Due to general musical omnivorousness, I've dabbled in listening to Bing Crosby, one of the most commercially successful -- and possibly most influential -- male vocalists of the 20th century. But so far, I've never been sufficiently struck to spin anything more than once. Part of that may be due to the simple creakiness of the few recordings I sampled seriously, mostly 1920s-era 78 transcriptions of Crosby with Paul Whiteman's orchestral jazz aggregation. More recently, after reading Gary Giddins' excellent biography, A Pocketful of Dreams: The Early Years, 1903-1940, my curiosity was piqued once again.
There's an absolute yacht-load of Crosby records out there, but it's somewhat of a stumper to figure out where to dip in for more than what is offered by a few easily found one-LP greatest hits albums. Which, really, tends to be the case for many prolific artists of the 78 era.
The rights to many pre-World War II recordings changed hands at least once during the near-collapse of the recording industry in the Great Depression, and once the dust settled, in most cases the existing records were all that remained for future duplication. While loads of material was eventually reissued to cash in on nostalgia during the first couple decades of the LP era, few U.S. labels presented well-organized reissue campaigns compiling all those old shellac sides in a coherent fashion, excellent 1970s double LP sets by RCA Victor being one notable exception. Decca Records, though, did make a couple interesting attempts at career spanning box sets early in the LP era, for Louis Armstrong and Crosby. And as luck would have it, I found a copy of Bing: A Musical Autobiography for a couple bucks last week.
Coincidentally, I already had a chance to hear the Armstrong set a few months back, thanks to former Isthmus editor Dean Robbins. The original 1956 box contained four LPs, with Louis talking a bit from a script about the songs before launching into them. As he had initially recorded for a number of labels other than Decca, the Satchmo box offered 1950s re-recordings of nearly all of the songs included, and the set curiously cuts off at 1934 (perhaps a second volume was planned?). That being said, Satchmo is a great recording, offering the unique chance to hear a legend taking a new crack at sides which even then were considered a sort of jazz Rosetta Stone. It was a brave move by Armstrong, and going on six decades later, to these ears the box set has a charm and musical value nearly equal to the venerated original recordings.
It was actually Crosby's box set project from 1954, though, that served as the template for Satchmo. Crosby offers typically self-deprecating patter between songs, which are occasionally shortened to a verse and refrain; side one, for example, cranks through 12 numbers from the early years. The shortened versions are possible because the first four sides of the five discs of Bing also utilize mostly new recordings, with the Buddy Cole Trio. It reverts to the original Decca recordings for the remainder, starting from about 1938.
It's welcome that the set keeps the backing simple on the re-recorded selections, allowing Crosby's laid-back singing style to carry the day. It's this earlier period that was explored by Giddins in A Pocket Full of Dreams
The new recordings of the early songs make for a very pleasant listen, and being created just for this album project, they present the material in a more coherent fashion than the various compilations they could be found on otherwise would. And things certainly get jazzier once the original recordings start taking over, welcomely heralded by Bing's duet with Connee Boswell on "Yes Indeed," from 1941. The original 78 sides also give the listener a better idea of the seemingly clashing cross-section of styles Crosby mixed together for Decca, Bing-izing pop songs, country and cowboy tunes, Hawaiian- or Irish-styled melodies and jazz. His effortless-sounding vocalizing bridges all contextual chasms, and the tracks compiled for Bing rarely slide into schmaltz.
Overall, Bing: A Musical Autobiography may not provide a historically definitive single-set overview of his career up to when it was issued -- but due to the sheer bulk of his past recordings, that would have been nigh-impossible to pull off anyway. It still makes for the best entree into Crosby's music that I've encountered in my admittedly unschooled attempts to check it out. The completist in me is intrigued by references to a "Collector's Classics" series of 10-inch LPs as part of a discography in the accompanying booklet ... and Decca did stacks of other reissue LPs in the '50s and '60s as well. All you collectors reading that statement know that sort of thinking is the start of how one ends up with a whole crate of Bing Crosby records. (Decca DX-151, 1954)
