same time.
The effect was electric. To women, he sounded romantic, vulnerable, and faintly mysterious; to men, he conveyed emotions without going overboard. He was one of them: a man, not some brilliantined eunuch. And the seeming casualness of his vocal style made every man feel he could sing like Bing.
Little Frankie was no exception. But he came by the idea honestly: as it happened, both his parents could also sing. Marty had wooed Dolly by serenading her with an old-fashioned number called “You Remind Me of the Girl Who Used to Go to School with Me.” For her part, Dolly used to love to gussy herself up on Saturday nights, bounce around to Hoboken’s many political