1. Bing Crosby was one of the first global cultural icons.
132 Facts About Bing Crosby
1. 2.
Bing Crosby made over 70 feature films and recorded more than 1,600 songs.
3.
Yank magazine said that Bing Crosby was "the person who had done the most for the morale of overseas servicemen" during World War II.
4.
In 1948, Music Digest estimated that Bing Crosby's recordings filled more than half of the 80,000 weekly hours allocated to recorded radio music in America.
5.
Bing Crosby won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Going My Way and was nominated for its sequel, The Bells of St Mary's, opposite Ingrid Bergman, becoming the first of six actors to be nominated twice for playing the same character.
6.
Bing Crosby was the number one box office attraction for five consecutive years from 1944 to 1948.
7.
At his screen apex in 1946, Bing Crosby starred in three of the year's five highest-grossing films: The Bells of St Mary's, Blue Skies, and Road to Utopia.
8.
Bing Crosby is one of 33 people to have three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, in the categories of motion pictures, radio, and audio recording.
9.
Bing Crosby was known for his collaborations with his friend Bob Hope, starring in the Road to.
10.
Bing Crosby then persuaded ABC to allow him to tape his shows and became the first performer to prerecord his radio shows and master his commercial recordings onto magnetic tape.
11.
Bing Crosby has been associated with the Christmas season since he starred in Irving Berlin's musical film Holiday Inn and sang "White Christmas" in the film of the same name.
12.
Bing Crosby was born on May 3,1903, in Tacoma, Washington, in a house his father built at 1112 North J Street.
13.
Bing Crosby's parents were Harry Lillis Crosby, a bookkeeper, and Catherine Helen "Kate".
14.
Bing Crosby's father was of Scottish and English descent; an ancestor, Simon Crosby, emigrated from the Kingdom of England to New England in the 1630s during the Puritan migration to New England.
15.
In 1917, Crosby took a summer job as property boy at Spokane's Auditorium, where he witnessed some of the acts of the day, including Al Jolson, who held Crosby spellbound with ad-libbing and parodies of Hawaiian songs.
16.
Bing Crosby graduated from Gonzaga High School in 1920 and enrolled at Gonzaga University.
17.
Bing Crosby attended Gonzaga for three years but did not earn a degree.
18.
In 1923, Bing Crosby was invited to join a new band composed of high-school students a few years younger than himself.
19.
Al and Miles Rinker, James Heaton, Claire Pritchard and Robert Pritchard, along with drummer Bing Crosby, formed the Musicaladers, who performed at dances both for high school students and club-goers.
20.
Bing Crosby gained valuable experience on tour for a year with Whiteman and performing and recording with Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey, Eddie Lang, and Hoagy Carmichael.
21.
Bing Crosby matured as a performer and was in demand as a solo singer.
22.
In 1929, the Rhythm Boys appeared in the film King of Jazz with Whiteman, but Bing Crosby's growing dissatisfaction with Whiteman led to the Rhythm Boys leaving his organization.
23.
Bing Crosby played the lead in a series of musical comedy short films for Mack Sennett, signed with Paramount, and starred in his first full-length film, 1932's The Big Broadcast, the first of 55 films in which he received top billing.
24.
Bing Crosby signed a contract with Jack Kapp's new record company, Decca, in late 1934.
25.
Bing Crosby led his radio show for Woodbury Soap for two seasons while his live appearances dwindled.
26.
Bing Crosby's records produced hits during the Depression when sales were down.
27.
Bing Crosby's first son Gary was born in 1933 with twin boys following in 1934.
28.
Bing Crosby admired Louis Armstrong for his musical ability, and the trumpet maestro was a formative influence on Bing Crosby's singing style.
29.
In 1936, Bing Crosby exercised an option in his Paramount contract to regularly star in an out-of-house film.
30.
Bing Crosby asked Harry Cohn, but Cohn had no desire to pay for the flight or to meet Armstrong's "crude, mob-linked but devoted manager, Joe Glaser".
