10

RHYTHM BOYS

They were trying to get him to make a solo record, but he laughed — said it was silly, no one wanted to hear him alone.

— Cork O’Keefe ( 1946) ¹

As frenetic as Bing was calm, Harry Barris, at twenty-one, was the quintessence of Jazz Age show business, or at least thought he was. He played piano, sang, joked, and wrote songs (though he had yet to sell any) and was brazen with confidence. Small, wiry, and moonfaced with glittery eyes, and dark hair slicked back and parted in the middle, Harry had already logged more miles than Bing and Al combined. He was born in New York, on November 24, 1905, to a Jewish family that relocated to Denver when he was in his teens. He studied music in high school with Wilberforce Whiteman, who took a liking to him, and at fifteen played local dances with a small band that included Glenn Miller, Ted Mack, and Matty Malneck. He enrolled at the University of Denver in 1923 but did not last long. Harry liked to claim he was expelled for playing piano after hours. (Told he could play until 10:00 P.M., he cracked, “That’s when I get up.”) ² His predicament was exacerbated by incipient signs of the alcoholism that tormented him all his life.

He toured briefly with Gus Edwards’s revue School Days and played for a short while in Paul Ash’s orchestra in Chicago, but mostly he toured as a single for Paramount-Publix with his Blu Blowing Baby Grand. Along the way, he married and a daughter was born. Variety caught up with his twelve-minute act in St. Louis and acclaimed his showstopping “nut songs,” which had the audience “tied in knots.” The reviewer concluded, “Young, peppy, and goofy is this young man Barris. And he can help any show.” ³ Harry tried to convince Whiteman of that when he arrived in New York, but the bandleader was full up with pianists and singers. He soon found a job at bandleader George Olsen’s club, where his hotcha style of banging the piano lid on the beat and mix of ragtime and nonsense songs won him a modest following, though not enough income to support a family. Bing would later remember his act as “sort of a metropolitan type Fuzzy Knight” — a reference to the western actor who started out as a hillbilly pianist and bandleader. ⁴

One of the first people Barris looked up in New York was an old friend, Jimmy Cavanaugh, who toured in vaudeville performing original material, none of which caught on. After the two downed a few beers, Cavanaugh showed Harry a lyric he was working on and asked whether he could do anything with it. Harry walked to the piano and fashioned a melody; they called their song “Mississippi Mud.” Mal-neck, determined to help three fish out of water, told Harry about Bing and Al, suggesting they might team up. Harry was initially skeptical: if one of them played piano, what would he do? But Matty arranged a meeting at which Harry banged out his new tune, and the rapport was instant. “The next day we went over to Barris’s apartment,” Al recalled, to work out a routine:

We fooled around with some ideas and we tried out some three-part harmony. We were all baritones but I had the highest voice so I sang the top part. Barris sang the middle part while Bing sang the low part…. One of Harry’s tricks in his solo act was to slam the top of the piano for an effect and make the sound of a cymbal with his mouth. This sounded great and all three of us were getting our kicks at the way we sounded. We all came up with ideas. Bing took most of the solo parts and Barris and I would fill in with answers or a rhythmic scat background. Although we weren’t conscious of it, we were creating an entirely new style of singing pop songs. We were far more jazz oriented than any other singing group of that time…. We were greatly influenced by the great jazz musicians we had heard and were working with. We were very free and uninhibited. We had a solid beat in our rhythm numbers, but we could also give a pretty ballad an individual and personal feeling. In two more days we had put together two complete songs, “Mississippi Mud” and “Ain’t She Sweet.” We sang the songs for Matty Malneck and he was bowled over. He said, “If Whiteman doesn’t flip over you three guys, he’s gotta be nuts.” ⁵

Whiteman flipped. He installed them in his dying club the next Saturday night, bringing in a second white spinet to match the first. The house was nearly full. Paul introduced them as the pianos were wheeled out. Bing stood between them with his cymbal. According to Rinker, they “slammed the piano lids and carried on. You can bet the audience at the Whiteman club could hear us now.” ⁶ The crowd not only listened but stopped dining, drinking, and talking, and applauded enthusiastically for both numbers. Barris had the least distinctive voice of the three, but his sizzle and high-strung energy inspired Bing and Al, whose curtain-pulling days were now over.

Whiteman could not wait to get them into the studio — and not just them. Whiteman had never given up on his desire to hire bona fide jazz soloists, and Bing and Malneck made him more determined than ever. The best white players were in Jean Goldkette’s band, but Paul was reluctant to raid another orchestra; in any case, several of Goldkette’s stars were none too eager to wade into a sea of Whiteman strings. Instead, he co-opted four of the five musicians who worked in Red Nichols’s famous recording unit, the Five Pennies.

Nichols was a competent but rarely inspired cornetist who had created a fascinating small band with timpani and a clever ratio of written to improvised music. Though Whiteman made a fuss over him, Nichols ultimately chafed at playing what he considered compromised jazz. He came on board in February and was gone by summer. Still, Whiteman managed to capture a couple of his best cornet solos on the same session that introduced Barris, on April 29. Max Farley orchestrated a new song by Harry Woods, “Side by Side,” with a vocal chorus worked out by Barris that incorporated a stutter — “Oh, we ain’t got plenty of muh-muh-money / Maybe we’re ragged and fuh-fuh-funny.” Bing sings the bridge solo, backed by the harmonizing of Al and Harry, and reasserts a touch of Jolson schmaltz in his quivering cadences.

Bing was more himself on Malneck’s adaptation of “I’m Coming, Virginia,” the song he and Rinker had flubbed at a previous session, with Barris adding only a hot-cha-cha coda. Here Bing captures the originality of “Muddy Water,” combining his deft time with a full, relaxed articulation of the words. Contrary to Al’s suggestion of a diligent jazz influence, two surviving takes show that their scat routines were worked out to the last detail. Yet Bing’s imperturbable vocal, Matty’s writing, Nichols’s solo, and the band’s skill combined to make “I’m Coming, Virginia” the best and most authentic jazz record Whiteman had ever made.

Harry did not participate in the May recording of “I’m in Love Again,” and Bing and Al were relegated to the choir, backing Charles Gaylord, except for a brief and undistinguished solo passage in which Bing reveals a hoarseness that would plague him for years, ultimately altering his sound and style. Two weeks later Whiteman presented his new vocal trio on an innocuous if cheerful Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson tune called “Magnolia,” a record that introduces their patter style, each spurring the others with spoken or sung interjections punctuated by Barris’s cymbal-like hahh! The song, replete with topical references to “sex appeal” and movie queens Clara Bow, Lillian Gish, and Gloria Swanson, was an excuse to focus attention on the band’s recent jazz recruits, now including Jimmy Dorsey, who solos on alto saxophone, and the innovative jazz and symphonic drummer Vic Berton, a Nichols associate, who bounces the ensemble with pedaled timpani and choked cymbals.

