Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  America was now awash with singing idols who didn’t need to raise their voices to capture an audience – one that was predominantly young, female and avid. There was the cowboy crooner Nick Lucas, who helped to popularise an instrument rarely heard before in popular music. ‘Why not learn the guitar9?’, prompted a British reviewer of Lucas’s oeuvre in 1926. ‘It is a coming instrument for dance work.’ Another exemplar was the ‘whispering pianist’, Art Gillham, who played a cross between blues and ragtime piano, and anticipated the rampant egotism of rock ’n’ roller Jerry Lee Lewis in the way he told himself to ‘play it pretty, baby’. He was soon trumped in the barely-breathing stakes by Whispering Jack Smith (not to be confused with his 1960s Whistling namesake). His forte was sounding like a Yankee twin to the British writer and cabaret artiste Noël Coward; his voice was so clipped and hushed that it was as if he were standing behind the record-buyer and mumbling suggestive nothings into her ear. On stage, he adopted ‘a really confidential attitude10’, draping one arm casually over his piano as if he were in the back seat of a cinema, and accompanying himself with a minimum effort of the right hand. There were dozens more of lesser personality, now long forgotten: Chester Gaylord, Charles Lawman, Smith Balleur, Seger Ellis … even a British contender or two, such as Sam Browne and Maurice Elvin, who was known on these shores as ‘the wizard of the microphone’.

  The definition of ‘crooner’ soon stretched sufficiently to encompass any singer of a romantic disposition. Foremost among those was Arthur Tracy, universally known as ‘The Street Singer’. Though he was clearly operatically trained, threatening hearing loss to any modest damsel into whose ear he might roar, he attracted a fervent female following, first in his native America and then in Britain, where he was a regular feature in the popular weekly magazines. He posed for cameras and pen-portraits as a wandering hobo of the accordion, and it seemed not to affect his reputation in the slightest when it was revealed that he had never sung in the streets, and did not actually play the accordion heard on his records.

  By early 1927, there was even a female crooner in tow: Vaughn DeLeath (admittedly not the most feminine of stage names for a woman born Leonore Vonderleath).fn2 Like her male rivals, however, DeLeath had to bow to the paragon of the genre. Paul Whiteman’s ‘Muddy Water’ was a cover of a recent hit by Harry Richman, who was set on stealing Al Jolson’s vaudeville crown. After eighty jaunty and uneventful seconds, the melodious waves parted to reveal a 23-year-old singer who gave off a burst of contradictory signals – reticence, sly humour, politeness and an innate sense of jazz timing. This was the solo debut of a young man named Harry Lillis Crosby, who was one half of a vaudeville team called the Rhythm Boys, one quarter of Whiteman’s vocal combo, and a performer of whom bandleader Artie Shaw famously said (to the youngster’s finest biographer, Gary Giddins): ‘The thing you have to understand11 about Bing Crosby is that he was the first hip white person born in the United States.’

  For anyone born in the 1950s or afterwards, it is difficult to square that reckoning of Crosby’s talent with the distant memory of a middle-aged entertainer who seemed to lack Sinatra’s panache, Presley’s physicality or Dylan’s insight, to name but three hip white persons from subsequent eras. Bing seemed, to the rock ’n’ roll generation, to be a showbiz schmoozer who exhibited a strange distance from his peers, whilst masquerading as their closest friend. Then he died, and various family members testified to his shortcomings as a husband and father. While Sinatra’s appeal and presence merely multiplied with age and beyond death, Crosby felt (I don’t say ‘sounded’ because, really, who was listening to him in 1977?) like the most prominent member of a breed that had been rendered irrelevant by the arrival of rock ’n’ roll. The rock ’n’ roll generation (and this writer, as its guilty representative) didn’t know what it was missing. Bing Crosby wasn’t merely the ultimate crooner – a category that would soon become the subject of similar derision – but arguably the most influential singer of the twentieth century. His celebrity fans would have concurred: among them Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan.