31.
Bing Crosby threatened to leave the film and refused to discuss the matter.
32.
Bing Crosby ensured behind the scenes that Armstrong received equal billing with his white co-stars.
33.
Bing Crosby learned how to pronounce German from written scripts and read propaganda broadcasts intended for German forces.
34.
Bing Crosby has achieved greater popularity, made more money, attracted vaster audiences than any other entertainer in history.
35.
The biggest hit song of Bing Crosby's career was his recording of Irving Berlin's "White Christmas", which Bing Crosby introduced on a Christmas Day radio broadcast in 1941.
36.
Bing Crosby's record hit the charts on October 3,1942, and rose to number 1 on October 31, where it stayed for 11 weeks.
37.
Bing Crosby's recording of "White Christmas" has sold over 50 million copies worldwide.
38.
Bing Crosby's recording was so popular that Crosby was obliged to re-record it in 1947 using the same musicians and backup singers; the original 1942 master had become damaged due to its frequent use in pressing additional singles.
39.
In 1977, after Bing Crosby died, the song was re-released and reached No 5 in the UK Singles Chart.
40.
Bing Crosby was dismissive of his role in the song's success, saying "a jackdaw with a cleft palate could have sung it successfully".
41.
Collins was used in place of their longtime partner Dorothy Lamour, whom Bing Crosby felt was getting too old for the role, though Hope refused to do the film without her, and she instead made a lengthy and elaborate cameo appearance.
42.
Shortly before his death in 1977, Bing Crosby had planned another Road film in which he, Hope, and Lamour search for the Fountain of Youth.
43.
Bing Crosby won an Academy Award for Best Actor for Going My Way in 1944 and was nominated for the 1945 sequel, The Bells of St Mary's.
44.
Bing Crosby received critical acclaim and his third Academy Award nomination for his performance as an alcoholic entertainer in The Country Girl.
45.
Bing Crosby was a frequent guest on the musical variety shows of the 1950s and 1960s, appearing on various variety shows as well as numerous late-night talk shows and his own highly rated specials.
46.
Bob Hope memorably devoted one of his monthly NBC specials to his long intermittent partnership with Crosby titled "On the Road With Bing".
47.
Bing Crosby was associated with ABC's The Hollywood Palace as the show's first and most frequent guest host and appeared annually on its Christmas edition with his wife Kathryn and his younger children, and continued after The Hollywood Palace was eventually canceled.
48.
Bing Crosby's last TV appearance was a Christmas special, Merrie Olde Christmas, taped in London in September 1977 and aired weeks after his death.
49.
Bing Crosby produced two ABC medical dramas, Ben Casey and Breaking Point, the popular Hogan's Heroes military comedy on CBS, as well as the lesser-known show Slattery's People.
50.
Bing Crosby was one of the first singers to exploit the intimacy of the microphone rather than use the loud, penetrating vaudeville style associated with Al Jolson.
51.
Bing Crosby was, by his own definition, a "phraser", a singer who placed equal emphasis on both the lyrics and the music.
52.
Bing Crosby had already been introduced to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith before his first appearance on record.
53.
However, while Bing Crosby can be called a jazz singer, he was not strictly only a jazz singer as he modeled the style and techniques to a broad scope of music that he performed, ranging from Jazz to Country to even such material as operetta arias.
54.
Bing Crosby credited Kapp for choosing hit songs, working with many other musicians, and most important, diversifying his repertoire into several styles and genres.
55.
Kapp helped Bing Crosby have number one hits in Christmas music, Hawaiian music, and country music, and top-30 hits in Irish music, French music, rhythm and blues, and ballads.
56.
Bing Crosby elaborated on an idea of Al Jolson's: phrasing, or the art of making a song's lyric ring true.
57.
Bing Crosby's was among the most popular and successful musical acts of the 20th century.
