BING'S TEN FAVORITE PERFORMERS - PART ONE

Bing Crosby is often considered one of the greatest singers of all time. It is interesting as to who was some of his favorite performers.  Mr. Crosby contributed this list of his 10 favorite all-time performers to the first edition of The Book of Lists in 1977. As the years go by and some of these great artists fade from the collective consciousness, I think it important and well worth the time to use Mr. Crosby’s list as a reason to revisit their work. After all, these entertainers were the Jay Z and Katy Perry of their own time.

Crosby states: “These are not listed in order of preference, and include no actors, only performers. I could, of course, list hundreds more.”

1. AL JOLSON (1886-1950)
The cantor’s son was considered one of the greatest performers of the 20th-century. He was beloved by millions and a great influence on later performers like Judy Garland and Bing Crosby. In fact, in the 1930s he was the highest paid performer in the United States.

2. ETHEL WATERS (1896-1977)
Ethel Waters was one of the best-loved performers of the last century. A blues, jazz, and gospel vocalist who is associated with many standards, including “Am I Blue?,” “Dinah,” and “Stormy Weather” (a song later associated with Lena Horne). As an actress, she starred in many films including Cabin in the Sky (1942) and Pinky (1949), for which she became only the second African American woman nominated for an Oscar.

3. JAMES BARTON (1890-1962)
Barton is, perhaps, the most obscure performer on Mr. Crosby’s list. He was a lauded vaudevillian and star of film and television. He began in minstrel shows and, according to Wiki, his years working with black performers led him to becoming one of the first white jazz dancers in the country. He played the Palace Theater, the apex of vaudeville, eight times. He later became recognized as serious actor, performing on Broadway in Tobacco Road (1934) and The Iceman Cometh (1946).

Barton was featured as the emcee (and last dancer) in the 1929 Paramount short After Seven. The film also featured the Chick Webb Orchestra and Shorty George Snowden, whom I learned in my research was one of the most famous lindy hop dancers of the period.

4. FRANK SINATRA (1915-1998)
In his superb book Why Sinatra Matters (1998, Little, Brown and Company), Pete Hamill wrote:

“His finest accomplishment, of course, was the sound. The voice itself would evolve over the years form a violin to a viola to a cello, with a rich middle register and dark bottom tones. But it was a combination of voice, diction, attitude, and taste in music that produced the Sinatra sound. It remains unique. Sinatra created something that was not there before he arrived: an urban American voice.”

Of course Frank Sinatra remains one of the most admired, imitated, and absolutely essential performers of all-time. Even if he hadn’t presided over 20th-century popular culture so intensely and for so long—by the 1990s there were t-shirts that said, “It’s Sinatra’s World, We Just Live in It”—he would still have earned a place on this list by dint of his prolific body of work. From 1940s crooner to Oscar-winning actor, Sinatra was an entertainer par excellence and a uniquely American phenomena. His Capitol Records with arrangements by artists like Nelson Riddle, Billy May, and Gordon Jenkins, remain the high watermark of mid-century cool; a different kind of cool from the concurrent sound of rock ‘n roll, but in some ways more timeless.

5. LENA HORNE (1917-2010)
Lena Horne was many things: one of the biggest African American film stars of her generation, a sex symbol, a civil rights crusader, and one of the greatest singers of her time. Like Ethel Waters before her, she began as a Cotton Club dancer before transitioning to films. A victim of the intense racial politics of the mid-century, her studio MGM could not fully exploit her talent and she languished, primarily doing specialty numbers in all-star revues or the occasional all-black musical (Stormy Weather) before becoming one of the greatest nightclub performers of the 1950s and 1960s. (For more on her fascinating life, read my friend James Gavin’s riveting Horne biography Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne, which was published in 2009 by Simon and Schuster.)


TO BE CONTINUED...

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CROONERS AND PALM SPRINGS

Music lovers are soaking up the vibes this week of music legends at the Empire Polo Club.

