Bing Crosby (29 page)

Their hard work on the arrangements is evident from the alternate takes, which are virtually indistinguishable from the masters.
The Rhythm Boys never achieved anything approaching the buttery harmonies and unison drive of the Mills Brothers or the Boswell
Sisters, but their inventiveness and pep influenced both of those groups and countless other vocal teams, some of them rank
imitators. Donald Mills and his brothers heard Bing with the Rhythm Boys: “He had a great voice
then
and, actually, some of our music came from listening to what they were doing.”
¹⁰
Despite their burgeoning popularity, the Rhythm Boys were humbled when Jack Fulton’s falsetto la-di-da vocal in an otherwise
upbeat arrangement of “My Blue Heaven” generated the biggest Whiteman hit of the year. Spokane’s
Daily Chronicle
stayed loyal to its hometown boys, however, commending “Mississippi Mud” and their new partner (mangled as Jack Barriss):
“The variety of jazz put into these pieces is distinctive and unique and includes rapid fire patter, bits of solo work, minor
chords and close harmonies with deft business on the piano and with the cymbals.”
¹¹

Yet Bing’s recorded work over the next three months provided him with few chances to shine. His hoarseness had worsened, and
Whiteman felt it best to bury him in the choir. He is so off-mike and whispery in his solo on “The Calinda” — faux Africana
tarted up with a weird haunted-house arrangement — that one is surprised Whiteman agreed to release it. On “It Won’t Be Long
Now,” notable for Tommy Dorsey’s solos on trombone and trumpet, the Rhythm Boys add little to Malneck’s jazzy arrangement.
In November the band toured the Midwest. When it arrived in Chicago, the trio was assigned a recording session of its own.
Victor declined to release “That’s Grandma” (until 1942), a comical, swinging number with a unison scat chorus backed by Harry’s
piano and Bing’s cymbal; the prattling lyric by Bing and Cavanaugh concerns a chipper grandma and relies on allusions to popular
entertainers like Eddie Cantor and Moran and Mack. Far more intriguing is “Miss Annabelle Lee,” in
which Bing huskily parodies sentimental balladeers of the day and improvises a six-bar passage — his first scat solo on records.

It was a warm-up. The next week’s sessions represented a turning point, a crucial shift in the Whiteman band that led to the
most durable music — along with “Rhapsody in Blue” — of Paul’s long career. Two selections recorded at the November 1927 dates,
“Changes” and “Mary,” established Bing as the choice singer among Whiteman’s musicians, some of whom would now regard him
as one of the band’s top soloists, period.

Whiteman’s determination to hire first-rate jazz players paid off that fall. In August Whiteman, Jimmy Dorsey, the Rhythm
Boys, Jimmy Gillespie, and Henry Busse had traveled to the Million Dollar Pier in Atlantic City to hear the Jean Goldkette
orchestra. They were especially interested in its brilliant young arranger, Bill Challis, whom Dorsey had been pressing Whiteman
to hire. The Goldkette organization, based at the Graystone Ballroom in Detroit, included more than twenty bands. Goldkette
himself was a French-born failed concert pianist who did not much care for jazz and rarely appeared with the bands touring
under his name. By mid-1927 he was devoting most of his time to his booking agency, and his most important band, the one with
the great jazz musicians, was rumored to be on its last legs. In Atlantic City Challis invited Whiteman to guest-conduct a
number. Afterward, Paul told several of the musicians that he did not want to be responsible for breaking up the band but
that when the time was right, he hoped to hear from them.

Challis was the first to join, when Whiteman opened at the Paramount on September 10, a couple of weeks before the Goldkette
band collapsed. Goldkette’s main jazz stars, including cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and saxophonist Frank Trumbauer, elected
to go to New York and work in a big band organized by saxophonist Adrian Rollini. “I was offered a job with Rollini, too,
but I liked the idea of the fiddles, all those reeds, all that brass,” Challis recalled. “I thought, well, that’s for me,
that’s what I’ve been looking for, a lot of instruments, a lot of things to do. Plenty of records.”
¹²

An admirer of Whiteman’s key arranger, Ferde Grofe, Challis spent his first weeks “watching and learning, finding out who
did what and listening to all the shows.”
¹³
He was put to the test when Whiteman
reached Indianapolis. That week other major Goldkette refugees drifted into Whiteman’s band, first bassist Steve Brown, then
Beiderbecke and Trumbauer. While they rehearsed their opening at the Indiana Theatre, a very green piano player, singer, and
songwriter named Hoagy Carmichael stopped by to visit his old friend Bix, who introduced him to Whiteman. Hoagy’s first piece,
“Washboard Blues,” had recently been recorded by a local group, Hitch’s Happy Harmonists, with the composer on piano. Whiteman
liked it. He told Hoagy that if the tune had lyrics, he would use him to sing them at the band’s next recording session in
Chicago.

