“Elvis Bows, Bing Just Nods”:
High and Low Culture in Fancy
Meeting You Here
Gilbert L. Gigliotti
On Fancy Meting You Here, his 1958 duet
album with Rosemary Clooney, Bing Crosby offers a trenchant critique of the
coarsening of American culture. From
Crosby’s own liner notes to many of the special lyrics written by Sammy Cahn and Ira Gershwin, among others, the musical travelogue
offers listeners a crash course in late-fifties pop culture while exposing the
incipient fissure between young and old that would become the “generation gap”
the following decade.
The RCA-Victor
album (LSP-1854), a collection of thirteen geographically-themed songs,
including “On a Slow Boat to China,” “Hindustan,” “You Came A Long Way from St
Louis,” “Isle of Capri,” and “Calcutta,” was recorded during three sessions on
July 28th, August 7th and 11th, 1958. It was based, according to the record jacket,
upon an idea by songwriters Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen[1],
and serves as a de facto sequel to
Frank Sinatra’s best selling album Come
Fly with Me,[2] released
by Capitol Records in February of that same year, its title track also written
by Cahn and Van Heusen, and
also arranged and conducted by Billy May, the former trumpeter and arranger for
Charlie Barnet and Glenn Miller (Rice; Whitburn
282).
As on the Sinatra album, May’s
arrangements on Fancy Meeting You Here
are sonically rich and very witty, all the while taking full advantage of the
possibilities of stereophonic recording technology. As jazz saxophonist Buddy Collette describes
May’s work with Sinatra during the same period:
[He] would try
things. He might put in little songs,
start a
little melody and
work that way through the whole chorus, and
Frank would like
that because it was different. Billy May
was
very
inventive…he’d be putting the song into the background
and voicing it,
which would work against the chords…(Granata 135).
May’s last minute arranging was infamous, while, at the same
time, being well recognized for his fresh orchestrations, or, as drummer Alvin Stoller phrased it: “Billy wrote with meat” (Granata 135). Indeed,
May’s “meaty” presence, both musical and physical, is hard to ignore on almost
all of his recordings. On Fancy Meeting You Here, in fact, Cahn especially mentions him in the final cut of Side I,
“Love Won’t Let You Get Away,” when, commenting about the many songs that await
listeners on Side Two, Bing and Rosie sing:
Rosie: Here comes another side
Here we go for
that tourist ride
Bing: Lots of places we haven’t tried
Seems the world’s
as wide as Billy May!
In short, May’s remarkable size and talent make listeners
marvel even at what should be quite obvious (the mass of Earth itself), just as
his arrangements make such standards as “Hindustan” (1918), “It Happened in
Monterey” (1930), and “Isle of Capri” (1934) seem as fresh as the year they
were composed.
Not
surprisingly, given both the previous pairing of Crosby and Clooney in the 1954
movie hit White Christmas and, since
Rosie was a favorite singing partner of Bing because “their vocal range and
esprit were a perfect match” (Giddins 513), the singers’
performances consistently equal May’s arrangements in wit, warmth, and
exuberance.[3] Bing, after all, as Gary Giddins
writes in his landmark biography A
Pocketful of Dreams, was “never more honestly or affably himself than in
duets,” a format he used “more frequently than anyone else – on records, radio,
and television” (Giddins 513). And, as Giddins
further describes it, Bing preferred duets because the format presented him
with:
…a
challenge, like golf, with a modified
degree of competition.
He
was as generous to other singers as to fellow actors, and his
supreme confidence
relaxed and inspired them. The laughter
in
a Crosby duet was
never scripted, while the scripted material
often sounds
improvised; it is generally impossible to tell how
much was planned.
(513)
The
Crosby/Clooney duets on Fancy Meeting you
Here fit this description perfectly.
On “Isle of Capri,” for example, Rosie’s reading of “that Capri isle was
a real ringer-dinger” sparks an
audible giggle from Bing. Similarly, both
in the opening of “You Came a Long Way from St. Louis,” when Bings suggests that someone knit Brigitte Bardot a “hug-me-tight” so she won’t “catch her death of a
cold” and, in “Calcutta,” when he refers to a snake as a “Hope double,” his
line readings tickle Rosie not a bit.