  One of the most enduring of Crosby’s achievements was translating scat singing into a tool that could be used by any performer. By 1932, his technique had become so prevalent that the New York Times could deplore ‘the boys and girls who intersperse12 the vapid lines of the chorus with a medley of monotonous, meaningless syllables which defy print. These interpolations sound as if the singer had forgotten the words of the ditty and had to fill in with a tra-la. Sometimes they vary it with a whistled bar or two.’ So relaxed and inviting was this style that it lent itself to imitation. ‘People sing more than they did13, and more for their own pleasure than with any thought of an audience’, noted a BBC report at the end of that decade. It was now unremarkable to hear someone humming, whistling or scatting a tune in the street, activities that a few years earlier would have made them candidates for an asylum. With a vested interest, the BBC’s sociologists declared that the credit for this shift in public behaviour could be claimed not only by the sublime easiness of the crooners – but by the prevalence of the medium that had brought them to the masses: the radio.

  Soft, foul, crooner-obsessed14 Britain …

  A. K. Chesterton, propaganda director, British Union of Fascists, 1936

  Whiners and bleaters15 defiling the air … a degenerate form of singing … No true American would practice this base art … They are ribald and revolting to true men.

  Cardinal O’Connell, Archbishop of Boston, 1932

  At the height of the Second World War – as the first battle of El Alamein raged, and German forces advanced towards the Russian fortress of Stalingrad – the BBC turned its sights on the enemy within. The Corporation believed that the morale of the British public was in its care. The nation’s spine needed to be stiffened and straightened. This was not the time for ‘flabby’ entertainment, which would soften the British will to resist Germany and its allies.

  ‘Male crooners16’, a senior BBC executive declared, ‘are quite divorced from the reality of the times.’ Their voices were unmanly, and betrayed homosexual leanings; their songs sentimental and enervating; their demeanour threatened to reduce the British heart to ‘slush’. On 21 July 1942, the organisation issued a formal Dance Music Policy, which laid down its guiding principles. At its head was a simple aim: ‘To exclude any form of anaemic17 or debilitated vocal performance by male singers … To exclude numbers which are slushy in sentiment.’ Several of Britain’s leading dance-band vocalists were banned from the airwaves for the duration of the conflict.

  Bing Crosby was spared from the BBC’s assault. Indeed, his appearance later in the war on the immensely popular radio show Variety Band Box was thought to have provided a welcome shot of adrenaline to a public worn down by years of bombing and rationing. It helped that, as his biographer noted, ‘Bing’s singing was nothing18 if not virile … the Cardinal O’Connells of the world could never tag him with imputations of effeteness.’ Gary Giddins explained the magic of his vocal technique: ‘Bing conveyed a chest-tone19 approach, making full use of his diaphragm.’ By contrast, ‘Most of his predecessors20 who were not belters belonged to the genteel school, and sang with effete head tones.’

  Foremost among these ‘effete’ performers was a bandleader whose voice, in the pre-microphone age, had been so slight that he required a megaphone to be heard above the hubbub of his band. In the late 1920s, however, Rudy Valleefn3 began to appear on a weekly radio variety show in New York, The Fleischmann Yeast Hour. In that medium, the delicacy of his vocals became an asset rather than a burden, lending him a sense of intimacy which many listeners found positively erotic – especially his female fans, who could imagine that he was addressing each of them personally. As one historian noted, ‘This approach made some people21 uneasy, and they viewed Vallee and his counterparts as effeminate, as “sissies” who did not project traditional masculinity into the music. But his legions of fans felt otherwise; they loved the image
of a man confessing his weaknesses in a romantic relationship.’

  Almost immediately, Vallee and his Connecticut Yankees aroused a following that was both fervid and voluble. His fans were almost entirely female, and many of them in their teens, an audience who had never before been targeted with such cunning accuracy. ‘Men Hate Him! Women Love Him!’, screamed the advertisements for his 1929 film The Vagabond Lover. The journalist Martha Gellhorn witnessed this phenomenon as Vallee performed at the Paramount in Brooklyn: ‘The audience, except for the few22 uncomfortable males present, goes mad. A murmur of delight rises like a tidal wave, becomes an envious moan, pants into a yearning sob … The woman in the next seat murmurs, “Isn’t he the sweetest ever?” Another, behind us, sighs, “That’s too lovely to be true” … The audience does not slacken in its turbulent enthusiasm. It is enraptured, fanatical … He is their darling, their Song Lover.’

