I love that 'In the Summertime' it's a great summer anthem and it's also deeply immoral and disgusting! Being one of the very small percent of people who actually listened to the words in pop songs not just the overall sound,and you'd be surprised how many people of my age group who've never clocked the lyrics,I realised age 13 the song was saying something both true and horrible. Pity I ignored the warning! But if you've ever gone past an English country pub on a nice summers day and seen a bunch of lads there- and they could be in there 50s! it's that song in real life. And they're nice people too! But lads have always been lads! Screechy feminists notwithstanding.
I also remember at like 14 when i first stumbled across this song thinking "wait, what did he say? I guess they were just more honest about it back then.." This was in the 90s, so halfway between then and now, thereabouts(kinda shows the progression).
And its a great song. Definitely captures the feeling of being a young man in the summer, with women on your mind. Even at 44 that feeling comes along like clockwork mid may..
I recently watched High Society on DVD. It's interesting to see how that Dad vibe he rocked back then which was very in tune with Middle America disguised that he wasn't that old,but he and Frank Sinatra seem the same age yet were different generations but then it was 'cool' to seen mature and sophisticated. And here in Britain a generation of teen boys like Cliff Richard,Paul MacCartney,John Lennon et al,just couldnt identify with these "Dads" and went on to develop their own style.
How amazingly coincidental that your email showed up in my onscreen inbox while I'm sitting at the piano rehearsing the Crosby/Bowie version of "Little Drummer Boy" for the Christmas Eve Singalong tonight at my Unitarian Universalist church. I'm almost 70 and singing the Crosby part, and the Bowie part will be sung by a 28 year old prog rock vocalist that I've known since his childhood. I'll be thinking of these Crosby stories tonight and well in the future. And I'll perhaps binge a few "Road To..." movies over the holiday. Thank you so much for this!
I have a 5th perspective. My father ran away from his home in Baltimore when he was 16 - went to New York City, to become a singer; no training whatsoever, but he sounded a lot like Bing Crosby. He was back in Baltimore within a few months and stayed there, except for WW-2, for the rest of his life. He seldom sang, and has been dead for forty years. Every time I hear Bing’s “White Christmas”, I hear my father’s voice.
A few of us are still devoted to the Road movies (they showed them all the time on TV when I was growing up), so we see Bing (and Bob) all year round. I recommend going to Youtube and watching Bing sing "You Don't Need to Know the Answer" with the Andrews Sisters. It's from Road to Rio, and it's absolutely jaw-dropping.
Very interesting, but I would add that you have left out Bing the great jazz singer, who recorded with Duke Ellington among others, and with various important jazz small groups (with Venuti and Lang among others) and whose vocals with the Whiteman band were revolutionary (I'm Comin' Virginia), plus his start with the vocal group within the Whitman band ,The Rhythm Boys, with Al Rinker (Mildred Bailey's brother IIRC) and Harry Barris. Bing was a musical original, and he could swing - plus, of course, his prime inspiration was Louis Armstrong. But he made a lot of recordings, early on, with jazz groups - so maybe he was not particularly thrown by that progressive jazz accompaniment you mention. He was among that group of early white musicians - which included Bix - who were some of jazz's early modernists.
Great piece! Thank you. Crosby could pretty much do anything. Dixieland, ballads, Irish folk music, swing, pop, comic, ensemble...His version of "Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral" is a masterclass in control. Going softer and softer, as the melody rises in pitch. Not for nothing he was the most successful pop singer of the mid-20th century.
When my daughter was born in 2015, I used to sing "my version" of "Too-Ra-Loo-Ra" to her, calling it "Daddy's lullabye." I recorded it on my phone, at one point, because I had to travel and my wife wanted to soothe her with it. I sang it to my son when he was born in 2018, continuing Bing's legacy, in a tangential sense. My version became so ingrained in my kids' minds, in a Pavlovian way, that I could put them to sleep on long car trips by launching into it. 3 minutes later, they'd be out. Magical.
I was there when he was a guest on Dinah! They were rehearsing with our eight-piece band, and in a lull, they discussed the immediate future. One of them had a concert coming up with the San Francisco Symphony. Ozawa was the conductor.
"He's a 'Jap' but they say he's good," Bing said. Dinah looked uncomfortable.
