9

WHITEMAN

Home is Never Home Without PAUL

A White Man

A Good Man

A Great Man

— Variety, signed by thirteen (white) members of the New York musical community (1927) ¹

In late 1926 no American entertainer outside the movies was more famous, more acclaimed, or more caricatured than Paul Whiteman. Within a year Charles Lindbergh would fly across the Atlantic and forever raise the stakes on fame. But for the moment, the tall, egg-shaped Whiteman was the darling of the media — he could make news by announcing his latest plan for a diet. Fastidious in his bearing, he was the first genuine popular-music superstar, an idol mobbed coast to coast at railway stations in every city he played. When he returned from his first tour of Europe, in 1923, he was welcomed at the dock by New York’s mayor and police commissioner as well as by the heads of the musicians’ union, executives from the Victor Talking Machine Company, and seven bands, one playing from an airplane circling the arriving ship. To the delight of the hundreds of fans waiting at the dock, a skywriter lettered the air with HELLO PAUL. TO many, Whiteman personified the Jazz Age. You could scarcely avoid his mug, an illustrator’s delight, the original happy face: a swatch of slicked-back black hair, symmetrical brows and eyes, razor-thin waxed mustache, two chins.

He was born in Denver, in 1890, the son of music educator Wilberforce J. Whiteman, who abominated jazz and broke with his son because of it. They were testily reconciled after Paul became celebrated as a national resource. (Two of the elder Whiteman’s other students, bandleaders Jimmie Lunceford and Andy Kirk, would become leading figures of the Swing Era; he must have considered himself a total failure.) Whiteman first attracted some attention in California, where he led a Barbary Coast ragtime outfit while holding down a viola chair in the San Francisco Symphony. After a stint in the navy, he organized a popular ballroom band in Los Angeles. In 1920 he opened in Atlantic City and signed with Victor. An instant favorite with the haut monde, he soon moved to New York’s Palais Royal as sales of his first record, “Whispering,” soared into the millions. Whiteman became internationally recognized after he presented An Experiment in Modern Music at New York’s Aeolian Hall in 1924. That concert introduced George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” with the composer at the piano. Whiteman himself was not a composer, but he was a powerful arbiter of taste and considered himself a dedicated advocate of jazz. Although “Rhapsody in Blue” later became world-famous as a symphonic work, the original version arranged by Ferde Grofe was a jolting — even rickety — montage of orchestral bumps and moans, beginning with a yawning clarinet cadenza, punctuated by pounding piano, and finishing with a lovely concerto-like melody. Though by no means a blues, it shivered with blues shadings.

The Aeolian Hall concert was more than a premiere; it was a distillation of Whiteman’s argument with the music establishment. A passionate believer in American music, he had insisted that a native classicism was in blossom, inspired by lowborn jazz, far beyond the realm of academic composers and European tradition. This concert was intended to make his case; as far as the critics were concerned, it did. From that point on, Whiteman was promoted as the King of Jazz. Yet no jazz was played at Aeolian Hall, except for an introductory performance of the creaky “Livery Stable Blues,” which Whiteman offered as an indication of jazz in its “true naked form.” ² It was something to laugh at, a prelude to the scrupulously arranged and executed music Whiteman offered in its place — a concert ballroom music with damp rhythms and minimal improvisation.

Whiteman was on the wrong boat. By 1926, when his star had risen still higher after another successful European tour and he and Mary Margaret McBride had published their book, Jazz, he knew it. His mistake had been in thinking of jazz strictly as inspiration for serious music, a resource rather than an art in itself. The same year he overwhelmed critics at Aeolian Hall, another landmark musical event had taken place, one that went unnoticed by the major dailies. Louis Armstrong had arrived in New York to play with the orchestra of Fletcher Henderson, Whiteman’s relatively low-profile African American counterpart. Armstrong’s impact was instantaneous, immeasurable, and absolute. He had transformed the music of Henderson and his chief arranger, Don Redman, and countless others, not least Whiteman. He infused the basic building blocks of true jazz — blues, swing, and improvisation — with depth and exhilaration. Whiteman was not about to give up his expansive instrumentation, semiclassical repertoire, or vaudeville variety, but now he was hungry for honest-to-God jazz musicians.