By now they had decided to call themselves the Rhythm Boys, a play on the Happiness Boys, one of the first successful radio acts. The boss, presenting them as Paul Whiteman’s Rhythm Boys, arranged an independent recording contract for them at Victor and brought them back to the Paramount when the orchestra was hired for an unprecedented six-week engagement, at $10,500 a week. Not much attention was paid to the other acts or the film (Lois Moran in The Whirlwind of Youth). Whiteman’s first week was so successful that Sam Katz, the president of Publix, wanted to double the length of the band’s stay. Paul’s touring commitments prevented it, but to make each week special, Katz brought in Crosby and Rinker’s prior boss, Jack Parting-ton of San Francisco’s Granada Theater, to design the thematic productions. As the movie changed to W. C. Fields in Running Wild, so the band suddenly found itself wearing sailor suits aboard the USS Syncopation, while Whiteman conducted from a gun turret. The production changed weekly — among the titles were Rushia, Jazz a la Carte, and Fireworks — and the audiences were as receptive to the new singers as the Variety reporter, who lauded their spot as “a stellar opportunity in itself.” ⁷ In a succeeding notice, the reviewer pointed out that the show lacked comedy except for “the natural laughs in the delivery of the jazz vocal trio.” In the patriotic Fireworks, the band — including the two “blues yodeling plebes from Spokane” — performed a “cute” number with pop guns. ⁸

Midway through the Paramount run, the Rhythm Boys formally debuted on records, singing the first two numbers they had rehearsed, now tricked up as medleys and accompanied only by Harry’s piano and Bing’s cymbal whacks. “Mississippi Mud” is oddly structured: a twenty-two-bar chorus with a sixteen-bar middle section. The lyric is catchy (though marred by the term darkies, which was eventually changed to people), and the melody is propelled by accents on the first beat of almost every measure. Bing recorded it three times over the next seven months. Though the Rhythm Boys’ version is not as effective as those that followed, it confirmed the trio’s style as part music and part wisecracking comedy. A scat passage introduces them one at a time: Bing, then Al, then Harry, who finishes with a hahh. After a unison chorus in which Bing takes the lead in the middle section, the patter leads to an interpolation of “I Left My Sugar Standing in the Rain,” where Bing displays for the first time on record his sustained balladic tones as well as his humor and wordplay — in the spin he puts on the spoken phrase “I don’t know” and the spoonerism “irregardless and respective.” The second number employs “Ain’t She Sweet” as a rapid windup to Barris’s “Sweet Li’l.” Bing instructs the others at the outset, “If it’s gonna be good it must be fast,” and when they close with an exchange of scat breaks, he mimics a tuba (bub-bub-bub bub-a-bub-bub-bub), the modest beginning of a trait for future mimics.

Those recordings are not especially good, and darkies aside, have not aged well. Barris is too jumpy, though Rinker proves fairly adept at scat, and the humor is intrusive. Still, “Mississippi Mud” became hugely popular, and they performed it nightly at the Paramount and at the Whiteman club, establishing it as their signature song. Everyone who saw them remembered the number as a Jazz Age anthem. It secured Barris’s role as the new brains of the outfit, supplanting Al, who was both grateful and annoyed. Bing was no less ambivalent. “Barris was and is remarkably talented,” Bing wrote. “He writes songs as easily as other folk write a letter. In addition he can sing and he’s a good comedian. But while he could do all of these things, he knew he could do them. And because he gave the impression of knowing all there was to know, Al and I called him Little Joe Show Business.” ⁹

Their hard work on the arrangements is evident from the alternate takes, which are virtually indistinguishable from the masters. The Rhythm Boys never achieved anything approaching the buttery harmonies and unison drive of the Mills Brothers or the Boswell Sisters, but their inventiveness and pep influenced both of those groups and countless other vocal teams, some of them rank imitators. Donald Mills and his brothers heard Bing with the Rhythm Boys: “He had a great voice then and, actually, some of our music came from listening to what they were doing.” ¹⁰ Despite their burgeoning popularity, the Rhythm Boys were humbled when Jack Fulton’s falsetto la-di-da vocal in an otherwise upbeat arrangement of “My Blue Heaven” generated the biggest Whiteman hit of the year. Spokane’s Daily Chronicle stayed loyal to its hometown boys, however, commending “Mississippi Mud” and their new partner (mangled as Jack Barriss): “The variety of jazz put into these pieces is distinctive and unique and includes rapid fire patter, bits of solo work, minor chords and close harmonies with deft business on the piano and with the cymbals.” ¹¹

Yet Bing’s recorded work over the next three months provided him with few chances to shine. His hoarseness had worsened, and Whiteman felt it best to bury him in the choir. He is so off-mike and whispery in his solo on “The Calinda” — faux Africana tarted up with a weird haunted-house arrangement — that one is surprised Whiteman agreed to release it. On “It Won’t Be Long Now,” notable for Tommy Dorsey’s solos on trombone and trumpet, the Rhythm Boys add little to Malneck’s jazzy arrangement. In November the band toured the Midwest. When it arrived in Chicago, the trio was assigned a recording session of its own. Victor declined to release “That’s Grandma” (until 1942), a comical, swinging number with a unison scat chorus backed by Harry’s piano and Bing’s cymbal; the prattling lyric by Bing and Cavanaugh concerns a chipper grandma and relies on allusions to popular entertainers like Eddie Cantor and Moran and Mack. Far more intriguing is “Miss Annabelle Lee,” in which Bing huskily parodies sentimental balladeers of the day and improvises a six-bar passage — his first scat solo on records.

It was a warm-up. The next week’s sessions represented a turning point, a crucial shift in the Whiteman band that led to the most durable music — along with “Rhapsody in Blue” — of Paul’s long career. Two selections recorded at the November 1927 dates, “Changes” and “Mary,” established Bing as the choice singer among Whiteman’s musicians, some of whom would now regard him as one of the band’s top soloists, period.

Whiteman’s determination to hire first-rate jazz players paid off that fall. In August Whiteman, Jimmy Dorsey, the Rhythm Boys, Jimmy Gillespie, and Henry Busse had traveled to the Million Dollar Pier in Atlantic City to hear the Jean Goldkette orchestra. They were especially interested in its brilliant young arranger, Bill Challis, whom Dorsey had been pressing Whiteman to hire. The Goldkette organization, based at the Graystone Ballroom in Detroit, included more than twenty bands. Goldkette himself was a French-born failed concert pianist who did not much care for jazz and rarely appeared with the bands touring under his name. By mid-1927 he was devoting most of his time to his booking agency, and his most important band, the one with the great jazz musicians, was rumored to be on its last legs. In Atlantic City Challis invited Whiteman to guest-conduct a number. Afterward, Paul told several of the musicians that he did not want to be responsible for breaking up the band but that when the time was right, he hoped to hear from them.