  Such ecstatic devotion was stirred solely by Rudy Vallee’s persona on radio, which was now an essential vehicle for anyone who wished to rival his success. Bing Crosby accompanied Paul Whiteman’s orchestra on many broadcasts, before winning his own nationally networked Columbia Broadcasting show in 1931. Its success was instantaneous: within weeks he had begun a lengthy season of performances at the Paramount theatres in Brooklyn and on Broadway, where fans were perhaps less frenzied than they had been around Vallee, but proved to be more enduringly loyal. So concerned was the NBC network by the impact of Crosby’s CBS programme that they scheduled another crooner showcase, starring Russ Columbo, immediately afterwards. Only a bizarre shooting accident in 1934 cut short the youthful Columbo’s advance on Crosby’s crooning crown.

  The radio technology pioneered by Marconi at the birth of the twentieth century was initially assumed to be an extension of the telephone, transmitting messages to an audience beyond earshot. By 1910, however, records were being broadcast in several major US cities. Within another decade, the first officially licensed transmitter (beaming station KDKA) began broadcasting from East Pittsburgh, and could be picked up by amateur radio enthusiasts across the Atlantic.

  Crooning and radio grew in tandem, fuelling each other’s rise. More than news or features, the public wanted entertainment. Broadcasters quickly learned that the medium lent itself to a gentler style than that appropriate for a vaudeville theatre. While the airwaves of Britain and the BBC were placed under government control in 1927, America was the home of sponsored broadcasting. Top entertainers would act as the mouthpiece for any company or product that purchased their services. The limitations of technology, and the slightly invasive act of entering people’s homes, combined to make certain forms of music more acceptable to the masses than others: hence the popularity of the soft-voiced crooners, who could bring warmth to the most solitary of listeners. To enhance the illusion that they were the audience’s friends, they were given affectionate nicknames, so that Little Jack Little was known as the Friendly Voice of the Cornfields and, more exotically, Joe White became the Silver-Masked Tenor, his true identity a secret for many years.

  Radio could convince millions that an entertainer was performing for each of them alone; it turned music, and especially the art of the crooner, into a private act of communion. It was more seductive than listening to a record, because not only could the performers be heard to speak, but their voices seemed to come into the room as if by magic – without the fantasy-shattering necessity of winding up a gramophone or placing a needle on a record every three minutes.

  Radio could create its own stars, who often had to perform in public under pseudonyms invented by their sponsors – the Mono Motor Oil Twins, for example, or the Interwoven Pair (also known as the Happiness Boys, or in pre-radio days as Billy Jones and Ernest Hare). It also boosted the careers of dance bands, especially after the mid-1920s, when technology made it feasible for live performances to be broadcast; and, from 1928 onwards, these programmes could be heard across the United States, as local stations were ‘hooked up’ to form national networks. While comedians complained that too much radio exposure killed their prospects as live performers, because audiences had already heard their gags, dance bands competed for airtime, confident that their popularity would be multiplied by the kudos of broadcasting.

  It was not enough to be heard on the radio, of course; one had to be enjoyed. Just as crooners provided superior (and ‘easier’) listening than strident baritones or piercing sopranos, ‘sweet’ bands were greatly preferred to their ‘hot’ counterparts. As the head of the Davey radio network explained in 1932, ‘The constant jar and rasping23 of irritating sound that is sometimes called music has a tendency to put the nerves on edge. If one turns his radio on for a whole evening and hears nothing but slam-bang jazz, his nervous system is likely to be in rebellion. It seems to me that one of the most desirable qualities of a radio program is restfulness, which causes one to lean back in his chair and be comfortable while listening to the music. A little stimulant is all right, but modern people need a larger proportion of the soothing qualities of entertainment.’ Those who were employed to judge the aesthetic quality of music might often disagree, but the majority demanded smooth, melodious sounds. Radio was in effect an uninvited guest, which had to mind its manners and quell its idiosyncrasies to avoid being asked to leave.