After extensive listening and long chats with Henderson, Duke Ellington, and others, Whiteman concluded that the best jazz musicians were black, and he proposed to sign some, including his friend ragtime pianist and songwriter Eubie Blake. His management came down hard: in addition to all the lost bookings in the South and some in the North, he would risk humiliating his black musicians, who would be relegated to separate entrances, dining and boarding facilities, and even toilets. Whiteman acquiesced but countered with his determination to hire black arrangers. He wasn’t the first to do so: his chief rival, Vincent Lopez, had challenged the Aeolian Hall triumph with a competing concert of his own, commissioning new pieces by Henderson and W. C. Handy. Whiteman moved more slowly: a few years later he would trade arrangements with Henderson while a young black composer, William Grant Still, would emerge as his most prolific staff writer. In the interim, he went looking for white musicians who could play authentic jazz, the real thing. So he was intrigued when his manager and financial adviser, Jimmy Gillespie, raved about an act at the Metropolitan, two young men, one a terrific baritone. Whiteman said, “If you think they’re the bees’ knees, bring em to me. ³

The day after they got the call, Bing and Al walked backstage at the Million Dollar Theater and knocked on Whiteman’s dressing-room door. Gillespie admitted them. Bing remembered the huge Whiteman sitting on a bed “looking like a giant Buddha, and he had a pound of caviar in his lap and a bottle of champagne on his breakfast table… the ultimate in attainment.” ⁴ In later years the more homespun Rinker remembered Whiteman sitting in his dressing gown drinking beer, but when Bing and Whiteman were alive, neither Rinker nor anyone in the room contradicted Bing’s often repeated recollection. If Bing did inflate his depiction of Whiteman’s “habiliments of success,” ⁵ it would not be surprising. His vision of the orchestra leader is remarkably consistent with the aspirations of Bing’s boyhood poem “A King,” the dream now conferred upon a real monarch (of sorts), “in robes of white / With vassals kneeling left and right.”

In his memoir, Bing said they performed a few numbers in the dressing room, perhaps to disguise the fact that Whiteman had offered them a job without having heard them. Instead, he had dispatched two trusted musicians to the theater to see whether Crosby and Rinker were as good as Gillespie claimed. Pianist Ray Turner dismissed them as “cute,” ⁶ but violinist and arranger Matty Malneck was impressed. Malneck said of their act, it was “like hearing a great jazz player for the first time.” ⁷ Malneck (yet another former student of Wilberfore Whiteman) was one of the band’s few advocates for recruiting genuine jazz players, so his word was good enough for Paul.

According to Al, Whiteman made a point of saying that he had seen the act before making his offer. “You guys are good,” he told them. “How would you like to join my band?” He offered them a featured spot at $150 a week each. They would begin by touring the Balaban and Katz circuit and wind up in New York, where Paul was scheduled to open his own nightclub and perform in a Charles Dillingham show on Broadway. They would be paid extra for their work in his club, for Broadway, and for each Victor record they made with the band. With options, the contract could bind them for five years. “Well, how does that sound?” he asked. “Go ahead, boys, talk it over.” ⁸

The two young men exchanged grins. Bing spoke up. “Al and I don’t have to talk it over, Mr. Whiteman,” he said. “We accept your offer. How soon would you want us to start?” “As soon as possible,” Whiteman told them, at which point Al said to Bing, “Say, what about our contract with Jack Partington?” (They were signed to Partington through November.) Whiteman thought for a moment and advised them to complete the contract and join the band for its three-week stay in Chicago. “That will give you a couple of weeks to relax,” he said. The next day they returned to Whiteman’s dressing room with Al’s dad to sign the papers. Before taking off on his tour, Whiteman shook hands with them and said, “So long, I’ll see you sprouts in Chicago.” ⁹

Mildred was delighted, as was Partington, relieved perhaps that they intended to honor their contract. Eleven months and one week before, Bing and Al had left Spokane in a Tin Lizzie, “just to see my sister and hoping we could get something going,” Al marveled. ¹⁰ Now they were about to work with their idol, scaling what Bing described as the Mount Everest of show business. ¹¹ Al thought he was living a Horatio Alger fable. Bing credited luck. Yet it would be a mistake to discount the appeal and originality of their act. Audiences loved them, and Whiteman wasn’t risking much. He wanted something fresh and jazzy, something for young people, and who better than these two clean-cut kids? He had no way of knowing that in signing them, he had put into motion the career of the first in a long line of white musicians who popularized real black music (jazz, not mammy singing) for a white public. This was ten years before Benny Goodman launched the Swing Era, thirty before Elvis Presley rocked.

Bing and Al marked time at the Metropolitan, reprising Russian Revels. But a couple of days later, the pair chalked up another first: a chance to make a record. Don Clark, a saxophonist who had worked with Whiteman before starting his own band, led the Biltmore Hotel Orchestra and had a Columbia Records session booked for October 18; he invited Bing and Al to sing the vocal choruses on two numbers. On ethical grounds, they should have passed; legally they were pushing their luck. They had just signed with Whiteman, a Victor artist who expected them to make their wax debut under his auspices. They accepted instantly. “We were kind of excited to hear how we would sound,” Al explained. ¹² Clark gave them lead sheets for two tunes, asking them to work up a harmonized chorus on each. The material was undistinguished: “I’ve Got the Girl!,” a weak tune by Walter Donaldson, who later wrote some of their most important Whiteman records, and “Don’t Somebody Need Somebody,” a throwaway by Abe Lyman, the cowriter of “Mary Lou.” No major recording career got off to a more dismal start than Bing’s.