Crosby really invented modern music using amplifiers. It meant he didn't have to sing loud to be heard in the back, and he took advantage of it, singing softly and letting the microphone do the work. Listen to something from the 1920s if you don't believe me. His love of golf and northern California both contributed to the birth of Silicon Valley even before Ampex sold him that tape recorder. I loved reading that story.
Not mentioned in the story: Ampex also invented the videotape recorder in the 1950s. Instant success in replacing the film recording that was the only way of distributing video across long disances before microwave relays (and then satellites) made wide broadcasts commonplace. (Think of flying films of Olympic events across the Atlantic to be seen in the USA.) And here I quit because I remember these events, starting from near the beginning.
And the History & scope you speak of is so vast & interesting ,just too big a subject in a Podcast I would guess. Even though I was born in 1952 I know a lot of the history. I suppose because I've been a Musician & Performer for over 50 years.
Sparked by a very unpleasant 5th grade teacher. Who had 1 redeeming quality in my ancient memory - he was an enthusiastic Ukulele player. He got some kind of deal on like 30 or more Plastic Ukulele's & kind of strong armed our split 5th & 6th grade class into learning the instrument. All of the kids were Not pleased.
For some reason my parent's were friends with a Old Country type violin Maker down in the city. They bought me a much more expensive Wooden Uke. I think it was because I was, after a short time ,able to play certain tough chords (I remember F was hard). And I suppose my Dad was able to recognize something as he was a Jazz/Big Band type drummer that played in local clubs all through my young life.
The teacher was impressed (probably because my Uke was nicer than his ?). And thus began my Long journey ,which continues to this day.
Yes, Ampex is too big for a podcast. Interestng aboiut your 5th grade teacher, since I had a really bad one myself with no redeeming qualities whatever. Remarkable story of your musical progress. My own musical talents, which were better than usual, never got developed properly, and my destiny was STEM, which has been good to me and funded my retirement, in which I've cpontinued as a musical dilettante. And Merry [Christmas or whatever]!
I have had trouble understanding the friendship of Crosby and Hope. Bob Hope was so cynical, sarcastic, and a jingoist patriot. Bing Crosby seemed like the opposite in being the perennial optimist. I do not recall any cynical sarcastic statement coming from Bing Crosby. He was the ultimate family man. Bob Hope seemed to be a caricature of a philandering anti-family icon. His conservative politics is well known. It is a mystery to me how Hope and Crosby were such close friends. But then Ruth Bader Ginsburg was close friends with Antonin Scalia. Go figure.
Yes, I've read that as well. The story in my faded memory is of his extreme conservative Catholicism, and telling his daughter that if she had relations with her boyfriend outside of marriage he would cut her off forever. (Pls fact check.)
It's hard though; I somehow look past Picasso's and Miles Davis' terrible treatment of women, and can generally separate the person from their art - decrying the one while revering the other. Bing Crosby doesn't get that same intentional partial blindness. I can get along in my life w/o his smooth crooning. Maybe also bc I stopped finding Bob Hope funny in about 1960.
Would you crib a bit from your daughter’s paper? I would like to know more about Bing Crosby in that vein. Yes, I can and will do my own investigation but she may have turned up something that I might miss. Thanks for the pointer that she found evidence that was contrary to his “good guy” image.
It has been noted that two Hollywood stars noted for dry slightly sarky humour both came from my city of Bristol UK. My parents came to this city from the wider west country to find work in the 1950s. That migration has been going on for a thousand years and folk who have investigated both Grant + Hopes family trees show that their families too come from the area around Bristol,places in Gloucestershire and Somerset. The City of Bristol always had a reputation of being a hard place where fools were not tolerated and "suckers never given an even break". In that regard it was like our popular idea of Paris which probably explains why that city feels like home to me! The funniness of Hope and the more subtle funniness of Grant is very Bristolian in nature. Not so much today now all them Londoners are moving here and diluting it and putting the house prices up!!!
It was often cruel and not kind but it was robust.