Challis was the first to join, when Whiteman opened at the Paramount on September 10, a couple of weeks before the Goldkette band collapsed. Goldkette’s main jazz stars, including cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and saxophonist Frank Trumbauer, elected to go to New York and work in a big band organized by saxophonist Adrian Rollini. “I was offered a job with Rollini, too, but I liked the idea of the fiddles, all those reeds, all that brass,” Challis recalled. “I thought, well, that’s for me, that’s what I’ve been looking for, a lot of instruments, a lot of things to do. Plenty of records.” ¹²

An admirer of Whiteman’s key arranger, Ferde Grofe, Challis spent his first weeks “watching and learning, finding out who did what and listening to all the shows.” ¹³ He was put to the test when Whiteman reached Indianapolis. That week other major Goldkette refugees drifted into Whiteman’s band, first bassist Steve Brown, then Beiderbecke and Trumbauer. While they rehearsed their opening at the Indiana Theatre, a very green piano player, singer, and songwriter named Hoagy Carmichael stopped by to visit his old friend Bix, who introduced him to Whiteman. Hoagy’s first piece, “Washboard Blues,” had recently been recorded by a local group, Hitch’s Happy Harmonists, with the composer on piano. Whiteman liked it. He told Hoagy that if the tune had lyrics, he would use him to sing them at the band’s next recording session in Chicago.

Late that night Whiteman knocked on Challis’s hotel room, with Gillespie, Carmichael, and a pedal organ in tow. The organ passed from arranger to arranger, depending on who was working on deadline. Challis recalled, “Paul asked Hoagy to play ‘Washboard Blues’ and asked me to arrange it for when we got to Chicago.” ¹⁴ By the time the band opened at Chicago’s Uptown Theater, however, Paul had second thoughts about Hoagy’s singing and asked Bing to cover for him. Carmichael remembered Bing’s coming around while he rehearsed and casually asking to see the lyric, explaining that he simply liked the song and wanted to learn it. “Paul wanted some insurance,” Hoagy realized. “If I couldn’t do it, he wanted someone who could. Bing was being kind. He didn’t want me to know I might flop.” ¹⁵ Hoagy made the record, and though it failed to get him a job with Whiteman, it marked the beginning of his long and fruitful association with Bing. For his next assignment, Challis determined to use Whiteman’s regular singers, all of them — the hot trio and the sweet trio.

Walter Donaldson’s “Changes” could not have been more aptly named. As Challis adapted it, the song embodied the changes in the Whiteman band: the old guard giving way to the new, the old dance-band aesthetic succumbing to the improvisational vitality of jazz. Of course, the title also suggested the bullish transformations in a nervous pre-Depression America that, during the previous six months alone, had witnessed Lindbergh’s flight, Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution, Babe Ruth’s sixty home runs, and The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length talking picture. A song-plugger representing Donaldson’s publisher gave “Changes” to Whiteman, who handed it to Challis, who reversed the usual roles of the two vocal trios. The sweet trio sings the first theme in strong midrange unison; the Rhythm Boys follow with a high-voiced harmony, singing four bars and scatting four more. The third theme is all Bing, followed instantly by a glorious cornet improvisation from the astonishing Bix. Though Donaldson’s lyric concerns the changing of musical keys (with a gratuitous reference to “many babies that he can squeeze”), the melody employs few notes; Bing’s episode consists almost entirely of repeated Gs, which he caps with a trombonelike melisma. “What I liked about Bing,” Challis marveled, “was there were fast words in there and they came out beautifully — excellent enunciation.” Challis underscores the energy of the soloists with exchanges between the winds and strings and a deep bottom bolstered by three baritone saxophones. “Paul said use whatever I wanted and I did.” ¹⁶

One man who was not happy with the changes was Henry Busse, Whiteman’s long-serving trumpet star whose rickety muted approach had once been considered “hot.” When Challis omitted him from his arrangement of “Washboard Blues,” Busse protested, pointing out that his contract guaranteed him a role in every Whiteman record. His jealousy would snowball as Beiderbecke increasingly usurped his position. He could not fail to notice that Whiteman treated the young and troubled newcomer like a son. (Paul and Bix had in common fathers almost Kafkaesque in their disapproving rage.) Bix was a heroic magnet for Chicago’s young white jazz musicians, who never gave a thought to the likes of Busse, and Bing was immediately accepted into that golden circle. They would hang out at a storefront speakeasy on State Street known as the Three Deuces, after the notorious brothel called the Four Deuces. Mezz Mezzrow recalled a midnight jam at the Deuces in November: “[Bing] beat time all night with his hands, like he was at a Holy Rollers meeting. Under Bix’s spell, everybody was a genius that night.” ¹⁷

Two days after “Changes,” another Donaldson tune defined the band’s stylistic divisions. In Malneck’s mischievous arrangement, “Mary” entangles Busse and Bix much as “Changes” connected the sweet and hot singers. After an ensemble introduction, Busse’s muted trumpet states the theme in damp staccato over a starchy bum-cha bum-cha rhythm. Then Bix takes over the brasses for the verse, delivering them and the entire ensemble into the sunshine of swing. Toward the end of the performance, Bix begins his flaming eight-bar improvisation with an impatient rip and, leading the brasses in contrapuntal figures, all but drowns out Busse’s reprise of the theme.

Yet Bix isn’t the key soloist. Bing is. Voice restored, he sings his chorus with exemplary finesse, articulating details at a cantering tempo and balancing rhythmic heat with vocal cool. He reshapes the melody, improving Donaldson’s cadences, displaying a jazz license all his own. The kind of liberties he took, however subtle, were not often appreciated by songwriters and publishers, who were known to threaten legal action over an altered note or word. Bing shows no trace of the Jolson influence, but he avails himself of an influence that had lain dormant: the upper mordent, also known as a pralltriller, that wavering catch in the voice preserved in the folk singing of Ireland, Scotland, and northern Africa. In his final phrases (“You wouldn’t let my castles come tum-tum-tumbling down…. What are you waiting for, Mary?”), Bing employs mordents on down and Mary.

Unlike “Changes,” “Mary” was not a hit with the public but was a triumph with the new guard in Whiteman’s band. Challis and other members lobbied for more Crosby features. To insiders, Bing was becoming something of a Bixian hero. Just as Bix proved that a white musician could be an expressively nonconformist jazz player, Bing showed that a white male vocalist did not have to sound like a Floradora girl. Bing thought like a musician; he had his own sound; he improvised; he had time.

Throughout the year, carbon microphones were increasingly replaced by new condenser microphones, which favored singers with an intimate approach. In Bing’s case, the mikes registered his fetching throatiness and nuanced phrasing. By the end of 1927, they were used with greater frequency in theaters, too, thanks in part to two show-business milestones that fall. On September 18 CBS Radio began broadcasting, giving NBC some badly needed competition and emphasizing improvements in the electrical reproduction of sound; on October 6 Jolson’s picture The Jazz Singer opened on Broadway, justifying the Warner brothers’ faith in Vitaphone and hastening further advances in audio technology.

