At 06:08 PM 4/19/99 -0400, you wrote:
>why choose Bing over Frank then?? Just wondering how your logic works . .
This is a good question, James--and I also appreciate that you at least
assume I have a logic to work <g>.
I wouldn't necessarily say that Bing's influence has stretched further into
the future than Frank's but I'd argue that BC's initial contributions,
which of course allowed for Frank's later elaborations, were more
significant. Bing created new ways of singing that, first off, allowed the
singer to swing (and here Bing's vocals were influenced by Satchmo's
playing, of course) and second, that were conversational and intimate, two
things that had not really existed, in the era of Jolsen and Cantor, before
the old groaner's innovations. Sinatra greatly refined those techniques, to
be sure, but he didn't come up with entirely new ones, as Bing had.
Also, I'd argue that Bing's musical influence reached outside the pop music
of his day, which went until I was a kid don't forget. For one example,
without Crosby's style of singing it's hard to imagine the Tommy Duncan,
Gene Autry, Red Foley, Jim Reeves, George Morgan or Eddy Arnold that we all
(?) love so dearly. Similarly, Bing also had a great influence on musical
theater. Sinatra's specific influence didn't cross boundaries so much, not
even to the stage where again he just continued what Bing had started, and
when it did it was perhaps more in swagger than anything else.
I don't know if that makes a case or not, but that's the, uh, "logic."
You know, I think I'd nominate ol' Cros' as THE performer of the century,
even before Elvis. What I mean by that is that, for one thing, he was the
one who first most widely employed the concept of a public persona that
became identifiable with the man--that in fact made it hard to distinguish
between the man and the entertainer (see writers Gary Giddens and Will
Freidwald for elaborations on this point). He was also one of the first to
go multi-media as a hugely successful film/radio star. Our entire century
of celebrity has, in the decades since, been built upon these two
strategies, all the way from, uh, Sinatra and Elvis on up to Madonna and
Tupac. --david cantwell
