Mention Bing Crosby to many Baby Boomer rock fans and eyes will roll. For them, he representedeverything out of date. He was dad’s favorite singer. But as recent biographies have shown, Crosby was once a hipster and an innovator; as a young white man exploring the black music of his day (the 1920s), Crosby understood the potential of electric microphones to transform recorded songs into an intimate experience, a conversation murmured into the ear of every listener. He was also one of the first American musicians to embrace magnetic recording tape.
Although the current of history left him behind by the end of the 1950s, he continued to recorduntil his death in 1977. Most of his efforts fell out of print as analog faded to digital, but an ambitious series of CDs is mining the archives for material.Many of the recordings had never been released and LPs finally seeing reissue as CD include bonus tracks.
A good place to startis at the beginning, with So Rare: Treasures from the Crosby Archive. The two-disc set opens with performancesfrom his first network radio broadcast in 1931, backed by a CBS studioorchestra featuring such future stars of swing as Artie Shaw and the Dorsey brothers. As a youthful baritone, Crosby caressed every syllable like an eagerlover saying goodnight. The collection includes such oddities as a recordingmade for the Del Mar horse racing club and excerpts from numerous episodes ofthe 1940s “Kraft Music Hall” radio show, including a lovely “Over the Rainbow”and a warmly rendered “As Time Goes By,” sung days after Casablanca went into wide release and transformed the song into a classic.
Crosby continued to broadcast live (or pre-taped) radio shows during the ‘50s, even as family entertainment shifted to television and radio was given over to spinning rock’n’roll and pop singles. Bing on Broadway collects performances of show tunes recorded from 1954-56 for “The Bing Crosby Show for General Electric.” By this time, his voice had mellowed into honey, leavened by a style at one with the spirit and tempo of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and other songwriters whose books he interpreted. An echo of the blues could even be heard in his rendition of Gershwin’s “How Long has This Been Going On.”
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In the final years hisvoice slipped deeper into the lower registers. He was still a recognizablestylist, even on his final album, Seasons (reissued on CD with bonus tracks recorded days before his death). The problem by the ‘60s was a paucity of good new material suitable for him, and the increasingly vanilla sound of his producers and arrangers.
