Bing Crosby

Harry Lillis Crosby was born on May 3, 1903, in Tacoma, Washington, the fourth of seven children of Harry Lowe Crosby, a bookkeeper, and Catherine Harrigan, the daughter of Irish immigrants ^[1]. In 1906 the family moved inland to Spokane, where his father took a job with a brewery and later built the family home near Gonzaga University. The nickname Bing arrived in childhood, taken from a comic feature called The Bingville Bugle that the boy enjoyed, and it stayed with him for the rest of his life ^[2].

Spokane shaped him. He attended Gonzaga High School and then Gonzaga University, where he studied with the intention of becoming a lawyer. Music kept interrupting. He sang with local groups, took up the drums, and joined a band of Spokane teenagers called the Musicaladers, which played dances around the city ^[1]. By his final year he was earning more from performing than he could expect from a legal apprenticeship, and he left the university in 1924 without taking a degree.

That autumn he and a friend, the pianist and singer Al Rinker, packed a car and drove to Los Angeles, where Rinker's sister, the jazz singer Mildred Bailey, helped them find work in vaudeville houses ^[3]. For anyone asking who was Bing Crosby before the fame, the answer is a college dropout drummer from Spokane betting everything on a duo act.

The gamble paid off quickly. In 1926 the bandleader Paul Whiteman, then the most famous name in American dance music, hired Crosby and Rinker for his orchestra. With the addition of Harry Barris they became the Rhythm Boys, a harmony trio that recorded with Whiteman and appeared in the 1930 film King of Jazz ^[3]. Working alongside Whiteman's jazz players, including Bix Beiderbecke, gave Crosby a feel for phrasing that most popular singers of the era lacked.

The trio left Whiteman in 1930 and joined Gus Arnheim's orchestra at the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles, where Crosby's solo numbers began drawing crowds on their own. His 1931 recording of I Surrender Dear became a national hit and led to a CBS radio contract ^[2]. That September he opened his own network radio show, and within months he was among the most recognized voices in the country.

His timing was fortunate in a technical sense. The electrical microphone, introduced in the mid 1920s, rewarded a soft, conversational delivery rather than the shouting projection older singers needed to fill a theater. Crosby understood the new instrument better than anyone. He sang quietly, bent notes the way jazz horn players did, and made listeners feel personally addressed ^[4]. Critics called the style crooning, and Crosby became its defining figure.

Any account of Bing Crosby achievements has to begin with the sheer scale of his recording career. Between the early 1930s and the 1950s he placed hundreds of songs on the American charts, a total no other artist of the era approached ^[2]. His 1942 recording of Irving Berlin's White Christmas, made for the film Holiday Inn, became a phenomenon. Guinness World Records lists it as the best selling single of all time, with estimated sales above 50 million copies worldwide ^[5].

Hollywood gave him a second empire. Paramount signed him in 1932, and he spent two decades among the top box office draws in America. The Road pictures he made with Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour, beginning with Road to Singapore in 1940, mixed songs, ad libs, and running jokes into one of the most profitable comedy series of the period ^[1]. In 1944 he won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as Father Chuck O'Malley in Going My Way, and he earned further nominations for The Bells of St. Mary's and The Country Girl ^[6].

He also changed how broadcasting worked. In 1946 Crosby, frustrated by the grind of performing live radio twice for different time zones, championed magnetic tape recording after hearing German Magnetophon technology brought home from the war. He invested in the Ampex corporation and moved his ABC radio show to tape, becoming the first major American star to prerecord a network program ^[4]. The decision helped establish tape as the standard for radio, and later television, production. Among Bing Crosby facts this one is often overlooked, yet it may be his most durable contribution outside music.

Crosby married the actress and singer Dixie Lee in 1930, and the couple had four sons: Gary, twins Dennis and Phillip, and Lindsay ^[1]. Dixie Lee largely withdrew from performing to raise the family at their home in the Toluca Lake district of Los Angeles. She struggled with alcoholism for much of the marriage and died of ovarian cancer in 1952 at the age of 41 ^[2].

In 1957 Crosby married the actress Kathryn Grant, thirty years his junior, and they had three children: Harry, Mary Frances, and Nathaniel. Mary later became an actress known for a famous plot twist on the television series Dallas, and Nathaniel won the U.S. Amateur golf championship in 1981 ^[1].

The private man was more complicated than the easygoing public image. His eldest son Gary published a memoir in 1983, Going My Own Way, describing his father as a cold and physically harsh disciplinarian, an account that two of his brothers disputed in part while a third supported it ^[7]. Away from controversy, Crosby's ruling passion was golf. He played to a low handicap, competed in the British Amateur, and in 1937 founded the pro-am tournament at Pebble Beach that carried his name for decades and continues today as the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am ^[6]. He also held a long ownership stake in the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball club.

Television extended his career after the peak film years ended. From the 1950s onward Crosby hosted specials and appeared as a guest across the networks, and his annual Christmas programs became a family ritual for American viewers ^[2]. His production company, Bing Crosby Productions, backed series and films, and his early investment in videotape research kept him close to the technology side of the business.

Health problems arrived in the 1970s. In March 1977, during a televised concert marking his fiftieth year in show business, he fell from a stage in Pasadena into an orchestra pit and ruptured a disc in his back ^[1]. He recovered enough to record again and to tour, finishing a two week engagement at the London Palladium in early October 1977.

Days later, on October 14, 1977, Crosby collapsed and died of a heart attack at age 74 after completing 18 holes at the La Moraleja golf course in Alcobendas, outside Madrid, Spain ^[6]. Reports of his final afternoon noted that he had played well and was in good spirits walking off the course. He was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.

Crosby's influence on singing is hard to overstate. He demonstrated that the microphone allowed intimacy, rhythm, and conversational phrasing, and nearly every male pop vocalist who followed worked in the space he opened. Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Dean Martin, and Elvis Presley all acknowledged his example, and jazz critics have long noted how much his time feel owed to Louis Armstrong, with whom he recorded and performed across four decades ^[4].

The honors accumulated accordingly. He received the first Grammy Global Achievement Award, stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for film, radio, and recording, and induction into halls of fame for both radio and popular music ^[2]. White Christmas returns to airplay every December, and his 1977 duet of Peace on Earth and Little Drummer Boy with David Bowie, taped weeks before his death, became an unlikely holiday standard of its own ^[5].

Scholars have given the life serious attention. The critic and historian Gary Giddins has published a multivolume Bing Crosby biography that treats him as a central figure in American entertainment, arguing that his blend of jazz sensibility and mass appeal made modern pop singing possible ^[3]. Gonzaga University holds a major archive of his papers and recordings and named its student center after him. Nearly half a century after his death, the voice remains instantly recognizable, calm and unhurried, the sound of American popular song learning to speak softly.