I realized after my comment about Scalia and RBG that I do have a hypothesis about their friendship. I think both of them were hyper-nerds about the law and saw each other as simply working with different starting axioms. I have never heard someone claim they were autistic but who knows? I went deep on the study of very abstract mathematics. That story is relevant here so a brief thumbnail sketch. I have always been a humanities person at heart but my psychological dependency on my father whose failed dream to become a quantum theory physicist lead me to become daddy’s little scientist to get what little scraps of attention he was capable of giving. He was extremely withdrawn emotionally. In my senior year of high school I was reading Goethe’s view that relationships should be fundamental, not objects and properties. I instantly agreed with Goethe and less than a year later when I realized my relationship with my father was sick, instead of going into being a novelist, a dream when I was nine years old, I realized that my strong background in math and science might give me a perspective thar very few people in the humanities possessed. I nearly completed a PhD (ABD, all but dissertation) in mathematics. I realized that almost all STEM people were hyper-nerds whose closed minds would never consider Goethe’s ideas as anything other than fluffhead nonsense. I believe that RBG and Scalia approached the law like a puzzle in logic. For people in the humanities that phenomena exists in the airhead nonsense of nihilistic postmodernism. I refer to that way of thinking as idiotlogical. However, in the arts, like actors on stage or the movies, I do not know of any well respected actor who is idiotlogical except maybe Clint Eastwood. But even he made movies that were very well done, definitely not idiotlogical propaganda. There are idiotlogical actors like Jean-Claude Van Damme but as far as I know they are all fourth rate boneheads. To be a great actor, you must have incredible empathy which does require imagination. James Woods might be an exception. It is well known in psychopathology that some psychopaths are incredibly skilled in empathy. The vast majority of actors include loving kindness and compassion in their list of highest values. Barbara Streisand and Gregory Peck are prime examples of that kind of actor. Sorry about this TLDR rant. It is a major theme in how I understand what it means to be a good human being. BTW, I am NO saint. It has taken most of my life to get where I really felt like I understood the basics.
Thank you for these insights. I did not use the word virtue or cite that. I merely pointed out the the dry sardonic humour of both Bob Hope + Cary Grant was,and is still,very endemic in their native city. I said it was often cruel and that is not so much now,it is more watered down. I'm sure Grant + many other stars were involved in lots of dodgy areas of life and people but that's not my concern.
I understand what you are saying. I do have a strong bias towards looking at the place of morals and ethics as regards public influencers. I very much appreciate the influence of the environment but I refuse to take a nihilistic moral relativistic stance. I am NOT saying you do. I am pointing out my biases. These times are rife with people who refuse to take responsibility for the consequences of their behavior. I am sure I need not mention Boris or Liz.
Over 20 years ago, I did a lengthy interview with Ken Barnes, who produced most of Bing’s final albums during the mid-1970s. Ken told me that when Bing arrived at the studio (cutting not one but two albums with full studio orchestra), the musicians decided to play some good natured pranks on him (e.g., turning the time around) just to see how he’d react. Ken said that no matter how they tried to throw him off course, Bing’s internal time was so rhythmically solid that the musicians were utterly unable to faze him. By the time the first day of recording was finished, the players were saying things like “This guy is a real musician!” So the encounter you wrote about between Bing and the young “disciples of Coltrane” doesn’t sound far fetched at all!
I'm old enough that I grew up during the Bing TV years and saw nearly all of his movies (certainly the ones with Hope). But to me, the beauty of Bing Crosby was his voice and his singing. Like Sinatra, having come up with sophisticated and talented players and arrangers, the man could SING. Spend some time with his catalog and I guarantee you'll be amazed even with the sometimes lesser quality of recordings in the early 20th century. You will be rewarded.
Im suprised to see mungo jerry still so high on that list. Or maybe not, its a catchy tune. One that would never get made today, i might add..
"If her daddy's rich, take her out for a meal
If her daddy's poor, just do what you feel" would never fly today.
I highly encourage the movie white christmas be added to everybodies xmas movies list(if its not there all ready). Bings coolness is on full display.
I love that 'In the Summertime' it's a great summer anthem and it's also deeply immoral and disgusting! Being one of the very small percent of people who actually listened to the words in pop songs not just the overall sound,and you'd be surprised how many people of my age group who've never clocked the lyrics,I realised age 13 the song was saying something both true and horrible. Pity I ignored the warning! But if you've ever gone past an English country pub on a nice summers day and seen a bunch of lads there- and they could be in there 50s! it's that song in real life. And they're nice people too! But lads have always been lads! Screechy feminists notwithstanding.
I also remember at like 14 when i first stumbled across this song thinking "wait, what did he say? I guess they were just more honest about it back then.." This was in the 90s, so halfway between then and now, thereabouts(kinda shows the progression).