Late that night Whiteman knocked on Challis’s hotel room, with Gillespie, Carmichael, and a pedal organ in tow. The organ
passed from arranger to arranger, depending on who was working on deadline. Challis recalled, “Paul asked Hoagy to play ‘Washboard
Blues’ and asked me to arrange it for when we got to Chicago.”
¹⁴
By the time the band opened at Chicago’s Uptown Theater, however, Paul had second thoughts about Hoagy’s singing and asked
Bing to cover for him. Carmichael remembered Bing’s coming around while he rehearsed and casually asking to see the lyric,
explaining that he simply liked the song and wanted to learn it. “Paul wanted some insurance,” Hoagy realized. “If I couldn’t
do it, he wanted someone who could. Bing was being kind. He didn’t want me to know I might flop.”
¹⁵
Hoagy made the record, and though it failed to get him a job with Whiteman, it marked the beginning of his long and fruitful
association with Bing. For his next assignment, Challis determined to use Whiteman’s regular singers, all of them — the hot
trio and the sweet trio.

Walter Donaldson’s “Changes” could not have been more aptly named. As Challis adapted it, the song embodied the changes in
the Whiteman band: the old guard giving way to the new, the old dance-band aesthetic succumbing to the improvisational vitality
of jazz. Of course, the title also suggested the bullish transformations in a nervous pre-Depression America that, during
the previous six months alone, had witnessed Lindbergh’s flight, Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution, Babe Ruth’s sixty home runs,
and
The Jazz Singer,
the first feature-length talking picture. A song-plugger representing Donaldson’s publisher gave “Changes” to Whiteman, who
handed it to Challis,
who reversed the usual roles of the two vocal trios. The sweet trio sings the first theme in strong midrange unison; the Rhythm
Boys follow with a high-voiced harmony, singing four bars and scatting four more. The third theme is all Bing, followed instantly
by a glorious cornet improvisation from the astonishing Bix. Though Donaldson’s lyric concerns the changing of musical keys
(with a gratuitous reference to “many babies that he can squeeze”), the melody employs few notes; Bing’s episode consists
almost entirely of repeated Gs, which he caps with a trombonelike melisma. “What I liked about Bing,” Challis marveled, “was
there were fast words in there and they came out beautifully — excellent enunciation.” Challis underscores the energy of the
soloists with exchanges between the winds and strings and a deep bottom bolstered by three baritone saxophones. “Paul said
use whatever I wanted and I did.”
¹⁶

One man who was not happy with the changes was Henry Busse, Whiteman’s long-serving trumpet star whose rickety muted approach
had once been considered “hot.” When Challis omitted him from his arrangement of “Washboard Blues,” Busse protested, pointing
out that his contract guaranteed him a role in every Whiteman record. His jealousy would snowball as Beiderbecke increasingly
usurped his position. He could not fail to notice that Whiteman treated the young and troubled newcomer like a son. (Paul
and Bix had in common fathers almost Kafkaesque in their disapproving rage.) Bix was a heroic magnet for Chicago’s young white
jazz musicians, who never gave a thought to the likes of Busse, and Bing was immediately accepted into that golden circle.
They would hang out at a storefront speakeasy on State Street known as the Three Deuces, after the notorious brothel called
the Four Deuces. Mezz Mezzrow recalled a midnight jam at the Deuces in November: “[Bing] beat time all night with his hands,
like he was at a Holy Rollers meeting. Under Bix’s spell, everybody was a genius that night.”
¹⁷

Two days after “Changes,” another Donaldson tune defined the band’s stylistic divisions. In Malneck’s mischievous arrangement,
“Mary” entangles Busse and Bix much as “Changes” connected the sweet and hot singers. After an ensemble introduction, Busse’s
muted trumpet states the theme in damp staccato over a starchy
bum-cha bum-cha
rhythm. Then Bix takes over the brasses for the verse, delivering them and the entire ensemble into the sunshine of swing.
Toward the end of the performance, Bix begins his flaming eight-bar improvisation with an impatient rip and, leading the brasses
in contrapuntal figures, all but drowns out Busse’s reprise of the theme.