The session took place in a hastily converted warehouse at Sixth and Bixel, and was engineered electrically. Bing and Al had to sing into a megaphone-like mike built into the planks of the recording booth. The Lyman tune was abandoned when Bing and Al could make nothing of it, and Peggy Bernier, a vaudeville trouper with pretty eyes and long bangs, fared no better. For all the good it did the boys or Clark, “I’ve Got the Girl!” ought to have been junked, too. Singing into a horn for the first time, Bing and Al could not sustain the blend of their voices. As a result, their recorded chorus is dominated by Al’s higher voice, though it is moored by Bing’s weighty, more controlled timbre. They sing Rinker’s treatment of the nattering tune energetically, inserting a measure of scat at the first turnback and attempting a unison portamento that got away from them. The performance did not do justice to their act — but then again, it wasn’t meant to. Their names did not appear on the label, and their complicity was further disguised by an accident: the record — backed with another Clark performance, “Idolizing,” vocal by one Betty Patrick — was inadvertently released at a fast speed. ¹³ Bing and Al sound like chipmunks.

The day after the session, Variety ran an item on the boys’ extraordinary new contract with Whiteman, to begin “in Chicago in the Publix houses.” ¹⁴ Weeks later the Spokane Chronicle reported that “they made a number of Columbia phonograph records,” ¹⁵ along with other ballyhoo that suggested a boneheaded attempt at public relations, probably by Everett. Not surprisingly, “I’ve Got the Girl!” promptly disappeared. Bing never spoke of it, and it lay unknown to avid Crosby collectors until 1951, when Ed Mello and Tom McBride published the first Crosby discography and failed to include it. After showing it to Bing, Larry Crosby wrote Mello, “Bing is well pleased.” But he pointed out that Bing told him his first record was with Don Clark’s orchestra “in 1926 or 1927 for Columbia — he thinks with Al Rinker. Do you have any record on this?” ¹⁶ A year later a collector in San Francisco found a copy. Larry’s doubt about Rinker was not shared by Bing, who recalled their duet well enough to sing a few measures for interviewers as late as 1976.

They finished at the Metropolitan with Joy Week on October 28, and two days later hit San Francisco to fulfill their debt to Partington. Before leaving, they sold their Dodge, and Mildred gave them a farewell party. Partington’s revues rotated weekly — Dancing Around, Jazz a la Carte, Way Down South. In the cast of the first two was Peggy Bernier, on whom Bing developed a crush that would later blossom into a woozy affair. But Bing and Al spent most of their time in San Francisco playing golf on the public links and — eager to impress Whiteman — working up new songs. During their final days with the company, they were preoccupied with the problem of filling a two-week interval before heading for Chicago. They may not have noticed the quiet revolution taking place in American entertainment: NBC had just launched the first radio network. The boys decided that after ending their run in Way Down South, they would visit Spokane. They made calls to line up a job. Within days the Spokane Chronicle trumpeted their return and a “big production” scheduled for the Liberty Theater. ¹⁷

Their reception at the Northern Pacific depot was a modest rendition of Hail the Conquering Hero, with a clamoring retinue of family and friends. Al’s family had relocated to Los Angeles, so they stayed at Bing’s home. Kate pointed out that her son had gained weight. Surrounded by neighbors on the Crosby porch, Bing sat a four-year-old named Mary Lou Higgins on his lap and sang “Mary Lou.” She began sobbing uncontrollably. ¹⁸ The prodigal sons palled around with the gang, squired women, played golf at Downriver Park, and did four shows daily. Ray Grombacher, who operated the Liberty — and the adjoining music shop that had been Al and Bing’s graduate school — hired them for five days at the fancy price of $350. They opened at 11:00 P.M.on the evening before Thanksgiving, opposite a popular Paramount comedy, We’re in the Navy Now, starring Wallace Beery and Raymond Hatton. That night their old stomping ground, the Clemmer Theater, made do with Stella Dallas and no live acts. The Liberty’s newspaper ads emphasized the movie but added: “And then just to make it the best show in town Ray A. Grombacher presents Bing Crosby & Al Rinker in their own original novelty.” ¹⁹ The ad included pictures of the pair in matching jackets and bow ties, along with their billing, “Two Boys with a Piano and a Voice.”