Of course,
another explanation for the spontaneity of Clooney’s reactions could be that Bing’s script did not read exactly as Rosie’s did, since,
from early in his radio career Crosby was well known for altering his lines
specifically to surprise his guests and interlocutors (Giddins
411). The “Hope double, y’know,” line seems especially tossed off, for
example.
Such verbal playfulness is also a
hallmark of Sammy Cahn’s “special lyrics,” a forte of his songwriting career. For Cahn, perhaps
best known as the songwriter “who put more words into Frank Sinatra’s mouth
than any other man”(Cahn 129), also was well known
throughout the entertainment industry for his “special material:” lyrics
written to the tunes of popular standards specifically for different events
across the musical, personal, and political spectrum.[4] Cahn’s occasional
lyrics were in high demand due to his ability to reflect the personalities and
interests of the individual performers who would sing his words – not to
mention his ability to include a remarkable number of “inside jokes,” as
well. Within the songs of Fancy Meeting You Here, for example, we
hear mention of Crosby’s being a stockholder in the Pittsburgh Pirates, Rosie’s
attraction to Marlon Brando, (“How About You?”), Bing’s earlier incarnation as a crooner (“Brazil”),[5]
and how absolutely everyone eats at “Dino’s,” Dean Martin’s restaurant “back on
the strip in L.A.”(“Isle of Capri”).
More intriguing, however, to this
listener, is how the album uses Crosby’s well-wrought persona to reflect what
can now be identified as the developing split between the Browkavian
“greatest generation” and their offspring, the baby boomers. That persona, in turn, mirrors two
significant aspects of Bing’s background: the classical
education Crosby received from the Jesuits in high school and college and his
lifelong love of language and wordplay.
Crosby benefited from being “the
only major singer in American popular music to enjoy the virtues of a classical
education,” because his education, according to Giddins:
…grounded his values and
expectations, reinforc[ed] his
confidence, and buffered him from his own ambition. [For]
as faithful as he was to show business, his demeanor was
marked by a serenity that suggested an appealing
indifference.
He had something going for him that could not be touched by
weigh the rewards of this world versus those of the next and
to
keep his own counsel (56-57)
Indeed, at least two songs from Fancy Meeting You Here make much of Bing’s
long-standing stardom and success and his self-deprecating attitude toward it,
“You Came a Long Way from St. Louis” and “I Can’t Get Started.”
In the
opening recitative of “
Bing has it all, but he is grounded enough to know not to
take it seriously and, moreover, one’s health should always win out over
fashion (no matter how attractive the look!).
Likewise, in the new Ira Gershwin
lyrics to “I Can’t Get Started”[6]
even as Bing declares how much power he wields in the world (by comparing
himself to the most recent musical icon), there is an inescapably self-effacing
quality that shines through his performance of the lyric:
Good grief, I’m
not exactly a clod.
When Elvis
Presley bows I just nod…
As a good student of the Jesuits,
Crosby viewed his position at the top of the entertainment world as a uniquely
privileged and powerful pulpit – even as he gently played off the priestly
image – in support of “scholastic progressiveness” and “liberal benevolence” (Giddins 55, 558).
For example, the title of an article in the February 1938 issue of Down Beat, which recounts many of
Crosby’s good deeds towards his friends in show business, captures these twin
concerns: “Bing Crosby (Dr. of Square Shooting) Known as Squarest Man in
Hollywood” (Giddins 456).
In 1958,
Indeed, in response to such
cultural trends, he admits the travelogue concept of Fancy Meeting You Here could be quite “salutary” for American
record buyers who, when they are not “wrapped up in the reading matter featured
on the album jackets,” are “wrapped up in one another” in the listening
booths. As he instructively continues:
With
the accompanying map some geography could be
absorbed. A careful selection of songs could reveal the
mores of the
places visited, the transportation facilities
available, the
mean climate, etc.[9]
Long before the term was invented,
The singer himself, however,
immediately discounts such “educational entertainment” as sounding “pretty
stuffy” and proceeds to highlight a variety of factors (Rosie’s voice and
humor; new lyrics by Cahn, Gershwin, and Bob Russell;
and even brand new songs) that prevent the record from turning, in Bing-speak,
into “a complete cruller.” Still, at notes’ conclusion, his schoolmasterish
voice returns, invoking, as it were, Horace’s admonition in the Ars Poetica that
good literature should both please and instruct (Epistles II.iii.333-334):
…remember—study the
map while listening. It’s very engrossing.