Yet Bix isn’t the key soloist. Bing is. Voice restored, he sings his chorus with exemplary finesse, articulating details at
a cantering tempo and balancing rhythmic heat with vocal cool. He reshapes the melody, improving Donaldson’s cadences, displaying
a jazz license all his own. The kind of liberties he took, however subtle, were not often appreciated by songwriters and publishers,
who were known to threaten legal action over an altered note or word. Bing shows no trace of the Jolson influence, but he
avails himself of an influence that had lain dormant: the upper mordent, also known as a pralltriller, that wavering catch
in the voice preserved in the folk singing of Ireland, Scotland, and northern Africa. In his final phrases (“You wouldn’t
let my castles come tum-tum-tumbling down…. What are you waiting for, Mary?”), Bing employs mordents on
down
and
Mary.

Unlike “Changes,” “Mary” was not a hit with the public but was a triumph with the new guard in Whiteman’s band. Challis and
other members lobbied for more Crosby features. To insiders, Bing was becoming something of a Bixian hero. Just as Bix proved
that a white musician could be an expressively nonconformist jazz player, Bing showed that a white male vocalist did not have
to sound like a Floradora girl. Bing thought like a musician; he had his own sound; he improvised; he had time.

Throughout the year, carbon microphones were increasingly replaced by new condenser microphones, which favored singers with
an intimate approach. In Bing’s case, the mikes registered his fetching throatiness and nuanced phrasing. By the end of 1927,
they were used with greater frequency in theaters, too, thanks in part to two show-business milestones that fall. On September
18 CBS Radio began broadcasting, giving NBC some badly needed competition and emphasizing improvements in the electrical reproduction
of sound; on October 6 Jolson’s picture
The Jazz Singer
opened on Broadway, justifying the Warner brothers’ faith in Vitaphone and hastening further advances in audio technology.

Two days after Christmas
Show Boat
opened at the Ziegfeld, a turning point for the American musical theater and, as it happened, a milestone for Bing. Whiteman
assigned Challis “Ol’ Man River” from
the magnificent score by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. Challis went to work, preparing the chart for Bing. That week
Whiteman debuted on NBC with his own show. Scheduled to sing, Bing alerted his family. But those in Spokane who huddled around
their radios were disappointed when he sang and was not identified — an indication of how inside his reputation was. “01’
Man River” would help change that. Challis and Malneck worked at a hotel piano, trying different voicings for the song. Malneck
tuned the strings “a la Venuti,”
¹⁸
a nod to Joe Venuti’s method of playing with the bow under the violin’s soundboard and the horsehairs tied over the strings,
enabling him to play four-note chords. The inevitable dissonances were incorporated in ensemble passages backing Bing. Whiteman
himself chose the buoyant tempo; he emphasized to Challis that he was making a dance record, not a semiclassical piece. On
Broadway, Jules Bledsoe sang it an octave lower than Bing, who delighted the rehearsing musicians when he took it up. Challis
recalled, “He could do that and make it sound good. He had good intonation. Took the whole tune and went right on up. You
didn’t have to tell him what to do, he just did it and did it nicely.”
¹⁹

The record was a sensation; months later Whiteman sought to extend its success by recording another version with Paul Robeson,
for whom the song was originally conceived, and a choir. But Bing’s triumph was singular. Coming on the heels of such sentimental
Whiteman bestsellers as “Together” (vocal, Jack Fulton) and “Ramona” (vocal, Skin Young), it created a stir among musicians
and fans, expanding Whiteman’s following among younger listeners. Cultural historian James T. Maher, in high school at the
time, believed Bing’s version spoke specifically to his generation. Johnny Mercer was transfixed by it: “It seemed to me he
employed a completely new and different style which sounded more natural and effortless than any I’d ever heard.”
²⁰
Britain’s young were mesmerized as well. As Alistair Cooke recalled, “Word ran through the English underground that a genuine
jazz singer — and a white man! — had appeared in the unlikeliest place: breezing along on the ocean of Paul Whiteman’s lush
‘symphonic’ sound.”
²¹
Even an older Bing, notoriously parsimonious with praise for any of his records, begrudgingly mentioned “01’ Man River” as
one of two favorites (along with his 1939 “My Isle of Golden Dreams”): “I made a good record of ‘Ol’ Man River’ when I
was with Whiteman. It was a good arrangement anyhow and I thought what I had to do on it was adequate.”
²²
He surely recognized the source of the climactic line in Hammerstein’s lyric: “I was at the same time,” confessed Saint Augustine,
“thoroughly tired of living and extremely frightened of dying.”
²³