“We were both a little nervous,” Al remembered. “It was a lot different playing to all of our hometown friends.” ²⁰ But after the first show, the nervousness disappeared. They headlined in a “six-act pot-pourri” ²¹ at the “midnight matinee” ²² and went over big. The Spokesman-Review reported “songs and songalogues last night, with Rinker at the ‘ivories’; Crosby lent the jazz touch to the act by playing a solo on cymbals. The big crowd went wild over their mixture of harmony and comedy.” ²³ The Chronicle further mythologized their flivver (comparing it to Elijah’s “flaming chariot”) and their ascendancy “to affluence in the song world,” and noted their impending departure for “Gotham’s high-priced whirl.” ²⁴ No mention was made of the coming tour of Chicago and the Midwest. The big news was that they would appear on Broadway in a Charles Dillingham production.

“It isn’t what the boys do, but the way they do it,” one reporter concluded, citing Bing’s “timely crashes on a diminutive cymbal.” ²⁵ For five days they performed at three, six, seven, and nine. Grombacher boasted that on the first day alone, 9,000 people saw the show and another 1,500 were turned away. At last he was compensated for the records Bing and Al did not buy at Bailey’s. Yet for Bing the memory of their visit was compromised: “Somebody sneaked into our dressing room and stole our money while we were on stage, a heinous thing to do to a fellow in his home town,” he recalled. ²⁶ They were able to earn some of it back with a show in the Italian Gardens of the Davenport Hotel, but they were not sorry to leave town. Bing’s family and friends cheered and wished them luck as the boys boarded the Great Northern to join Paul Whiteman’s band, the most famous in the world. Spokane did not lay eyes on Bing again for eleven years.

The train was three days getting to Chicago. Relying on a friend’s recommendation, they taxied to the Eastgate Hotel on Michigan Avenue. (“This time we checked in double,” Al recalled, referring to their old dodge of going two for one.) ²⁷ Whiteman was booked for three weeks in Chicago, a different theater each week. He closed at the Chicago Theater on the Saturday the boys arrived, and would hit the Tivoli — with Bing and Al — on Monday. On their last day to themselves, Bing and Al toured the city, learning the ways of the elevated train, which they would be using to get to the theater on the South Side. Bing attended a football game. His old friend Ray Flaherty was in town, playing with the New York Yankees, and Bing sat on the bench. They went out afterward for drinks and dinner, and Bing told Ray that there would be a pass in his name at the Tivoli.

Monday morning — December 6, 1926 — they packed blazers and got to the theater as the bandstand was set up. Whiteman arrived at noon, delighted to find them waiting: “Well, I see you made it, and right on time.” ²⁸ He introduced them to the musicians (“They seemed very pleased to have us with them,” Al recalled) but asked Bing and Al to sit out the two afternoon shows, to get a feel for the production from backstage. The show dazzled them as much as it had in Los Angeles. By evening they were nervous but raring to go. Whiteman gave them a pep talk and went to work. Al described their initiation:

The first evening show was about to start and we were all made-up and ready. There was a full house out front. Whiteman told us that we would go on about the middle of the show and that he would introduce us as Crosby and Rinker, who were making their first appearance with his band. Well, our turn finally came and Paul walked out and started our introduction. What he said was far different than what we had expected. He told the audience that he had heard two young boys singing in an ice cream parlor in a little town out west, called Walla Walla. “They sang some songs and I wondered what they were doing in Walla Walla. These kids were good, too good for Walla Walla, so I asked them to join my band. This is their first appearance with the band and here they are. I want you to meet Crosby and Rinker. Come on out boys.” The little piano was moved on stage and Bing and I came out from the wings. All I know is that we got a big hand after our first song and even more applause on our second number. To top it all, we were called back for an encore. That was our first appearance on the big time. You can bet we were two happy guys. Whiteman came over to us after the show and said, “Well, how do you feel? I knew they’d like you. Welcome to the band!” ²⁹

Whiteman’s introduction established a receptive mood in the audience but failed to impress the names of his recruits on a Chicago Daily News reporter, who referred to them as Bing Rinker and Bill Crosby. ³⁰ A small incident after the show presaged Crosby’s immense impact on popular music. One of the three songs he and Al performed was “In a Little Spanish Town,” a nervy choice considering they had originally nabbed it from Whiteman and his trombonist-singer Jack Fulton, who sang it at the Million Dollar Theater. Before they left for the hotel, Whiteman notified Fulton that the song would now be done by the new boys. Fulton was irate and let everyone know it. Al felt guilty and half a century later took pains to justify himself. He told a Crosby biographer that he and Bing did not realize it was Fulton’s number; he wrote in his memoir that Whiteman forced it on them. (In fact, Whiteman allowed them to choose their own songs.) Perhaps Bing also felt pangs — he did not record it for nearly thirty years.