And its a great song. Definitely captures the feeling of being a young man in the summer, with women on your mind. Even at 44 that feeling comes along like clockwork mid may..
(Honorable mention also to the "have a drink, have a drive" part!)
I recently watched High Society on DVD. It's interesting to see how that Dad vibe he rocked back then which was very in tune with Middle America disguised that he wasn't that old,but he and Frank Sinatra seem the same age yet were different generations but then it was 'cool' to seen mature and sophisticated. And here in Britain a generation of teen boys like Cliff Richard,Paul MacCartney,John Lennon et al,just couldnt identify with these "Dads" and went on to develop their own style.
“Have a drink, have a drive, go out and see what you can find” has aged a bit too!
😂😂😂🤭
How amazingly coincidental that your email showed up in my onscreen inbox while I'm sitting at the piano rehearsing the Crosby/Bowie version of "Little Drummer Boy" for the Christmas Eve Singalong tonight at my Unitarian Universalist church. I'm almost 70 and singing the Crosby part, and the Bowie part will be sung by a 28 year old prog rock vocalist that I've known since his childhood. I'll be thinking of these Crosby stories tonight and well in the future. And I'll perhaps binge a few "Road To..." movies over the holiday. Thank you so much for this!
Wonderful December Holiday’s piece . . . L O V E
I have a 5th perspective. My father ran away from his home in Baltimore when he was 16 - went to New York City, to become a singer; no training whatsoever, but he sounded a lot like Bing Crosby. He was back in Baltimore within a few months and stayed there, except for WW-2, for the rest of his life. He seldom sang, and has been dead for forty years. Every time I hear Bing’s “White Christmas”, I hear my father’s voice.
A few of us are still devoted to the Road movies (they showed them all the time on TV when I was growing up), so we see Bing (and Bob) all year round. I recommend going to Youtube and watching Bing sing "You Don't Need to Know the Answer" with the Andrews Sisters. It's from Road to Rio, and it's absolutely jaw-dropping.
You dont have to know the language*
I will do that. Sounds intriguing.
Very interesting, but I would add that you have left out Bing the great jazz singer, who recorded with Duke Ellington among others, and with various important jazz small groups (with Venuti and Lang among others) and whose vocals with the Whiteman band were revolutionary (I'm Comin' Virginia), plus his start with the vocal group within the Whitman band ,The Rhythm Boys, with Al Rinker (Mildred Bailey's brother IIRC) and Harry Barris. Bing was a musical original, and he could swing - plus, of course, his prime inspiration was Louis Armstrong. But he made a lot of recordings, early on, with jazz groups - so maybe he was not particularly thrown by that progressive jazz accompaniment you mention. He was among that group of early white musicians - which included Bix - who were some of jazz's early modernists.
Yes. He could swing & really put it out there. Amazingly - he was very Hip for his time
Powerful piece Mr. Gioia. May your days be merry and bright.
Great piece! Thank you. Crosby could pretty much do anything. Dixieland, ballads, Irish folk music, swing, pop, comic, ensemble...His version of "Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral" is a masterclass in control. Going softer and softer, as the melody rises in pitch. Not for nothing he was the most successful pop singer of the mid-20th century.
When my daughter was born in 2015, I used to sing "my version" of "Too-Ra-Loo-Ra" to her, calling it "Daddy's lullabye." I recorded it on my phone, at one point, because I had to travel and my wife wanted to soothe her with it. I sang it to my son when he was born in 2018, continuing Bing's legacy, in a tangential sense. My version became so ingrained in my kids' minds, in a Pavlovian way, that I could put them to sleep on long car trips by launching into it. 3 minutes later, they'd be out. Magical.
Thanks for the nice tribute to Bing. I’ve always thought that if you could sound however you wanted to, you’d want to sound like Bing.
In consideration of Bibg's scope of music, perhaps you'll consider a study of Dinah Shore who could match any of her TV show guests.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIESkw2U-sI
I was there when he was a guest on Dinah! They were rehearsing with our eight-piece band, and in a lull, they discussed the immediate future. One of them had a concert coming up with the San Francisco Symphony. Ozawa was the conductor.
"He's a 'Jap' but they say he's good," Bing said. Dinah looked uncomfortable.
