Should I even ask? Bing Crosby:
Gary
3,982 Posts
Who rides?I used to not, but now I do.
Gary
3,982 Posts
Comments
I ride for old school Crosby with the Rhythm Boys, mostly with Bix & Paul Whiteman. I've been looking for a comp of that stuff forever.
Wait, no, that was a bong.
apparently bing crosby was pot head when he was younger. louis armstrong introduced him to trees in his younger days and in the 60's and 70's he was vocal about how the herb should be decriminalized. kinda ill.
There is a Bing Cosby Themed Restaurant (WTF?) that just opened down the street. I kinda want to check it out. I like immitating Bing's singing.
Sayin. I admit to only checking for Bing when Silver Bells are ringing, but i'll ride hard for that Christmas album all day every. My grandkids will be listening to that schitt.
I think Les Paul, who recorded Bing, might be the innovator you are talking about.
My favorite Bing cut is, I'm An Old Cowhand.
The way he changed the approach to singing and cool, but I don't want to sit through more than one or two songs at a time.
Now Frank, him I can listen to.
Even considering the institutionalized dehumanization of blacks was still going strong in early 20th century and how entertainers were ignorant, willfully or not, of blackface's origins as brutal parody, I still cannot wrap my mind around how this was considered remotely tasteful.
DISCLAIMER: This is just my opinion, I'm not stating it as fact, it's just my theory.
I think a big component of racism in the 20th century U.S. was fear.
Legitmate fear of white people by blacks that had been abused on every level.
And a fear of the unknown by white people who feared blacks.
This latter fear may have been driven by the guilt of knowing that a good ass kicking(or worse) was deserved for slavery and other atrocities.
It was probably also a result of difference.......... being incapable of recognizing that the only difference between them and African-Americans was skin color.
Fear and ignorance.
Yet they recognized that black people were talented and they admired their music and performing abilities.
And the only way they could experience it without overcoming their fear and ignorance was to imitate it.
Of course this imitation itself was ignorant and offensive by definition.
Al Jolson was white people's way of enjoying what they perceived as black music.
Tasteful......in retrospect, HELL NO!
Later, in the 50's/60's they just put white people on the cover of black artists LP's so white people could "safely" enjoy black music.
That being said, anyone who uses blackface in 2009 is doing so for the sole purpose to insult and offend.
Oddly enough, Crosby also starred in the biography of the man who invented blackface/minstrelsy, Dan Emmett , who also wrote 'Dixie'.
I picked up the complete Little Rascals this past year and was stunned by how much blackface material (some gags, some performances by people other than the 'Our Gang' kids) had been edited out from what I had seen as a kid.
I had a talk with my Dad (who's 78) about how much of this he remembers (he was born in 1931). He said that minstrel shows (though often without blackface) were not at all uncommon as amateur entertainments well into the 40s. My own grandfather acted as 'interlocutor' (a stock minstrel character) in shows at the firehouse where he was a fireman (this was in Westchester County, outside of NYC).
Q) What's the difference between Bing Crosby and Walt Disney?
A) Bing sings and Walt disnae.
Actually, no. Les Paul was an innovator when it came to multitrack recording, but not magnetic tape in general. I don't recall Bing Crosby being an innovator as far as the actual development of the technology, but he was one of the first people to actually embrace recording to magnetic tape. He had a radio show back in the day and the story I heard was he embraced magnetic tape so he could record his radio shows in advance, thus giving himself more time to go golfing.
Actually, this is from his Wikipedia entry:
"Crosby exerted an important influence on the development of the postwar recording industry. In 1947, he invested US$50,000 in the Ampex company, which developed North America's first commercial reel-to-reel tape recorder, and Crosby became the first performer to pre-record his radio shows and master his commercial recordings on magnetic tape. He gave one of the first Ampex Model 200 recorders to his friend, musician Les Paul, which led directly to Paul's invention of multitrack recording."
Of course, if we really want to recognize the innovators of magnetic tape recording we'd have to give props to the Nazis. They developed tape recording and would record Hitler giving speeches so he could give multiple speeches in one day and seemingly from different cities vast distances apart. The US was baffled by that at first since magnetic tape recording didn't exist to the US. In the end a member of the US military ended up shipping some of the German tape units back to the US and developed them for commercial use here.
I was wondering when that British literature course was going to pay off.
And today is that day.
I don't get it.
but back to the blackface thing....I think Rock's explanation is pretty interesting. I was reading somewhere about the Black Swan label, and how in the beginning they were forcing the artists to perform what white people expected black music to sound like rather than what actual black music sounded like, i.e. the minstrels. But then the black audience said "WTF?" and they went on to record black music the way it actually was. Or something like that.
But I can't get with Al Jolson at all. Even if I could get past the blackface stuff, the singing is just awful to me.