Jack Fulton, however, had recorded it with Whiteman three months earlier, and his version was just then reaching the stores. By Christmas it was the biggest record in the country. Whiteman had no choice but to return it to the man who made it nationally famous. Yet Paul’s switcheroo served as a warning to those present: the effeminate, semifalsetto style typified by Fulton and the other musician-singers was not long for this world. ³¹

Bing’s stay in Chicago was eventful for other reasons, too. After Whiteman completed his week at the Uptown Theater, he reserved the cavernous Orchestra Hall for two days of recording, on December 21 and 22. The first produced three acceptable instrumentals. The second was less productive. “Bunch of Happiness,” a feature for the band’s high-voiced trio — Fulton, Young, and Gaylord — was deemed unsatisfactory and shelved. The same fate befell “Pretty Lips,” a Walter Donaldson tune designed to introduce Crosby and Rinker. Though four takes failed to jell, the arrangement showed enough promise to warrant another try at a later date. The session’s only acceptable number was a rendition of Ruth Etting’s “Wistful and Blue.” Coupled with an instrumental from the day before, it was the first of nearly one hundred titles Bing and Al recorded under White-man’s aegis. Dated as it is today, their record debut was novel in 1926.

Max Farley, a Whiteman saxophonist, arranged “Wistful and Blue” ‘s odd eighteen-bar theme for the orchestra, but the vocal chorus was treated separately; the singers were backed by viola, guitar, and bass. Matty Malneck, waiting for this kind of opportunity, arranged the vocal passage, using his viola as a third voice in unison with Bing and Al. With Wilbur Hall strumming guitar and John Sperzel keeping a yeoman beat on bass, they sing a straight chorus with a two-bar break, followed by a stop-time scat chorus that evolves into a chase between voices and viola. Rinker’s voice dominates the duet, but it was the general jazziness of the vocal interlude — not the individual talents of the singers — that made the record a turning point for Whiteman; this zesty brand of singing was unknown to most of his public. Bing credited Malneck’s arrangement with helping him and Al forge “a new style… a vocal without words.” ³²

To hip musicians in Chicago, however, scat had been the rage for months. Bing and some of the other adventurous musicians in Whiteman’s band heard it that very week from the master himself, Louis Armstrong. If mobster Al Capone ruled the city, Armstrong ruled its music. Whatever he played was instantly picked up by other musicians. The previous spring OKeh issued his Hot Five recording of “Heebie Jeebies,” and it caused a sensation, selling some 40,000 copies thanks to his inspired vocal chorus — a torrent of bristling grunts and groans in no known language. Pianist Earl Hines later claimed he knew musicians who tried to catch cold so they could growl like Louis; and Mezz Mezzrow, the marijuana-pushing clarinetist, recalled, “You would hear cats greeting each other with Louis’s riffs when they met around town… scatting in each other’s face.” ³³ Before Louis, scat singing could be heard on records by Cliff Edwards (Ukelele Ike) and Red McKenzie (Mound City Blue Blowers); Bing and Al had admired and imitated them in Spokane. But the ad libs on those records were often disguised by kazoo or comb. They had little of Armstrong’s rhythmic thrust and none of his melodic ingenuity.

At the time Whiteman pulled into town, Louis was fronting the Sunset Cafe band, with Hines as his musical director. The place was run by Joe Glaser, a Capone acolyte who several years later would become Armstrong’s manager, building the powerful Associated Booking Agency in the process. In Chicago he billed his star in lights as “The World’s Greatest Trumpet Player.” The Sunset was located on the main stem of black Chicago but served an integrated audience. Because its band played a good two hours after most others retired, the club became a second home to many of the best white musicians in town, among them Bix Beiderbecke, Hoagy Carmichael, Tommy Dorsey, and Frank Trumbauer.

Whiteman introduced Bing and Al to the Sunset and other hot spots in Chicago. One can only imagine Bing’s initial response to Louis’s irrepressible genius, especially if Mildred Bailey had primed him for an experience bordering on the Second Coming. All his life Bing surrounded himself with people who made him laugh. In Armstrong, music and humor were inseparable. Bing was bowled over one evening when Louis revived a routine he had developed in New York in 1924, putting on a frock coat and dark glasses and preaching as the Reverend Satchelmouth. The Gonzagan found Armstrong’s irreverence almost as revelatory as his music. He had a front-row pew and knew exactly what he was hearing. When asked in 1950 who had influenced him most, Bing replied, “I’m proud to acknowledge my debt to the Reverend Satchelmouth. He is the beginning and the end of music in America. And long may he reign.” ³⁴

The band headed east, and at every Paramount-Publix theater it played — in Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Youngstown, Cincinnati — Bing and Al went over well. As the old year turned new, Whiteman broke the house record at St. Louis’s Missouri Theatre and was held over for a second week. Throughout January 1927 the band traveled through one triumph after another, until it boarded a train out of Cincinnati bound for New York’s Grand Central. White-man’s return generated the usual hoopla: a motorcycle escort to Times Square for festivities at the Paramount Theater, then downtown to City Hall, for Mayor Jimmy Walker’s greeting; finally, the motorcade headed uptown for lunch at the Hotel Astor.