Many others used such vernacular of the day. It appears times are gradually changing for the better in that regard.
In consideration of Bing's scope of music, perhaps you'll consider a study of Dinah Shore who could match any of her TV show guests.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIESkw2U-sI
Crosby really invented modern music using amplifiers. It meant he didn't have to sing loud to be heard in the back, and he took advantage of it, singing softly and letting the microphone do the work. Listen to something from the 1920s if you don't believe me. His love of golf and northern California both contributed to the birth of Silicon Valley even before Ampex sold him that tape recorder. I loved reading that story.
Not mentioned in the story: Ampex also invented the videotape recorder in the 1950s. Instant success in replacing the film recording that was the only way of distributing video across long disances before microwave relays (and then satellites) made wide broadcasts commonplace. (Think of flying films of Olympic events across the Atlantic to be seen in the USA.) And here I quit because I remember these events, starting from near the beginning.
And the History & scope you speak of is so vast & interesting ,just too big a subject in a Podcast I would guess. Even though I was born in 1952 I know a lot of the history. I suppose because I've been a Musician & Performer for over 50 years.
Sparked by a very unpleasant 5th grade teacher. Who had 1 redeeming quality in my ancient memory - he was an enthusiastic Ukulele player. He got some kind of deal on like 30 or more Plastic Ukulele's & kind of strong armed our split 5th & 6th grade class into learning the instrument. All of the kids were Not pleased.
For some reason my parent's were friends with a Old Country type violin Maker down in the city. They bought me a much more expensive Wooden Uke. I think it was because I was, after a short time ,able to play certain tough chords (I remember F was hard). And I suppose my Dad was able to recognize something as he was a Jazz/Big Band type drummer that played in local clubs all through my young life.
The teacher was impressed (probably because my Uke was nicer than his ?). And thus began my Long journey ,which continues to this day.
Yes, Ampex is too big for a podcast. Interestng aboiut your 5th grade teacher, since I had a really bad one myself with no redeeming qualities whatever. Remarkable story of your musical progress. My own musical talents, which were better than usual, never got developed properly, and my destiny was STEM, which has been good to me and funded my retirement, in which I've cpontinued as a musical dilettante. And Merry [Christmas or whatever]!
I didn't go into his Bad issues
I have had trouble understanding the friendship of Crosby and Hope. Bob Hope was so cynical, sarcastic, and a jingoist patriot. Bing Crosby seemed like the opposite in being the perennial optimist. I do not recall any cynical sarcastic statement coming from Bing Crosby. He was the ultimate family man. Bob Hope seemed to be a caricature of a philandering anti-family icon. His conservative politics is well known. It is a mystery to me how Hope and Crosby were such close friends. But then Ruth Bader Ginsburg was close friends with Antonin Scalia. Go figure.
My daughter wrote a paper on Bing when she was in school, and she was dismayed to discover what a family man he wasn’t.
Yes, I've read that as well. The story in my faded memory is of his extreme conservative Catholicism, and telling his daughter that if she had relations with her boyfriend outside of marriage he would cut her off forever. (Pls fact check.)
It's hard though; I somehow look past Picasso's and Miles Davis' terrible treatment of women, and can generally separate the person from their art - decrying the one while revering the other. Bing Crosby doesn't get that same intentional partial blindness. I can get along in my life w/o his smooth crooning. Maybe also bc I stopped finding Bob Hope funny in about 1960.
Would you crib a bit from your daughter’s paper? I would like to know more about Bing Crosby in that vein. Yes, I can and will do my own investigation but she may have turned up something that I might miss. Thanks for the pointer that she found evidence that was contrary to his “good guy” image.
So I've heard
It has been noted that two Hollywood stars noted for dry slightly sarky humour both came from my city of Bristol UK. My parents came to this city from the wider west country to find work in the 1950s. That migration has been going on for a thousand years and folk who have investigated both Grant + Hopes family trees show that their families too come from the area around Bristol,places in Gloucestershire and Somerset. The City of Bristol always had a reputation of being a hard place where fools were not tolerated and "suckers never given an even break". In that regard it was like our popular idea of Paris which probably explains why that city feels like home to me! The funniness of Hope and the more subtle funniness of Grant is very Bristolian in nature. Not so much today now all them Londoners are moving here and diluting it and putting the house prices up!!!