Two days after Christmas Show Boat opened at the Ziegfeld, a turning point for the American musical theater and, as it happened, a milestone for Bing. Whiteman assigned Challis “Ol’ Man River” from the magnificent score by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. Challis went to work, preparing the chart for Bing. That week Whiteman debuted on NBC with his own show. Scheduled to sing, Bing alerted his family. But those in Spokane who huddled around their radios were disappointed when he sang and was not identified — an indication of how inside his reputation was. “01’ Man River” would help change that. Challis and Malneck worked at a hotel piano, trying different voicings for the song. Malneck tuned the strings “a la Venuti,” ¹⁸ a nod to Joe Venuti’s method of playing with the bow under the violin’s soundboard and the horsehairs tied over the strings, enabling him to play four-note chords. The inevitable dissonances were incorporated in ensemble passages backing Bing. Whiteman himself chose the buoyant tempo; he emphasized to Challis that he was making a dance record, not a semiclassical piece. On Broadway, Jules Bledsoe sang it an octave lower than Bing, who delighted the rehearsing musicians when he took it up. Challis recalled, “He could do that and make it sound good. He had good intonation. Took the whole tune and went right on up. You didn’t have to tell him what to do, he just did it and did it nicely.” ¹⁹

The record was a sensation; months later Whiteman sought to extend its success by recording another version with Paul Robeson, for whom the song was originally conceived, and a choir. But Bing’s triumph was singular. Coming on the heels of such sentimental Whiteman bestsellers as “Together” (vocal, Jack Fulton) and “Ramona” (vocal, Skin Young), it created a stir among musicians and fans, expanding Whiteman’s following among younger listeners. Cultural historian James T. Maher, in high school at the time, believed Bing’s version spoke specifically to his generation. Johnny Mercer was transfixed by it: “It seemed to me he employed a completely new and different style which sounded more natural and effortless than any I’d ever heard.” ²⁰ Britain’s young were mesmerized as well. As Alistair Cooke recalled, “Word ran through the English underground that a genuine jazz singer — and a white man! — had appeared in the unlikeliest place: breezing along on the ocean of Paul Whiteman’s lush ‘symphonic’ sound.” ²¹ Even an older Bing, notoriously parsimonious with praise for any of his records, begrudgingly mentioned “01’ Man River” as one of two favorites (along with his 1939 “My Isle of Golden Dreams”): “I made a good record of ‘Ol’ Man River’ when I was with Whiteman. It was a good arrangement anyhow and I thought what I had to do on it was adequate.” ²² He surely recognized the source of the climactic line in Hammerstein’s lyric: “I was at the same time,” confessed Saint Augustine, “thoroughly tired of living and extremely frightened of dying.” ²³

Bing was elated to be surrounded, finally, by some of the country’s most admired white jazz players. He roomed with Bix at New York’s Belvedere Hotel, where many of Whiteman’s musicians were quartered. The two friends listened to and discussed music constantly, whether they were sober or spinning. Bix held his liquor better than Bing, who frequently fell into a stupor. Of the men he most often named as musical influences — Jolson, Armstrong, and Beiderbecke — Bing was personally closest to Bix. He memorized his cornet solos, scatted his phrases, and was particularly taken with Bix’s devotion to modern classics, from Eastwood Lane and Cyril Scott to Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky. As critic Larry Kart would observe, Bix’s blend of American jazz and European classicism was “a romantic sound — gentle, intimate, and tinged with nostalgia. And those were the qualities that soon would mark Crosby’s style.” ²⁴

Bing and Bix spent a lot of time at a speakeasy down the street from the Whiteman club’s old spot. The place had a piano on the balcony, where, despite the speak’s loud goings-on, Bix and other musicians exchanged ideas. “I didn’t contribute anything but I listened and learned,” Bing recalled. “I felt my style then was a cross between Al Jolson and a musical instrument. I was now being influenced by these musicians…. Bix, Bill Challis, even Frank Trumbauer would make suggestions to me for my vocalizing and I’d give it a try.” ²⁵ When Trumbauer organized a session for OKeh Records early in 1928, he hired Bing along with Bix, Malneck, Chester Hazlett, Jimmy Dorsey, Min Leibrook, and pianist Lennie Hayton, among others (paying Bix fifty dollars, Hazlett thirty dollars, and the rest twenty-five). He even selected two numbers created by the Rhythm Boys. Trumbauer’s recording of “From Monday On” was never issued, but “Mississippi Mud” is a jazz classic, albeit one often found distasteful because of the patter between Tram (as Trumbauer was known) and Bing. Though they avoid heavy dialect, their routine is decidedly in the idiom of blackface vaudeville acts like Moran and Mack, with Tram stuttering his lines. The only soloists are Bix (a resplendent chorus) and a strikingly relaxed Bing, upholding his end of the patter without missing a beat of the song.

With his jazz players pressuring him to feature Bing as a soloist, Whiteman made him a regular at recording sessions, though he buried him in the choir almost as often as he brought him into the limelight. Yet Whiteman was canny enough to give Bing numbers that suited him — especially after “01’ Man River” topped sales charts in March. Remarkably, Bing participated in more sessions in 1928 — about three dozen — than he would again until 1940. Those record dates track the artist in development, as he jettisons the Jolson flutter and the stiffness that marred “Muddy Water.” Bing developed a uniquely spirited sangfroid. No matter how jazzed-up the setting, he negotiated the words, rhythm, and melody with a polished timbre and flawless enunciation. Even on off days Crosby’s instrument radiated confidence. Most of his predecessors who were not belters belonged to the genteel school and sang with effete head tones. Bing conveyed a chest-tone approach, making full use of his diaphragm. His vocal mask was complete and mature. But his most extraordinary gift was to communicate naturally. While other pop singers employed ponderous or flaccid tones, Bing sang the same way he spoke. His style avoided the mannerisms of style; his art seemed artless, even effortless.

One example is his stunning chorus on Grofe’s breakneck version of Show Boat’s “Make Believe.” The instrumental chorus is ornate, but Bing’s vocal, backed by Steve Brown’s stomping bass, marries rhythmic panache to pitch-perfect articulation and underscores the lyric’s meaning despite the charged tempo. Tom Satterfield reflected Challis’s influence in his finest arrangement, “There Ain’t No Sweet Man That’s Worth the Salt of My Tears,” a jazz classic with Bix driving the ensemble and Bing rattling his first word — a rhythmically italicized I’m — for a sensational entrance. The song’s unchanged gender reflects the obstinacy of song publishers, who would not allow singers to alter pronouns; Bing was not permitted to sing “there ain’t no sweet gal.” Since the great majority of songs were conceived as male entreaties to women, the sanctity of pronouns discouraged the employment of female singers, a convention Whiteman eventually breached when he hired Mildred Bailey.

At a February session Bing sang the obscure “Sunshine,” notable only as his first recording of an Irving Berlin song — a handsomely executed but commonplace beginning for what would turn out to be a mighty collaboration. Within weeks he was also featured on Mal-neck’s strongest arrangement since “I’m Coming, Virginia” (perhaps his finest ever), the definitive version of “From Monday On,” for orchestra and all six singers. A Barris original, with input from Bing on the lyric, the song was first recorded by the Rhythm Boys in January. That performance marked Bing’s debut as a whistler and includes an awkward Al Rinker chorus that publicly revealed what everyone in Whiteman’s fold knew: a huge musical gap existed between the former Musicaladers. Malneck’s version, made six weeks later, was something else, an arranger’s fantasia.