Whiteman had five days before opening at the Paramount on February 12, and little time to rest. When he was not supervising and ballyhooing Club Whiteman, which was set to open February 18, the last night of the Paramount engagement, he was recording. On February 10 he used his Walla Walla boys in tandem with Fulton, Young, and Gaylord on an ersatz Asian novelty, “Shanghai Dream Man,” complete with gong and woodblocks. The five-man choir (Bing and Al disappear in the soup) carols “shing-a-ling-a-hi-lo.” Grofe’s gloomy arrangement seemed to foretell the events of two days later, when Crosby and Rinker became the punch line in one of show business’s fabled Waterloos.

On screen: Dolores Costello in The Third Degree. On organ: Jesse Crawford. Main attraction: “The Jazz King (in person).” ³⁵ The Paramount, flagship of the Publix chain, was a jaw-droppingly opulent theater and the quintessence of big-time entertainment. Whiteman’s musicians liked to pretend it was just another gig — even if it paid them $9,500 for the week. Variety loved their show, complaining only that it was short. “Whiteman could do an hour easily without really getting started,” yet he crammed “the smartest, quickest, snappiest routine of his career” into forty-two minutes, beginning with Jack Fulton piping “In a Little Spanish Town.” ³⁶ Toward the end of the set, Whiteman introduced his dynamic find “from the coast.” Variety was pleased: “Rinker and Crosby, a smart two-man piano act who sing ditties differently and are of the Van and Schenck class. After Whiteman gets through grooming the boys, they will be plenty in the money.” The critic went on to note that they “vocalised two numbers and accepted as many encores.” ³⁷

No one else remembered it that way. Not only were there no encores, but the audience sat on its hands, quiet as the grave, a freeze-frame. For the next two days, Bing and Al repeated the act that had always wowed them in the Midwest — to more silence. The theater manager wanted them out, and Whiteman complied. “They laid dinosaur eggs,” he recalled. ³⁸ No one could explain it. “Wistful and Blue” was a successful record and pleased every audience, except in Whiteman’s citadel. On the road to New York, he attempted to integrate Bing and Al into the orchestra rather than bring them on as a specialty act. The idea of carrying singers who did nothing else was unheard of, so Whiteman had them sit with the band, pretending to play prop instruments — violin for Bing, guitar for Al, each with rubber strings. Audiences throughout the heartland had been pleasantly surprised when a small piano was rolled onstage and the two young men stood up to do their numbers.

Yet in New York, Whiteman could not give them away, and he tried, situating his boys in the lobby, where fans who could not get in to one show milled around waiting for the next. Bing and Al wheeled a spinet into the vestibule to entertain, but the crowds there were no more appreciative than those inside. Whiteman used them as backup singers: “We sat in the band and we hummed background for Johnny Fulton, who sang solos, and for Skin Young and things,” Bing recalled. ³⁹ He says in his autobiography, “I couldn’t explain it then. I can’t now.” ⁴⁰

After years of thought, Al concluded: “New York taste very much leaned toward the Jewish type of thing,” ⁴¹ meaning Jolson, Sophie Tucker, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, and others “who put over songs with much more emotion and broad showmanship.” He and Bing “were more intimate and sang our songs in a more modern way.” ⁴² That fails to explain why the warblings of Fulton, Gaylord, and Young were so well received. Some said the Paramount itself defeated them, particularly since they sang without microphones or megaphones. But that fails to explain the hostility they faced in the lobby. Al noted, “We had been influenced by the new jazz feeling popular with young people and understood and appreciated by audiences outside of New York.” ⁴³ Yet in 1926 New York was running over with jazz bands. The reason for the boys’ failure may lie in a combination of all these factors, plus an undefinable negative vibe, nothing more concrete than that they were perceived as young and impudent. One observer referred to their “collegiate and cocky air.” ⁴⁴ Whiteman, trying to fix the blame twenty years later, told columnist Ben Gross that a Paramount executive sent a telegram forbidding him from allowing Crosby a solo.