58.
Bing Crosby had separate charting singles every year between 1931 and 1954; the annual re-release of "White Christmas" extended that streak to 1957.
59.
Bing Crosby had 24 separate popular singles in 1939 alone.
60.
Statistician Joel Whitburn at Billboard determined that Bing Crosby was America's most successful recording act of the 1930s and again in the 1940s.
61.
Organizations that audit record sales do not have an official tally, but some claim sales are notable, namely: In 1960, Bing Crosby was honored as "First Citizen of Record Industry" based on having sold 200 million discs.
62.
The Guinness Book reported some of the singer's worldwide sales on a few occasions: In 1973, Bing Crosby had sold more than 400 million records worldwide, and by 1977 he had sold 500 million discs, being ranked as the most successful and best-selling musical artist in 1978.
63.
For 15 years, Bing Crosby was among the top 10 acts in box-office sales, and for five of those years he topped the world.
64.
Bing Crosby received 23 gold and platinum records, according to the book Million Selling Records.
65.
Bing Crosby charted 23 Billboard hits from 47 recorded songs with the Andrews Sisters, whose Decca record sales were second only to Bing Crosby's throughout the 1940s.
66.
In 1962, Bing Crosby was given the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
67.
Bing Crosby has been inducted into the halls of fame for both radio and popular music.
68.
In 2007, Bing Crosby was inducted into the Hit Parade Hall of Fame and in 2008 the Western Music Hall of Fame.
69.
The man was listening to Bing Crosby sing, "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive".
70.
Bing Crosby had investments in real estate, mines, oil wells, cattle ranches, race horses, music publishing, baseball teams, and television.
71.
Bing Crosby made a fortune from the Minute Maid Orange Juice Corporation, in which he was a principal stockholder.
72.
Bing Crosby had to do two live radio shows on the same day, three hours apart, for the East and West Coasts.
73.
Suddenly Bing Crosby saw an enormous advantage in prerecording his radio shows.
74.
Bing Crosby could do four shows a week, if he chose, and then take a month off.
75.
Bing Crosby used his clout, both professionally and financially, for innovations in audio.
76.
Bing Crosby left the network and remained off the air for seven months, creating a legal battle with his sponsor Kraft that was settled out of court.
77.
Bing Crosby would get an additional $40,000 from 400 independent stations for the rights to broadcast the 30-minute show, which was sent to them every Monday on three 16-inch lacquer discs that played ten minutes per side at.
78.
Sometimes, if Bing Crosby was having fun with a song and not really working at it, we had to make it up out of two or three parts.
79.
Bing Crosby invested $50,000 in Ampex with the intent to produce more machines.
80.
Mullin explained how one new broadcasting technique was invented on the Bing Crosby show with these machines:.
81.
Bing Crosby gave one of the first Ampex Model 300 recorders to his friend, guitarist Les Paul, which led to Paul's invention of multitrack recording.
82.
Mullin continued to work for Bing Crosby to develop a videotape recorder.
83.
Television production was mostly live television in its early years, but Bing Crosby wanted the same ability to record that he had achieved in radio.
84.
Mullin had not yet succeeded with videotape, so Bing Crosby filmed the series of 26-minute shows at the Hal Roach Studios, and the "telefilms" were syndicated to individual television stations.
85.
Bing Crosby Enterprises gave the world's first demonstration of videotape recording in Los Angeles on November 11,1951.
86.
NAFI Corporation and Bing Crosby purchased television station KPTV in Portland, Oregon, for $4 million on September 1,1959.
87.
Bing Crosby partnered with Ed Craney, who owned the CBS radio affiliate KXLY and built a television studio west of Bing Crosby's alma mater, Gonzaga University.
88.
Bing Crosby was a fan of thoroughbred horse racing and bought his first racehorse in 1935.
89.