It was often cruel and not kind but it was robust.
I never saw Cary Grant as an example of virtue. I did investigate William Randolph Hearst after watching the movie “Citizen Kane”
https://daily.jstor.org/why-william-randolph-hearst-hated-citizen-kane/
Cary Grant was a fixture at Hearst Castle.
I realized after my comment about Scalia and RBG that I do have a hypothesis about their friendship. I think both of them were hyper-nerds about the law and saw each other as simply working with different starting axioms. I have never heard someone claim they were autistic but who knows? I went deep on the study of very abstract mathematics. That story is relevant here so a brief thumbnail sketch. I have always been a humanities person at heart but my psychological dependency on my father whose failed dream to become a quantum theory physicist lead me to become daddy’s little scientist to get what little scraps of attention he was capable of giving. He was extremely withdrawn emotionally. In my senior year of high school I was reading Goethe’s view that relationships should be fundamental, not objects and properties. I instantly agreed with Goethe and less than a year later when I realized my relationship with my father was sick, instead of going into being a novelist, a dream when I was nine years old, I realized that my strong background in math and science might give me a perspective thar very few people in the humanities possessed. I nearly completed a PhD (ABD, all but dissertation) in mathematics. I realized that almost all STEM people were hyper-nerds whose closed minds would never consider Goethe’s ideas as anything other than fluffhead nonsense. I believe that RBG and Scalia approached the law like a puzzle in logic. For people in the humanities that phenomena exists in the airhead nonsense of nihilistic postmodernism. I refer to that way of thinking as idiotlogical. However, in the arts, like actors on stage or the movies, I do not know of any well respected actor who is idiotlogical except maybe Clint Eastwood. But even he made movies that were very well done, definitely not idiotlogical propaganda. There are idiotlogical actors like Jean-Claude Van Damme but as far as I know they are all fourth rate boneheads. To be a great actor, you must have incredible empathy which does require imagination. James Woods might be an exception. It is well known in psychopathology that some psychopaths are incredibly skilled in empathy. The vast majority of actors include loving kindness and compassion in their list of highest values. Barbara Streisand and Gregory Peck are prime examples of that kind of actor. Sorry about this TLDR rant. It is a major theme in how I understand what it means to be a good human being. BTW, I am NO saint. It has taken most of my life to get where I really felt like I understood the basics.
Thank you for these insights. I did not use the word virtue or cite that. I merely pointed out the the dry sardonic humour of both Bob Hope + Cary Grant was,and is still,very endemic in their native city. I said it was often cruel and that is not so much now,it is more watered down. I'm sure Grant + many other stars were involved in lots of dodgy areas of life and people but that's not my concern.
I understand what you are saying. I do have a strong bias towards looking at the place of morals and ethics as regards public influencers. I very much appreciate the influence of the environment but I refuse to take a nihilistic moral relativistic stance. I am NOT saying you do. I am pointing out my biases. These times are rife with people who refuse to take responsibility for the consequences of their behavior. I am sure I need not mention Boris or Liz.
Over 20 years ago, I did a lengthy interview with Ken Barnes, who produced most of Bing’s final albums during the mid-1970s. Ken told me that when Bing arrived at the studio (cutting not one but two albums with full studio orchestra), the musicians decided to play some good natured pranks on him (e.g., turning the time around) just to see how he’d react. Ken said that no matter how they tried to throw him off course, Bing’s internal time was so rhythmically solid that the musicians were utterly unable to faze him. By the time the first day of recording was finished, the players were saying things like “This guy is a real musician!” So the encounter you wrote about between Bing and the young “disciples of Coltrane” doesn’t sound far fetched at all!
Thanks for sharing
What a nice read for Christmas Eve! Well done!
Really great piece Ted , thanks for the interesting history , so important to hear these stories .
I'm old enough that I grew up during the Bing TV years and saw nearly all of his movies (certainly the ones with Hope). But to me, the beauty of Bing Crosby was his voice and his singing. Like Sinatra, having come up with sophisticated and talented players and arrangers, the man could SING. Spend some time with his catalog and I guarantee you'll be amazed even with the sometimes lesser quality of recordings in the early 20th century. You will be rewarded.
Well said, Ted. You left out the inspiration for the Post Sugar Crisp Bear. “How ya doin’ Granny?) probably because you’re a youngster.