The second-story blocklong Club Whiteman opened on Broadway and Forty-eighth Street to a packed, star-studded, bring-your-own-hooch crowd in which Prohibition agents mingled with Governor Al Smith and Mayor Jimmy Walker; two rival club owners, Jimmy Durante and Texas Guinan; Charlie Chaplin, Jeanne Eagels, Gloria Swanson, and Harry Warren. Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson dropped by a few days later, bringing greetings from Whiteman’s father, who was conducting her choir. Entered by a carpeted staircase, the ornate black-and-gold room could accommodate between 900 and 1,000 customers. As a result, what passed for a full house in other places (a hundred filled tables) was a disaster at Club Whiteman. The bandleader introduced a singer he discovered in Chicago, but in her first New York visit, Ruth Etting did not fare much better than Crosby and Rinker.

In three months Paul would unload his 50 percent interest and retract his name. Meantime, he used the club to give Bing and Al another shot at New York. But he scheduled them during intermissions between the floor shows. They worked by the side of the stage under a spotlight, Al at a white piano adorned with Paul’s caricature. Without microphones, they were unable to claim the attention of the audience. After two nights the perplexed Whiteman dropped their act. He allowed them to earn their keep, however, opening and closing the bandstand curtains.

Bing and Al served as stagehands for nearly three weeks, a humiliation they accepted with aplomb, not that they had much choice. On at least one occasion, Bing was assigned a mallet to pound the chimes, offstage, during the climax of the 1812 Overture. Describing his “heartbreak” in his 1954 memoir, Bing insisted, “We were prepared to go back to Los Angeles or even to Spokane,” ⁴⁵ but he was more candid to his biographer Charles Thompson in 1976: “I couldn’t care less, really. I knew that Whiteman had to pay us — we were contracted and I just felt something’d show up.” ⁴⁶ Besides, Bing had the chance to disport himself in the speakeasy and musical life of New York. He basked in a world he could scarcely imagine back in the listening booths of Bailey’s House of Music. He was bedazzled by glittery Harlem: the Cotton Club, where the late-night audiences sparkled as much as the elaborate revues; Connie’s Inn, where Allie Ross’s band invited top jazz soloists to sit in; Smalls’ Paradise, an enormous basement that accommodated 1,500 people and offered Charlie Johnson’s band and sometimes Willie “the Lion” Smith; the Lafayette Theatre, where you could catch Duke Ellington when he wasn’t midtown at the Kentucky Club or the Plantation Cafe. Another midtown mecca was the Roseland Ballroom, where you could hear the best black jazz musicians, in Fletcher Henderson’s band, or the best white ones, in Jean Goldkette’s. Bing was in the right place at a transitional time. Come December, Ellington would debut at the Cotton Club, an engagement that would bring New York jazz to the attention of the world. If Bing was inclined to soak up too much bootleg whiskey, he was soaking up just as much music.

The results were soon evident. A week after Club Whiteman opened its doors, Paul scheduled the band for a week of recording sessions at Victor’s New York studio. (Crosby recalled them taking place in Camden.) At the first session, he asked Bing and Al to blend with his three tenor voices on a selection only slightly less risible than “Shanghai Dream Man.” “That Saxophone Waltz,” on which the five men hum “do-do doodle-doodle do” in indistinct unison, is of interest only because Bing’s tones are vaguely discernible and the eight-bar setup for the vocal was pilfered after three decades by Richard Rodgers for “Edelweiss.” Three days later Paul gave them another shot at “Pretty Lips,” something of a companion piece to “Wistful and Blue,” yet a distinct improvement. After a natty theme statement by saxophone virtuoso Chester Hazlett, a transition ignited by thumping bass sets up the vocal episode, again with Matty Malneck’s viola echoing the singers. The distinction between Bing’s round lower tones and Al’s flavorless higher ones is unambiguous, yet they blend well, especially in the chase section with Malneck.

Whiteman knew he had something special in Bing, and if New York put any doubts in his head, Malneck was there to allay them. Three days later Whiteman recorded Matty’s intricate arrangement of a wonderful recent song by Will Marion Cook and Donald Heywood, “I’m Coming, Virginia,” with Bing taking his first solo and Al harmonizing only on the final scat chorus. Yet four tries failed to produce a satisfactory take, and they left the studio in a state of bitter frustration. Three days after that, on March 7, at New York’s Liederkranz Hall, Whiteman’s faith was rewarded as the band essayed another Malneck arrangement, “Muddy Water,” a song recently introduced by Harry Richman, the egocentric headliner who graduated from burnt cork to top-hat-and-cane elegance. It was the work of white composer Peter De Rose, at the outset of a career that produced “Deep Purple” and “Wagon Wheels,” and black lyricist Jo Trent, whose “Georgia Bo-Bo” Louis Armstrong had recorded the previous year. This time Al was left out altogether.

