Bing Crosby (3 page)

Crosby rarely allowed stereotypical Catholic pieties to interfere with the scampish irreverence that informed much of his
best work, from the romantic comedies to the
Road
movies. It was even present in his finest screen performances, as the golfing, imbibing, indulgent, yet determined Father
Chuck O’Malley in Leo McCarey’s great films,
Going My Way
and
The Bells of St. Mary’s.
Bing’s casual Huckleberry Finn demeanor as a pipe-smoking idler who never dresses up or removes his hat was portended by
his odd name, which eclipsed cultural divisions with its unmistakably North American yet faintly Asian (the open-mouthed
aw
surrounded by two grin-making
ees)
arrangement of consonants and vowels: an Anglo-Danish surname modified by a nickname’s New World audacity. In a world of
Skips, Whiteys, Blackies, Reds, Pinkys, Shortys, Macs, Butches, and Chips, Bing was a standout moniker, a name that underscored
his easygoing modesty. He taught the world what it meant to live the American common man’s dream. Aside from his music, that
was the best part of his art, perhaps the best part of himself.

Bing was a remarkably autobiographical performer. Yet while the public thought it knew him intimately, his intimates conceded
that Crosby was, in many respects, unknowable. They would often remark on his intelligence, humor, and generosity, and then
marvel at his contradictions: the melting warmth and chilly reserve, the conservatism and
liberality, the piety and recklessness. Bing liked people who made him laugh (he expressed bewilderment that anyone might
think him, as many did, a loner) but avoided public displays of affection and introspection. After he lost the soul mate of
his early years, guitarist Eddie Lang, he could no more have bared his soul to another man than submit to psychoanalysis.
Iron-willed and self-made, insouciant and obstinate, gregarious and remote, he was thoroughly enigmatic, yet hardly unknowable
— no man with a legacy as large as Crosby’s could be that. Neither saint nor monster, Crosby survives his debunkers along
with his hagiographers because the facts are so much more impressive than the prejudices and myths on either side. Bing Crosby
was, after all, a poor boy from a Catholic working-class district in turn-of-the-century Spokane who caught the attention
of the world and made it better. “Call me lucky,” he said. But it was never just luck or even talent. It was also the determination
and brains of an alert young man who came along when American entertainment was at a crossroads. He showed it which road to
take.

I will sing with my spirit, but I will also sing with my mind.

— I Corinthians 14:15

With a mother named Harrigan, you are Irish, I take it?

— Ken Carpenter,
Kraft Music Hall
(1945)
¹

Late in the spring of 1831, Bing Crosby’s maternal great-grandfather, Dennis Harrigan, a fifty-one-year-old farmer and carpenter
who lived in Schull parish, in the southwestern region of County Cork, Ireland, ushered his family aboard a timber ship bound
for New Brunswick, Canada.
²
Leading his wife, Catherine,
³
and nine of their ten children onto the creaking deck, Dennis knew what to expect of the grueling voyage. Still, he counted
himself lucky, for few members of his congregation were able to leave at all. Of the 65,000 emigrants who set sail in 1831,
only ninety or so from tiny Schull could afford passage, not many of them Catholic.
⁴
A brave, resolute lot, they gazed westward with tenacious faith as the ship cleared Ireland’s southernmost point, the Mizen
Head of southwest Cork’s Mizen peninsula, once a haven for smugglers and pirates who sought refuge in its impregnable coves.

The Canadian-built vessels were designed not for carrying passengers but for transporting timber, New Brunswick’s primary
export. To maximize efficiency, the shipbuilders hastily modified the holds and lowered passenger fares by more than two-thirds,
allowing greater numbers of Irish families to emigrate and generating the slogan
“timber in, passengers out.” Dozens of those ships were lost at sea, and many more were decimated by typhus, dysentery, and
other diseases. All were cursed with conditions as barbarous as those of slave ships: insufficient food supplies, inadequate
sanitation and gender partition, little if any ventilation, berths half as high as those required by law for slavers. The
journey averaged six weeks, and the only music heard was the shrill wail of unceasing lamentations.

The wilderness of Canada’s eastern provinces promised to be friendlier to the Harrigans. Dennis’s siblings had brought over
their families the previous year. Now Dennis removed his own family (all but his married daughter, Ellen Sauntry, who arrived
in New Brunswick twenty years later as a widow with seven children), fourteen years before the Great Hunger and before the
tidal wave of Irish immigration that flooded America’s urban centers. His smaller generation of immigrants would explore and
prosper in rural America, migrating from the Northeast to the Midwest to the Northwest, building successful farm communities
with the logging skills they learned in the Canadian woods. The names of Mizen peninsula’s Catholic congregants who left that
season and in harder ones to follow took root all across America: Fitzgerald, Driscoll, Reagan, Harrigan, Sullivan, Donovan,
Coughlin, O’Brien, Hickey, Mahoney.

They had abandoned a hellish place.

A hundred years had passed since Jonathan Swift offered his “modest proposal” to abate Ireland’s poverty, beggary, and congestion
by cannibalizing its “Popish” offspring. “A most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked
or broiled,” he advised, “a delicacy befitting landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to
have best title to the children.”
⁵
Ireland, cherishing its brood not least as a defense against the privations of old age, tripled its population in the decades
after Swift.