Matty devised an elaborate setting for “From Monday On,” beginning with Fulton and company mooing the introduction in tenor range. The Rhythm Boys scat an interlude, and Bix charges in with a high note and full chorus as the saxes carry the theme. Matty confined Al to the choir and let Bing carry the main vocal chorus. In the best-known of three surviving takes, Bing tags a couple of words (skies, on) with Jolsonesque vibrato, though he lightened up on the later takes. He is otherwise loose and robust, and the record has a joyousness that has lost nothing over the years. To a musician like Challis, “He sang a song right, in the register you wanted to hear it. If it was up to me who the singer would be, it was usually Crosby. He enunciated and he had presence. He could hit a low A flat, maybe a little lower, and his top note was F, but he didn’t have a preferred key. I always used my own judgment.” ²⁶

“High Water,” Whiteman’s pretentious attempt at a hymn, typifies what jazz players loathed about his music but is perversely amusing for Bing’s spoken interlude — a parody of Jolson — and for his evident relief when swinging the chorus. “What Price Lyrics?” by Barris, Bing, and Malneck, is a chatty send-up of moon/June rhymes (Bing offers Sammy/mammy) and finishes with a round of scat. “Lovable” is a negligible Richard Whiting melody, brightly arranged by Challis. Bing’s stellar chorus makes the most of Seymour Simons’s lyric (“others just imitate / kisses that you create”) and is characterized by canny breath control and minor embellishments, prefiguring his mature style. (For some reason, “Lovable” was released only in England.) Challis’s “My Pet” intrigues because three takes exist in which Bing improvises very different eight-bar segments, combining scat and words on the first, borrowing Armstrong licks for the second, and finding himself on the third.

* * *

Most of the songs of the period were not appreciably better than “My Pet,” and many that Bing tackled were worse, for example, “I’m Afraid of You” or “It Was the Dawn of Love.” But every so often a gem came along, suggesting another reason that Bing was the ideal man for the time. Songwriting was entering a new phase of sophistication and subtlety. Only parodies could accommodate the June/moon rhymes, mother worship, patriotic gibberish, and coon song outrages that had dominated Tin Pan Alley for nearly a quarter of a century. The 1920s brought talented songwriters able to embrace the Jazz Age blend of Prohibition, flaming youth, exotica, and sex. Among the most enduring were Walter Donaldson (“Makin’ Whoopee,” “Yes Sir! That’s My Baby”); Spencer Williams (“I Ain’t Got Nobody,” “Everybody Loves My Baby”); Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields (“I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” “Doin’ the New Low-Down”); Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby (“Nevertheless,” “Three Little Words”); and Buddy DeSylva, Ray Henderson, and Lew Brown (“Button Up Your Overcoat,” “The Best Things in Life Are Free”).

Yet by 1928, after Show Boat, even the songs of those progressive talents seemed transitional. Something new was going on. You heard it in the swinging ingenuity of Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers (“Manhattan,” “Thou Swell”), the sexy wit and minor keys of Cole Porter (“Let’s Do It,” “You Do Something to Me”), the invigorated melodies of the prophetic Irving Berlin (“Blue Skies,” “How About Me?”). With the arrival of book musicals on stage and later in film, American songwriting entered a golden age, an explosion of melody and harmony to rival the recently faded glory days of Italian opera. Crosby was the era’s first great voice and interpreter. He made lyrics understandable, worthy of attention.

Good songs liberated Bing. On “Louisiana,” written by J. C. Johnson and Andy Razaf, Challis introduces him with a brassy fanfare and a “waaaah” from the vocal choir, launching a marvelous supple chorus in which Bing fulfills the promise of those elocution distinctions he earned at Gonzaga. Unfortunately, the exuberance of that performance was torpedoed the next afternoon by the mutiny of White-man’s old guard.

Furious at the attention lavished on Beiderbecke, Henry Busse was at the boiling point. No one could recall exactly what set him off, but in the last hour of a recording session, he loudly berated Paul. The bandleader snapped back at him. Another old-timer, drummer Hal McDonald, sided with Busse. The dispute ended with the two stomping out of Liederkranz Hall and the Whiteman organization. With one scheduled tune left, a dejected Paul canceled work till the next day and put out a call for replacements. Despite the calamity, the postponed tune emerged as a Whiteman benchmark. Satterfield adapted Rodgers and Hart’s “You Took Advantage of Me,” a hit song introduced by Joyce Barbour and Busby Berkeley in the revue Present Arms. The record is celebrated for the riotous chase chorus (a conversational but formally precise exchange) by Bix and Tram and the vocal that follows. Bing had the unenviable task of upholding a high level of invention, but as Bix’s biographer, Richard Sudhalter, has observed, “Bing Crosby, entering immediately afterwards, catches the mood exactly, voice brimming with obvious pleasure at what has just gone on. ²⁷

That number represented not only the end of the old Whiteman band but the end of the orchestra’s historic eight-year association with Victor. Chiefly because of a perceived rivalry with another Victor bandleader (Nat Shilkret), Whiteman signed with the accommodating Columbia Records. He was so miffed at Victor that on May 12 he allowed a Fox Movietone newsreel crew to film him tearing up his contract at the stroke of midnight (when his association with Victor officially ended). Worried by the large number of records Whiteman had stockpiled at Victor, Columbia wanted him in the studio immediately. To underscore its commitment to the band, the company paid Whiteman the singular tribute of designing him his own disc label: a pale blue potato-shaped caricature of Paul set against an orange-and-green background. Yet a thorn lurked behind the pastels. Columbia’s engineers were not as good as their Victor counterparts at capturing the band’s plush sound. Worse, the sessions were run by Eddie King, a jazz-hating producer who encouraged Whiteman to revive his old sound; the winged phrasing of a Bing or Bix gave him no pleasure.

Meanwhile, Bing was enjoying the good life, whether on tour or at home base. The money was good and the booze was plentiful. Every city the band played — Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Erie — provided him with a golf course by day and speakeasies by night. In New York the Rhythm Boys were in demand for private parties thrown by or for such celebrities as Mayor Walker, Buddy DeSylva, and Beatrice Lillie. Other nights the guys headed for Harlem, for mixed-race jam sessions in Fletcher Henderson’s basement or shows at the Cotton Club and other venues starring such titans as Duke Ellington and Ethel Waters. On Broadway the boys soaked up songs in such shows as Oh, Kay I, with Gertrude Lawrence and a Gershwin score; Oh, Please!, with Bea Lillie and music by Vincent Youmans; Funny Face, with Fred Astaire and another Gershwin score; as well as Hit the Deck! (Youmans) and A Connecticut Yankee (Rodgers and Hart) and more — entertainment without end. Bing, Al, and Harry were present at Midnight Frolic, an exclusive show atop the New Amsterdam, when Maurice Chevalier made his American debut. They met Maurice Ravel at a Whiteman session and attended his concert at Mecca Auditorium. They spent numerous evenings doubled-up with laughter at the Parody Club, home to the vaudeville anarchy of Clayton, Jackson, and Durante. The great Durante never failed to convulse Bing. But maybe the Rhythm Boys spent too much time together; they were beginning to get on one another’s nerves.