Comically portrayed or not, Bing’s didacticism seems obvious throughout the album, as
the singers take aim at many fads.
Crosby and Clooney’s updated rendition of “It Happened in Monterey,” for
instance, lampoons the annoyingly repetitive cha-cha beat and its eponymous
dance craze and pre-dates the more famous Sam Cooke parody “Everybody Likes to
Cha-Cha,” which went to #31 in 1959 (Pareles and Romanowski 119).
After briefly running through the standard chorus and verse, they sing:
That was the way they
used to play,
But here’s the
version you’ll hear today:
They cha-cha-cha’d in
They cha-cha-cha’d in
The song, in short, asks the musical question, even
punctuated with a comical trombone burp at its conclusion: how can anyone not
be heartbroken at such a rendering?
Similarly, that the tourist couple
is driven off “The Isle of Capri” not by fate or the fear of commitment but by
the ubiquity of stale mandolin arrangements and bad pasta dishes cannot but be
seen as pessimistic harbingers of the future of pop culture.[10] The rhyming of “
But it is not simply the sorry
state of contemporary music that is problematic in the corrupted rendering of “It
Happened in
His
way with words, not just his singing and whistling,
helped define Bing’s personality…He rolled large words
on his tongue,
trilled rs,
fiddled with malapropisms and
spoonerisms, and
mimicked the lower, upper, and outcast
classes,
exemplified in minstrel badinage or highfalutin rhetoric. (63)
Bing performs thus in his liner notes:
And then to make
it as gilt-edged as a sheaf of municipals,
[producer Simon Rady] dropped the whole project into the
ample lap of that
Falstaff of the arrangers, that Rabelais of the
rolling bass –
“The Merry Maestro,” Billy May.
As a singer, language was his primary medium, and what was
happening to lyrics at the hands of rock-and-roll had to be disheartening. The literate lyrics of Tin Pan Alley writers
were under assault and demanded worthy defenders, and he and his collaborators
here answer the clarion call.
In 1958, there was no doubt who
this company of artists thought would win out. Indeed, Fancy Meeting You Here concludes on a decidedly confident note when
My little
chickadee,
You may say that
you’re through with me
You’ll have no
more to do with me
You’re all through
with me and good day
But you’ll find
that love won’t let you get away
Record buyers may think their relationship with Bing is
over, but, he assures them, it is not.
More than forty years later,
however, a striking allusion to Verdi’s “Anvil Chorus” from Il Trovotore,
in “On a Slow Boat to
Works
Cited
Bennett,
Charles and John Rolfe, eds. Horace:
Complete Works.
Bacon, 1962.
Brackett,
David. Interpreting Popular Music.
1995.
Cahn, Sammy. I Should Care: The Sammy Cahn Story.
Crosby,
Bing. “Liner Notes.” Fancy
Meeting You Here. LSP-1854. RCA, 1958.
Giddins, Gary. Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams The Early Years 1903-1940.
Granata, Charles L. Sessions with Sinatra: Frank Sinatra and the
Art of Recording.
Hardy,
Phil, and Dave Laing.
The Faber Companion to 20th-Century
Popular Music.
Pareles, Jon, and Patricia Romanowski, eds. The Rolling
Stone Encyclopedia of Rock
and Roll.
Rice,
Robert W. “Rosemary Clooney.” Clap
Your Hands Here! Comes Rosie/Fancy
Meeting You Here. TARCD-1060.
Taragon Records, 2000.
Ulanov, Barry. The Incredible
Whitburn, Joel. The Billboard Book of Top 40 Albums.
1995.