But congestion was not the foremost source of Ireland’s sorrows. The nefarious Penal Code of 1695 barred Irish Catholics —
three-quarters of the population — from owning land and businesses, from voting, and from building schools and churches or
attending those that existed.
⁶
Informants, particularly those who turned in priests, were rewarded. The Act of Union, passed in 1801 amid a blizzard of
bribes, threats, and hangings, promised to balance the scales between Ireland and England but in fact gave the dominant country
a
captive market — fortifying a corrupt system of absentee landlords, toppling what was left of Irish commerce, and dissolving
the Dublin-based Parliament. While the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 did away with the code, it could not abate the long
history of religious enmity.

Ireland became a grim landscape of windowless mud-and-stone cabins, potato-and-milk diets, cholera. The Duke of Wellington
observed, “There never was a country in which poverty existed to the extent it exists in Ireland.”
⁷
and the French traveler Gustave de Beaumont found in the Emerald Isle extremes of misery “worse than the Negro in his chains.”
⁸
In the year the Harrigans set out for New Brunswick, the Mizen peninsula was beset by cholera and famine.

Most likely the Harrigans spoke Gaelic, not English, and could not read at all. They were tough, hardworking, close-knit,
intensely religious, and musical. A legend passed down into the twentieth century traces the family’s genesis to John of Skibbereen
(a town some twelve miles east of Schull), who may have been Dennis Harrigan’s father and was known as Organ O’Brien for his
fine playing of the church instrument.
⁹
The importance of music and dance in nineteenth-century Ireland can hardly be overstated, for amusements provided as much
solace as the church. After a visit in 1825, Sir Walter Scott described the people’s “natural condition” as one of “gaiety
and happiness.”
¹⁰

When the ship finally docked, the Harrigans made their way through the Miramichi section of New Brunswick to the outlying
woods of the Williamstown settlement, six miles inland, where they learned to clear land for tillage and built log cabins
that furnished little protection against the winter’s freezing temperatures. Dennis’s nine children ranged in age from one
to twenty. He made capable carpenters of his sons.

Most of Williamstown’s Catholic settlers were from Mizen peninsula and were powerfully united by culture and custom. The strongest
bond was religious, strengthened by the prejudices of the Irish Methodists who preceded them. A second bond was the tradition
of aggregate farming, the sharing of tilled soil between families as in the Irish townlands. A third, consequent to the first
two, was the observance of secrecy: the “sinister side”
¹¹
of the Irish character that
historian Cecil Woodham-Smith has traced to the days of the Penal Code. A fourth was the heritage of strong, venerated women
(Ireland was that rare nation where husbands paid dowries for wives, instead of the reverse) who secured their households.
A fifth bond was that of large families — small communes within the larger ones.

Music — the public converse of the secret self — was the sixth bond, taking the form of Irish melodies and rhythms that became
increasingly popular and influential in the last half of the nineteenth century, complementing styles developed at the same
time by African Americans. It was the custom in Ireland and Africa, but not in Europe, to dance to vocal music; to favor the
pentatonic scale, call-and-response phrases, and cyclical song structures; to employ expressive vocal mannerisms, including
dramatic shifts in register, nasality, and most especially the upper mordent.
¹²

The mordent — a fast wavering from one note to another and back, a fleeting undulation that suggests a mournful cry — was
a vestige of the Byzantine influence that dominated European music in the Middle Ages. That influence vanished from most of
Europe but endured in the plaintive folk music of Scotland and Ireland, owing to their economic and geographical isolation
from the modernizing impact of the Reformation and Renaissance. A 1950s edition of
Chambers’s Encyclopaedia
defines the mordent as a “certain oscillation or catch in the voice as it comes to rest momentarily upon a sustained sound”
¹³
and goes on to qualify it as a basic attribute of “crooning.” Among young Celtic singers of the twenty-first century, the
mordent-heavy approach is known as
sean nos,
¹⁴
or old style, but it was new to Americans in the 1920s, when Dennis Harrigan’s great-grandson pinned the mordent to popular
music like a red rose.

Sealing the family’s bargain with the New World, Catherine Harrigan, in her early forties, gave birth on September 6, 1832,
to her eleventh child, the only one born in North America, Dennis Jr. It would have greatly surprised Bing Crosby to learn
that his maternal grandfather was Canadian; he assumed he was Irish born, and wrote as much in his memoir and on his mother’s
death certificate.
¹⁵
(When Bing attempted to trace the family line during a visit to Ireland, he was thwarted by his certainty in the matter.)
¹⁶
If Dennis Sr. embodied the trials of transatlantic resettlement, his son — born in
New Brunswick and baptized at St. Patrick’s in Miramichi — would personify the westward journey into and across the United
States.

By 1835 his family, like so many of Williamstown’s interconnected tribes, was earning much of its livelihood from logging
and timber. The desirable riverfront land had been taken by previous settlers, but the rigors of clearing tracts acclimated
the newcomers and taught them to survive the wilderness. Protestants and Catholics often worked together, united by the hostile
environment. Dennis Harrigan’s appointment as overseer of highways in 1839 affirmed the increasingly significant Catholic
presence. But the old enmities persisted. Catholics were characterized as criminal or rowdy and were severely punished; one
man was hanged for stealing twenty-five pennies and a loaf of bread. Catholic children had to travel long distances to escape
the schooling of Methodist crusaders. The first Catholic teacher, James Evers, hired in 1846, was falsely accused of sexually
molesting a Methodist student and was fired. A petition attesting to his “good moral character” was signed by thirteen parents
of Williamstown, including Dennis Harrigan.
¹⁷
Evers spent two years futilely defending himself, then cleared out in 1849, at which time the Court of General Sessions at
Newcastle concluded that he was a man of “moral and sober habits” and “taught to our satisfaction.”