“We couldn’t decide which of us was boss,” Bing recalled. “Every three or four weeks we decided to break up, then the next day we’d get back together again.” ²⁸ Bing could be cantankerous and was becoming unreliable. Some nights he was so green from drink that he had to be held up at the mike; on other nights he did not show at all. Barris was never without his flask, constantly nipping. Al tried to keep up, no easy task when he double-dated with Bix, but remained the most responsible — “I was too young to keep up with them” ²⁹ — and was sometimes perceived by the others as a scold. The women they saw were chorus girls, of which there was a limitless supply.

When Whiteman played Philadelphia in December 1927, Bing met two roommates, Ginger Meehan and Dolores Reade, who were appearing in the road cast of Eddie Dowling’s Honeymoon Lane. The women would remain in his life, but as the wives of men with whom he had lifelong associations: in 1930 Ginger married Johnny Mercer, and three years later Dolores married Bob Hope. Dolores recalled, “Back in the Philadelphia days, if they couldn’t find Bing, they’d say, well, where was he last night, and they’d go and look for him under one of the tables.” ³⁰

Francis Cork O’Keefe, the dapper manager who later advised Bing, also saw him at the Philadelphia engagement, having taken the train from New York because “people had been raving about a guy with Whiteman.” He found Bing “nervous and shy.” ³¹ O’Keefe may have been the first to suggest that he go out as a single, but Bing dismissed the idea; he did not even want to make a record under his own name. “I sat in the first row,” O’Keefe told an interviewer in 1946. “Harry Barris was the piano player, the clown of the crowd. Bing had the worst sore throat, but I heard him and liked him. I went backstage to say hello to the guys and met him. He had something, but then he was just another one of the fellows. They were trying to get him to make a solo record, but he laughed — said it was silly, no one wanted to hear him alone.” ³² O’Keefe worked on him for better than a year, to no avail. He was not ready.

Bing was more focused on Ginger Meehan, a quietly pretty, Brooklyn-born brunette with delicate features — just the type he preferred. One night in New York, at nearly 1:00 A.M., Bing wired Ginger at Philadelphia’s Emerson Hotel: ACCORDING TO US STATISTICS THERE ARE 7 MILLION PEOPLE HERE BUT WITHAL IM A STRANGER AND MISERABLY ALONE BECAUSE YOURE NOT ALONG LOVE UNDYING BEST REGARDS TO DOLORES AND STUFF. BING. ³³ The affair continued on and off through the summer. When Whiteman pulled into Chicago in July, Ginger was already there, in the road company of Good News. Bing wired her at the Selwyn Theater: WOULD LIKE TO SAY HELLO THIS EVE AFTER YOUR PERFORMANCE SAY AT ELEVEN FIFTEEN. BING. ³⁴ Six days later he wired her a few minutes before she went onstage: WOULD LIKE TO CALL YOU TONIGHT IF BUSY SUE ME BING. ³⁵ Ginger didn’t Sue, but the romance fizzled, possibly because Bing became enamored of another Good News cast member, the star, Peggy Bernier, whom he had met twice before — at Don Clark’s recording session and in Jack Partington’s San Francisco revues. Bing’s infatuation with Peggy, who could keep up with his late-night carousing, lasted several months, unlike most of his romances, which were as fleeting as stops on a vaudeville circuit.

The good life took its toll on the Rhythm Boys. Whiteman complained that they no longer seemed as dedicated to their work. They stayed out late and looked beat at the early matinees. When the movie went on, they would repair to a nearby speakeasy and sometimes could hardly tear themselves away in time to make the next show. Merwyn Bogue,a worshipful young Whiteman fan who became popular in the 1930s as Kay Kyser’s trumpet player and comic foil, Ish Kabibble, got a close look at them on and off the bandstand. He first saw the Rhythm Boys when Whiteman opened at the Perry Theater in Erie, Pennsylvania. “The audience went wild” ³⁶ as the trio, backed by Rinker on a tiny organ, belted out “Mississippi Mud.” Bogue attended all four shows every day of the engagement, and designated himself the boys’ guardian after he tailed them to a speakeasy one afternoon:

The boys muttered a password through the little peephole. A door opened, and we all went inside. The owner must have considered me part of the group. But nobody knew me from Bephus, and I sat off in a corner by myself. The three of them got something to drink, scooped handfuls of peanuts from a glass penny machine, and sat telling stories. I was so afraid they would be late for their next show that I appointed myself their timekeeper…. When I finally said [“Hey, fellows, you better start walking back or you’ll miss your next show”], they looked at me as if to say, “Who are you?” But they got up and left. After this had happened a few more times, one of them said, “Thanks kid.” They were never late for a show that whole week. ³⁷

In 1949, when Ish Kabibble had a spot in the Crosby movie Riding High, he asked Bing “if he remembered a kid in an Erie speakeasy who always got him to the theater on time. He did a double take, swung his golf club at another wad of Kleenex, and said, ‘Was that you? Hey, those were the greatest peanuts I ever ate!’ “

The boys’ most grievous sin was their failure to “grow the act.” Whiteman assigned them roles on recordings, but he expected them to develop new material for concerts and their own record dates (which, like the band’s, were made at Columbia). In Bing’s estimation, “I don’t think we were too serious about our work, it was just something we liked to do, we enjoyed it and never really made a conscious effort to improve ourselves. Although we looked for new material all the time, it was difficult to get all three of us together at one time for a rehearsal. About the only time we did is when Whiteman had something for us to do with the big band and then we had to be there or we’d get the old sack.” ³⁸

Whiteman had no intention of firing them, but he was losing patience and noticed that some theater audiences continued to resist the trio’s charms. As Variety observed, “There seem to be a lot of people in a picture house audience who don’t know what they’re trying to do or what it’s all about, but it’s funny, hot, and good.” ³⁹ In July Whiteman summoned the boys to his office and, as Barris recalled, told them, “I’m taking the band on tour and if it’s okay with you, I’d like to place you on a vaudeville circuit.” ⁴⁰ They had little choice. In a sense, Paul was exiling them from the band. He hoped that independence would straighten them out and spur their creativity. If they could cultivate audiences on their own, they would be a more attractive component in the orchestra’s presentations when he brought them home. Meantime, he would be increasing his income, taking a percentage of their tour in addition to receipts generated by the band. Paul promised that they would rejoin the orchestra when it returned to New York and that in the interim he would continue to use them on records.

