Western Wanderings: The voice of Christmas. - sound recording review

Sunset, Dec, 2001 by Peter Fish

* SPOKANE, WASHINGTON--In our house, the December ritual goes like this. We gather around the VCR, eggnogs in hand, and fidget until the movie begins. Opening scene: Christmas Eve 1944, the European theater, not far from the front lines. On an impromptu stage, two song-and-dance men in Santa hats soft-shoe for their fellow GIs. Then the dance number ends, and one of the hoofers steps forward. In a baritone of almost ethereal purity and strength he begins to sing, "I'm dreaming of ..."

The dream is of a white Christmas; the singer is Bing Crosby. At one time, such identifying information would have been superfluous. But in the quarter century since his death, the singer has been pushed aside in favor of flashier entertainers. Now he is being rediscovered.

"I could listen to him for hours," says Stephanie Edwards Plowman, curator of the Bing Crosby Collection at Gonzaga University in Spokane.

The Bing Crosby Collection is here because Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby was a Spokane boy; he studied with the Jesuits at Gonzaga High School and later at Gonzaga University. He was pondering law school when he realized his weekend passion--singing with a local five-piece band known as the Musicaladers--mattered more to him than being an attorney. In 1925, at the age of 22, he hotfooted it to Los Angeles and tried to break into show business.

He hit it big. He toured with jazz band leader Paul Whiteman, made a movie, sold records and more records (although his first gold record, Sweet Leilani, did not come until 1937). By the late 1930s he was among the nation's most popular radio personalities; by the 1940s he was one of Hollywood's top stars. And all the time he was singing in a voice that friend Louis Armstrong likened to "gold being poured out of a cup."

Mementos from this career fill the Crosbyana Room: sheet music and gold records, posters from Crosby's Road movies with Bob Hope, and the Oscar he earned in Going My Way.

There are reminders, of course, of Crosby's biggest hit, "White Christmas." Irving Berlin wrote it for Crosby's 1942 film, Holiday Inn; it seemed to tap into a national longing for peace and hope in troubled times. "White Christmas" topped the music charts that year, and did so again in 1945 and 1947. In 1954, Crosby starred in a film, White Christmas, inspired by the song, which became the top grossing movie of the year. Even today, White Christmas stands as the best-selling record of all time.

"Crosby is a great figure," says Gary Giddins. Music critic for The Village Voice, Giddins this year published Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams, which has helped revive interest in the singer. "He could sing anything with authenticity, and he was an unparalleled interpreter of lyrics."

For Giddins, there is something else about Crosby: a niceness, an everyday-guy-ness. "The audiences adored him," he says. "Especially coming through the Depression and World War II, he was a guy people invested hopes and dreams in."

These qualities shine in the movie White Christmas. Through all the improbabilities of plot, the mix-ups with Danny Kaye and Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney, through the lesser songs, there he is, the boy from Spokane whose voice breaks your heart and heals it again.

Here in the Crosbyana Room, in the Crosby Student Center, Stephanie Plowman turns on a tape and Bing starts to sing, "Don't Fence Me In." We listen for a while, smiling. Soon, at our house, White Christmas the movie will near its end. Snow will at last fall on that Vermont inn, and Bing will step forward a second time to sing the reprise of the title song. And, even in troubled times, we'll feel that Christmas is possible after all.