“Muddy Water” did not electrify the music world. It was no “Heebie Jeebies” or “Heartbreak Hotel,” though sales were respectable. Yet Crosby’s first recorded chorus — thirty-two measures — was every bit as radical. Nothing remotely like it had been heard before. The song, with its bucolic theme of an idyllic life “down Dixie way,” was cannily appropriate for a Dixiephile like Bing. Yet his delivery is never patronizing or sentimental. He bets everything on his rhythmic phrasing and gives each word its due. The introductory trombone, answered by strings, and a bold unison ensemble chorus promise a jazz record; but only the vocal, backed by viola and rhythm, make good on the promise. Though stilted and even formal, Bing’s time and articulation are assured, especially on the bridge, where he emphasizes there and care with trilling vibrato that displays his growing affinity for swing.

No singer had ever come close to swinging on a Whiteman record or with any other white ballroom band. For that matter, in early 1927 hot vocals were practically unheard of on records by black orchestras. Except for a single brief scat break by Armstrong that he strongly disfavored, Fletcher Henderson confined vocals to Don Redman’s singspiel. The earthier territory bands of the Midwest tended to limit vocal choruses to novelties. Crosby’s very presence was singular. He was the first ever full-time band singer, not an instrumentalist who doubled on vocals.

As an indication of just how standout a performance “Muddy Water” is, one need only listen to it in tandem with other vocal records issued the same year. The bestselling singer of 1927, by far, was Gene Austin, with three number one hits. An innocuous tenor who two years earlier was little more than a Cliff Edwards imitator, Austin hit paydirt with “My Blue Heaven,” considered the all-time top seller for years, some say until Bing’s “White Christmas” in 1942. The four other most successful vocal records of the year were White-man’s “In a Little Spanish Town” (vocal by Fulton), Sophie Tucker’s “Some of These Days,” Ben Bernie’s “Ain’t She Sweet” (with singers Scrappy Lambert and Billy Hillpot), and Whispering Jack Smith’s “Me and My Shadow.” ⁴⁷ Sophie, a rowdy alto with a vibrato that could hold its own with a tailgate trombone, was the lustiest and most masculine of the lot. Smith, true to his name, whispered his songs into lullabies. The others piped in an effete manner that suited the gender-bending tastes of an era when transvestites were among the top attractions in vaudeville.

Variety reckoned 1923 as the peak year for cross-dressing acts, most famously the phenomenally successful Julian Eltinge, who a decade earlier had a Times Square theater named for him. Indeed, transvestism had become another school of minstrelsy, about which one critic opined, “Just as a white man makes the best stage Negro, so a man gives a more photographic interpretation of femininity than the average woman is able to give.” ⁴⁸ Bing had played black and female in grade school and would again, but as a singer the primary quality he projected was one of virility. The women fans who would ensure his success on radio were less smitten with his soft microphone crooning than with the fact that he was unmistakably of the opposite sex, which could not be said of Gene Austin and company. In the collective memory of popular music, the nasal Rudy Vallee is thought of as Bing’s predecessor; he did, in fact, precede Bing as a star. But his breakthrough came in 1929, two years after “Muddy Water,” and was less the youthful step forward it was claimed to be (especially by Vallee) than a brief throwback to the effete style Bing ultimately put to rest. Vallee does not speak to us; but Bing in 1927, though far from the finesse of his maturity, does. He makes one telling misstep in “Muddy Water,” inflecting “down on the delta” with a Jolsonesque tremor that suggests the old Broadway aesthetic. Otherwise, he is ours — a modernist.

Two days after “Muddy Water,” Whiteman reinstalled Bing and Al as performers at his nightclub. Two weeks after that, the band opened on Broadway in the musical comedy Lucky, with Mary Eaton, Walter Catlett, Skeets Gallagher, and Ruby Keeler. The show, a tale of a Ceylonese pearl diver and her conniving father, boasted lavish sets and a score by two great songwriting teams, Kern and Harbach and Kalmar and Ruby. But nothing could induce people to buy tickets. Whiteman appeared for nearly thirty minutes in a cabaret scene that began at 11:00 P.M., allowing the band time to perform nightly at his club as well. The song assigned Bing and Al, “Sam, the Old Accordion Man,” was ignored by the critics; theatergoers were apparently no more hostile to it than to the rest of the evening, which closed after seventy-one performances. Whiteman rewarded Bing with a solo number at the club, but by then the room was draining more money than it brought in. (Whiteman shuttered it on May 24, three days after Lucky folded.) Knowing the show and the club were fading, he could think of nothing to do with his proteges beyond dispatching them on vaudeville tours.

Once again, Matty Malneck came to the rescue. He arranged for Bing and Al to meet a friend of his from Denver who was having a rough time in New York — a wildly kinetic singer, pianist, and tune-smith named Harry Barris.