On August 1 he gave the news to the press: the Rhythm Boys would be playing the Keith-Albee, Orpheum, and Proctor vaudeville circuit. Whiteman did, as he promised, bring them in for several studio sessions, but otherwise the boys were on their own for six months, through February 1929. While the band toured in the East, the Rhythm Boys traveled to their first stop: the Proctor Theater in Yonkers. They played most major Midwestern cities and a few eastern ones, dipping as far south as Nashville, usually to great acclaim. At each venue they were introduced by a life-size plywood cutout of Paul and a transcription of his voice. “Ladies and gentlemen,” it proclaimed, “I take great pleasure in presenting to you my Rhythm Boys.” ⁴¹

They began the tour in high spirits. The double challenge of big-time vaudeville and autonomy invigorated them, though not musically. For a while they worked out a comedy dance routine to “Baby Face,” taking turns as they parodied what Al described as “dime-a-dozen dance routines by second rate hoofers.” ⁴² Despite the jokey intent, those “corny” steps proved a useful part of Bing’s apprenticeship; he used them throughout his career, not only in routines with Bob Hope and Fred Astaire but in comic time steps and hand gestures that defined his persona in numerous films and TV shows. The boys also worked out a comic mind-reading routine, with Harry and Al engaging the audience as Bing did the swami bit onstage in a turban (prefiguring a routine in the 1946 Road to Utopia). Bing acknowledged, “We had indifferent success. We went up and down. It depended. See, we’d been in vaudeville a lot and we’d been watching a lot of comics and we wanted to do comedy. And as a result, we weren’t singing hardly anything. And the managers of the different hotels and theaters objected to this strenuously. They thought they were booking a record seller, you know.” ⁴³

Playing only two shows a day, beginning at 2:00 P.M., Bing and Al spent mornings on the golf course, renewing their friendship and perfecting their games; they played about equally well and always for a small amount of money. To their surprise, most of the best private courses in each city granted them admission. Harry didn’t play, but he kept busy writing songs and nursing his flask. In Columbus, Ohio, they shared a bill with Jack Benny, who, learning of their mania for golf, asked whether he could join Bing and Al in a game. They had already made arrangements at the Scioto Country Club (where Jack Nicklaus learned to play) and so changed their reservation to a threesome, arriving early the next morning in their plus fours. After three or four holes, Bing hit his ball over a fence into a cow pasture. “That’s a new ball,” Bing complained, and climbed over the fence to get it. ⁴⁴ As he searched the pasture, Al and Jack heard a frightful bellowing and turned to see a mammoth black bull galloping toward Bing. As they yelled warnings, Bing took off like buckshot, barely making it over the fence in time. Shaken, they laughed it off, as they tended to do with most things.

The Rhythm Boys usually managed to look good onstage in their blue blazers and white flannels. Harry stood five foot six but usually sat at the piano; Bing was five nine and Al five ten. Variety recognized them as a potential hit “with the younger generation, particularly the flaps [girls]” ⁴⁵ but was less pleased with the material. Robert Landry, who had written the first review of Bing and Al in San Francisco and was now reporting from New York, saw “ample room for improvement” in the fifteen-minute act: “Little too much of sameness about the horseplay. More rhythm and melody and less slamming of the music rack suggested.” With “elimination and improvements,” he thought, they would be “a consistent zowie.” ⁴⁶ They ignored the advice, preferring to rack up hilarity on- and offstage.

Bing’s favorite city on tour was Chicago, where the trio played one week in September and another in November. As he grew friendly with Louis Armstrong, they began to inspire each other. Bing had learned much from Louis about style, spontaneity, time, and feeling. Armstrong was the fount from which Bing’s swinging and irreverent but emotional approach to song developed. Louis returned the admiration, picking up on Bing’s timbre and his way with ballads, which he soon added to his repertoire. Occasionally Louis even paid Bing homage by covering his songs or inserting a telling mordent. Writing in the 1960s to a friend, he discussed Bing at length: “Shortly after I witnessed my first hearing of Bing’s singing, he started making records with his Trio and different bands. Then, later, by himself. And that did settle it. There were just as many colored people ‘buying air,’ raving over Bing’s recordings, as much as anybody else. The chicks (gals) were justa swooning and screaming when Bing would sing…. The man was a Natural Genius the day he was born. Ever since Bing first opened his mouth, he was the Boss of All Singers and Still is.” ⁴⁷

One night Armstrong took Charlie Carpenter, his valet and subsequently a lyricist (“You Can Depend on Me”) and Earl Hines’s manager, to the Grand Terrace Ballroom, which stayed open until 4:30 A.M. The Rhythm Boys stopped by at 2:00, after finishing their own gig. Charlie was too young to drink but marveled at Bing’s thirst. When he ran into Bing thirty years later on a television soundstage, he told him, “I haven’t seen you since 1928, Bing, but I still remember you were tore up.” Bing laughed and said, “I probably was because in those days I was really putting it away.” ⁴⁸He was consuming more than liquor.

Louis’s influence on Bing extended to his love of marijuana, which he alternately called mezz (after Mezz Mezzrow), gage, pot, or muggles. Bing didn’t develop the lifelong appetite for it that Louis did, but he enjoyed it in the early days — it was legal — and, like Louis, surprised interviewers in the 1960s and 1970s by suggesting it be decriminalized, to set it apart from more harmful and addictive drugs. Bing’s eldest son, Gary, argued that pot had a lasting effect on his father’s style: “If you look at the way he sang and the way he walked and talked, you could make a pretty good case for somebody who was loaded. He said to me one time when he was really mad, ranting and raving about my heavy drinking, he said, ‘Oh, that fucking booze. It killed your mother. Why don’t you just smoke shit?’ That was all he said but there were other times when marijuana was mentioned and he’d get a smile on his face. He’d kind of think about it and there’d be that little smile.” ⁴⁹

Gary’s theory is hardly the strangest explanation of Bing’s preternatural cool, which in the early years of his career suggested indifference rather than the composure for which he became famous. It was as if he had not fully committed himself to the idea of making himself a success. He made no attempt to hide his stumbling inconsistency, except in letters home, which were often accompanied by mementos and gifts. His younger brother, Bob, finishing high school, received regular updates on Bing’s fortunes: “He’d write me quite often, tell me about the cities he played and what was happening in the orchestra. He sent me records of the original Dorsey brothers band and a lot of jazz things with Frankie Trumbauer and Bix Beiderbecke and some of the great musicians; a lot of Louie Armstrong, that was one of his favorites. Told me at one time, ‘I’m sending you a tennis racket and a whole tennis outfit. I want you to learn how to play tennis because that’s a great way to meet people.’And he sent me from Saks Fifth Avenue a very expensive racket and beautiful sweater and the shoes and the whole thing and a book of instructions by Bill Tilden.” ⁵⁰

About that time, Bing posed — uncharacteristically natty — for an eight-by-ten sepia portrait, his hands tucked into the pockets of a double-breasted jacket, with a handkerchief peaking from the breast pocket, and his tie carefully arranged with a dimple below the knot. His eyes are luminous and his hair thinning; a rakish, ready smile is crowned by an exactingly trimmed mustache. In his caption on a copy he sent his brother Ted, Bing wrote, “brush by Fuller.” His inscription also included a question without a question mark: “Am I too suave or sveldt.” ⁵¹