Radiohead, Jimmy Cliff and Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg are there this weekend for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Steve Martin, Kenny Rogers, Roy Clark and Ralph Stanley will appear next weekend at Stagecoach: California's Country Music Festival.

But music legends have been coming to this desert long before Goldenvoice started importing them. Following is a list of some music legends with landmarks reflecting their desert roots...


AL JOLSON: Old-timers call him the greatest entertainer ever. He was chosen to say the first words in talking pictures in 1927's “The Jazz Singer.” He began coming to Palm Springs in the 1930s and lived at 570 Via Corta for parts of four years before his death in 1950. His style is perpetuated today by artists such as Liza Minnelli, whose mother, Judy Garland, imitated Jolson as a kid.

GENE AUSTIN: This Texas native invented the soft style of singing known as crooning partly as an alternative to Jolson's aggressive vocal style. Austin, whose biggest hit was “My Blue Heaven,” sold more records than any other RCA Victor artist until Elvis Presley in the 1950s. He spent his last days at 1440 S. Driftwood in Palm Springs before dying at Desert Regional Medical Center in 1972.

RUDY VALLEE: This preppy favorite became the first singer to incite women to tear off a performer's clothes in the late '20s. He went on to popularize the variety show format with a radio program that was near the top of the national ratings throughout the '30s. His house in Las Palmas has been razed, but there are still remnants of the Palm Springs Racquet Club, which he helped popularize by playing there regularly. He also has a spot on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars at 123 N. Palm Canyon Drive.

BING CROSBY: This crooner was Tin Pan Alley's first-call vocalist in the '30s. Consequently, he had more top-10 hits than any artist in history. He also won a Best Actor Oscar for his role in “Going My Way” in 1944. Sadly, Bing Crosby's restaurant in Rancho Mirage closed and his two Coachella Valley houses are in gated communities. But you can take a photo of yourself at the gate of the Blue Skies Village mobile home park at 70-260 Highway 111, Rancho Mirage, which Crosby helped design in 1955.

GENE AUTRY: He may be best known today as the founder of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, but Autry also was an immensely popular film and recording star as Hollywood's original singing cowboy. He also was quite a presence in the valley and his widow still lives in Palm Springs. His hotel where they lived is now The Parker. A building at Eisenhower Medical Center is named after him. But the best place for an Autry-themed photograph is the statue of him at the corner of Ramon Road and Gene Autry Trail in — coincidentally — Gene Autry Plaza.

FRANK SINATRA: When the McCallum Theatre's Mitch Gershenfeld was recently asked if Sinatra's popularity had waned since his death in 1998, he just laughed. Sinatra is the one pop singer whose popularity is not likely to wane. He also remains ubiquitous in the valley. The Palm Springs Desert Resort Communities Convention and Visitors Authority can you give you a self-guided tour of places associated with him, including his homes in Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage. But the coolest place to feel his presence is at his grave site at Desert Memorial Park, 31-705 Da Vall Drive, Cathedral City, near a pack of friends and family including his parents, songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen and friend Jilly Rizzo.

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IF THEY COULD SING LIKE BING: AL JOLSON

The song "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime" was nearly the national anthem during the Great Depression. No other song personifies what was going on during the 30s quite like that song. Written in 1931 by lyricist E. Y. "Yip" Harburg and composer Jay Gorney, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" was part of the 1932 musical New Americana; the melody is based on a Russian lullaby Gorney heard as a child. It became best known, however, through recordings by Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee. Both versions were released right before Franklin Delano Roosevelt's election to the presidency and both became number one hits on the charts. The Brunswick Crosby recording became the best-selling record of its period, and came to be viewed as an anthem of the shattered dreams of the era.

Although I think Bing's version is the best, but the following radio transcription by Al Jolson is a close second. Jolson's version contains all of the anguish and heartache that all of America was feeling at the time...