  A decade earlier, the French composer Erik Satie had imagined a form of music that would ‘mask the clatter of knives24 and forks without drowning it completely, without imposing itself’. Simultaneously, a former brigadier general from the US Army conceived the idea of music as a form of social control, dampening any urges towards rebellion or subversion. The two thoughts were combined in 1922 when the North American company Wired Music Inc. began to pipe a blend of music and news reports into subscribers’ homes. Rather than relying on records, with their risk of aural stimulation, Wired Music assembled its own library of suitably sedated dance music – taking familiar tunes, and rearranging them so that nothing would grab the audience’s attention. The company offered its programming to hotels, shops and restaurants, matching the mood of their selections precisely to the ambience it was designed to create. By the mid-1930s, this service had assumed a more recognisable name, coined by combining the words ‘music’ (for its content) and ‘Kodak’ (to denote modernism): the Muzak Corporation.

  Compton Mackenzie had taken note of radio’s changing role. ‘There was a time when dance music25 was played by the BBC under the impression that people danced to it’, he wrote in 1934. ‘That delusion has long been cured. Dance music has become the staple noise emanating from a loudspeaker.’ But BBC radio had another task: adhering to the strict ethical principles of its supremo, director general John Reith. Here there was no commercial criterion to satisfy: listeners might have preferred a constant diet of light music, dance bands and crooning (although the latter two categories would have appalled those who regarded themselves as mature adults), but Reith’s strictures ensured that first they had to endure performances of operas, symphonies, concerti and other forms of ‘serious’ musical enlightenment. There were programmes aimed at children, and at adults, but nothing before the 1950s that might appeal specifically to those aged between (say) 12 and 25. Morals had to be carefully safeguarded, forcing the banning of all material likely to corrupt, shock or even mildly disturb the tiniest portion of the public. All references to commercial products were banned; so too songs (such as ‘Love For Sale’) which hinted even vaguely at the existence of sexual relations. For a while, Reith even refused to allow the titles of songs to be mentioned when acts were performing, in case that might be interpreted as a form of advertising. In later years, equally arbitrary restrictions were briefly imposed: a rationing on the proportion of American compositions, for example; a cull of vocal records, which were taken to be a distraction for the audience; and, consistently into the 1960s, an outright ban on any popular song that dared to take its melodic inspiration from a classical theme.fn4 This act of artistic outrage was held to be offensive to all persons of taste
. At any moment of potential conflict, the highbrow was always favoured over the populist. And, of course, no popular music at all could be aired on Sunday evenings.

  Regardless of these barriers, the BBC did create and maintain stars every bit as enduring as those fostered by the American networks. As in the US, the 1920s and early 1930s were the era of the dance band. Few of the American outfits ever performed in the UK, especially after disputes between the respective musicians’ unions halted the transatlantic trade in everything but variety entertainers between the early 1930s and the mid-1950s. So Britain nurtured its own talent; much in thrall to the American originals, it was true, but also boasting distinctively local attractions.

  While many members of the leading American bands harboured secret ambitions to play jazz, which could be satisfied with a discreet four-bar solo between the choruses of a popular melody, jazz might not have been discovered at all had the quest been left entirely to the British dance bands. Fads and gimmicks took months or even years to cross the Atlantic. Tunes travelled more quickly, especially if aided by theatrical revues or (from 1930 onwards) films. But there was still a distinct lag between the two cultures, which could mean that – in a slightly later era – the boom in American swing bands would not be echoed in Britain for the best part of a decade. Many British vocalists sang as if they were wearing the dinner jackets and black ties demanded of the BBC’s newsreaders and announcers. But whether or not they betrayed any hint of jazzy arrangements and ‘hot’ playing, the British bands supported a culture that enveloped the most aristocratic and lowly in the land in an orgy of dancing.

  Only the richest and best-connected personages on the social scene could expect to hear the Savoy hotel bands in their natural habitat. The nation’s top bands played hotels and nightclubs in London’s West End, because the financial and reputational rewards were so obvious. But beyond the Monseigneur and the Café de Paris, vast crowds were drawn to dance halls, where they were admitted for a few pennies that wouldn’t have bought them a soft drink at the Savoy, while in small towns and villages couples shut their eyes and whirled the foxtrot or the waltz to the sound of a radio or gramophone, imagining themselves ‘up West’ in the company of the Prince of Wales and his chums. As jazz historian Catherine Parsonage explained, ‘The dance hall was the only26 form of entertainment that could rival the cinema and public house [and which] gave women the opportunity to go out and enjoy themselves.’ The licence allowed to women during the First World War, then gradually withdrawn in the first years of peace, was seized back, never to be relinquished.