He was neither when he finished the November 1928 week in Chicago. During that visit Bing’s romance with Peggy Bernier blossomed, though they were not especially committed to each other. A series of beaux awaited Peggy at the stage door. To Bing, the Good News cast was a chicken coop and he was the fox. He dated one of Peggy’s two roommates and tried to get the other on the phone. But Dixie Carroll, who turned seventeen the day before the Rhythm Boys opened at the State-Lake Theater, had heard plenty about Bing’s reputation and refused his call. (A year later in Hollywood, she would take the name Dixie Lee and meet Bing face-to-face for the first time.) Still, Bing could not bear to part with Peggy, a playmate who could hold her liquor better than he, and when Harry and Al took the train for the next gig, in Rockford, Illinois, he promised to leave the next day and get there on time. After a serious night of saloon-hopping, Peggy poured him onto a train. Bing passed out and slept the distance, but it did him no good; he was in such bad shape when the train pulled in, the police hauled him to jail and kept him overnight, refusing to let him use the phone.

Harry and Al panicked. They went onstage as a duo for two shows, kibitzing their way through comedy numbers and haphazardly filling in Bing’s part. “We were sure something awful happened to Bing,” Al said, “maybe an accident.” ⁵² After the second show they called the hotel, and Bing answered, groggy and chagrined as he admitted why he had not been able to call them. They took revenge by asking an Irish actor to impersonate the theater manager. The actor marched up to Bing’s room and accused him of betraying his partners and breaching his contract. Bing abjectly apologized, asking the manager not to punish the other two for his transgressions, until Al and Harry could take no more and stopped the charade. He accepted the prank, smiling in relief.

While his Rhythm Boys cavorted through the Midwest, Whiteman enjoyed a series of triumphs in the East, including a Carnegie Hall celebration of his tenth year in New York. On the same September day that Whiteman recorded a garish medley of Christmas carols, among them “Silent Night” (a song that would one day become a Crosby annuity), an apoplectic theater manager in Toledo brought down the curtain on the Rhythm Boys in retaliation for what he considered a vulgar joke: “Say, Harry, do you know how to cure a horse from frothing at the mouth?” “Why no, Bing, how do you cure a horse from frothing at the mouth?” “Well, Harry, you teaches him to spit.” ⁵³ The boys were happier when they were in New York, and the band made better records when they were around.

One of them is Challis’s arrangement of Willard Robison’s faux-rural hymn, “’Taint So, Honey, Taint So,” the first record ever to begin with the singer entering before the band, which comes in a millisecond later. It was a startling thing to do, and a rumor grew that Bing was unable to pitch the correct note until the tenth take, when Challis had to prompt him with a pitch pipe. Challis denied the whole story: “I wanted to start off with a vocal, just a prank sort of, so I gave him the note he starts on. I think Paul beat off, or I did, well, anyway, he came right in and sang it. No problems or anything. And no problems with changes of key. He had a wonderful ear.” ⁵⁴ “’Taint So” is also notable for a balky bassoon solo by Trumbauer and dark Venuti-influenced strings behind Bing’s vocal.

Another standout, Walter Donaldson’s “Because My Baby Don’t Mean ‘Maybe’ Now,” opens with a chorus in which Bix Beiderbecke improvises figures that are closely shadowed by the band’s written phrases (a passage that shows why Ellington admired Challis). But the record is best known for Bing’s jaunty vocal; he completes several phrases with spirited bu-bu-bu-boos. Young fans began to note Bing’s spoken interjections, like “why say there” on “Wa Da Da” or “tell it” on “My Suppressed Desire” — which The New Yorker helpfully classified as not a “profound study in psychoanalysis, but [a] record full of surprises.” ⁵⁵ In truth, the record’s only revelation is Bing’s blithe eight-bar scat episode.

The Rhythm Boys were back in New York to play Christmas week at the Palace (Variety praised Bing’s ballad and the threesome’s “modulation of the vo-do-de-o stuff”) ⁵⁶ and Newark’s Proctor on New Year’s Eve. The day before closing at the Palace, Bing made two records with the Ipana Troubadours, a radio orchestra led by Sam Lanin that included several of Bing’s jazz buddies (the Dorseys, Vic Berton, Manny Klein), though you would not know it from the staid arrangements. Bing’s hiring indicated his growing stature among top musicians. He got to sing a very good song, “I’ll Get By,” with a somewhat husky voice and tinge of Jolson, and a very bad one, “Rose of Mandalay,” which he nonetheless enhanced with his intrepid zip.

On February 5 Whiteman inaugurated The Old Gold Hour, a successful series on WABC (the New York flagship of the Columbia Broadcasting System), airing Tuesdays at nine. Whiteman liked to tell how he originally offered the show to the president of NBC, who turned him down because his network already had a cigarette sponsor. Despite jealous sponsors, radio was about to enjoy a crushing if provisional triumph over its hated rival, the recording industry, aided by the stock market crash later in the year. Records were expensive, and radio offered free entertainment subsidized by advertising accounts. Even before the crash, the new medium flaunted its power. When the Radio Corporation of America took control of the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1928, it established RCA Victor, a division intended to manufacture nothing but radios (it produced 4 million that year alone). RCA would have been happy to wipe out the phonograph altogether. Instead, Victor officials held the fort, and RCA became the leading record label of the 1930s. Still, as late as 1939, when records rebounded with sensational sales, the networks (as opposed to independent stations) tried to keep them off the air.

Old Gold initially paid Whiteman $5,000 per broadcast hour for sixteen weeks. William S. Paley, who had just been elected president of CBS, knew the bandleader’s popularity would draw stations nationwide to his network, especially when the band went on the road, broadcasting from a different city each week. Old Gold had other concerns. Its deal required Whiteman to present his Rhythm Boys — the trio evidently had an influential fan in the tobacco business. Perhaps the executive was fond of “Mississippi Mud” or thought a young trio would lure young smokers or recognized a musical turnaround taking place, favoring baritones over tenors. Maybe all three motives figured in his rationale. For a turnaround was indeed in the air. Sponsors wanted people to keep their radios on as much as possible, as a soothing background for millions of potential consumers. Higher voices are better for reaching theater balconies, but lower ones are more appealing in living rooms. Radio’s superior sound captured the subtle nuances of deeper voices.

Whiteman cheerfully reinstated the Rhythm Boys at double their salaries ($300 each). He had another use for them beyond radio. A few months earlier, in the fall of 1928, when Herbert Hoover was elected president, Paul had agreed to star — for two-fifths of the net — in Universal’s “super-special 100 per cent talker,” King of Jazz. Carl Laemmle, Universal’s president, and Jimmy Gillespie signed the contracts at New York’s Harmony Club, agreeing to go into production in March with director Wesley Ruggles. Nothing about this production would go as planned.