Charles' son, Lindsay C Howard, became one of Crosby's closest friends; Crosby named his son Lindsay after him, and would purchase his 40-room Hillsborough, California, estate from Lindsay in 1965.
90.
Bing Crosby had arranged for Ampex, another of his financial investments, to record the NBC telecast on kinescope.
91.
Bing Crosby apparently viewed the complete film just once, and then stored it in his wine cellar, where it remained undisturbed until it was discovered in December 2009.
92.
Bing Crosby was the honorary chairman of the club's board of directors.
93.
Bing Crosby first took up golf at age 12 as a caddy.
94.
Bing Crosby was already spending much time on the golf course while touring the country in a vaudeville act or with Paul Whiteman's orchestra in the mid to late 1920s.
95.
Bing Crosby competed in both the British and US Amateur championships, was a five-time club champion at Lakeside Golf Club in Hollywood, and once made a hole-in-one on the 16th hole at Cypress Point.
96.
In 1950, Crosby became the third person to win the William D Richardson award, which is given to a non-professional golfer "who has consistently made an outstanding contribution to golf".
97.
Bing Crosby is a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame, having been inducted in 1978.
98.
Bing Crosby's trip was filmed for The American Sportsman on ABC, although all did not go well at first as the salmon were not running.
99.
Bing Crosby did make up for it at the end of the week by catching a number of sea trout.
100.
The Bing Crosby is home to both of the county's high schools' baseball teams.
101.
Bing Crosby reportedly had a problem with alcohol abuse between the late 1920s and early 1930s, spending 60 days in jail for drinking and crashing his car during prohibition.
102.
In 1977, Bing Crosby told Barbara Walters in a televised interview that he thought marijuana should be legalized, because he believed it would make it much easier for the authorities to exert proper legal control over the market.
103.
The Bing Crosby family lived at 10500 Camarillo Street in North Hollywood for more than five years.
104.
Bing Crosby married actress Kathryn Grant, who converted to Catholicism, in 1957.
105.
Tired of Dixie's drinking, Bing Crosby even asked her for a divorce in January 1941.
106.
Bing Crosby had one confirmed extramarital affair between 1945 and the late 1940s, while married to his first wife Dixie.
107.
Bing Crosby [Caulfield] was a lovely girl and we had some good talks.
108.
Bing Crosby confided to me that she desperately wanted to marry Bing Crosby.
109.
The document reveals that, during that time, Bing Crosby was taking Caulfield out to dinner, visited theaters and opera houses with her, and Caulfield and a person in her company entered the Waldorf Hotel where Bing Crosby was staying.
110.
Either in December 1945 or January 1946, Bing Crosby approached Cardinal Francis Spellman with his difficulties with dealing with his wife's alcoholism, his love for Caulfield and his plan to file for divorce.
111.
Ultimately, Bing Crosby chose to end the relationship and to stay with his wife.
112.
In November 1958, Bing Crosby purchased the 1,350-acre Rising River Ranch in Cassel, California after renting a portion of it for several years.
113.
In 1965, the Crosbys moved to a larger, 40-room French chateau-style house on nearby Jackling Drive, where Kathryn Crosby continued to reside after Bing's death.
114.
Gary Bing Crosby's adopted son, Steven Bing Crosby, said in a 2003 interview:.
115.
Bing's younger brother, singer and jazz bandleader Bob Crosby, recalled at the time of Gary's revelations that Bing was a "disciplinarian", as their mother and father had been.
116.
Bing Crosby was not out to be vicious, to beat children for his kicks.
117.
Bing Crosby's will established a blind trust in which none of the sons received an inheritance until they reached the age of 65, intended by Bing Crosby to keep them out of trouble.
118.
Lindsay Bing Crosby died in 1989 at age 51, and Dennis Bing Crosby died in 1991 at age 56, both by suicide from self-inflicted gunshot wounds.
119.
Phillip Bing Crosby died of a heart attack in 2004 at age 69.
120.
Nathaniel Bing Crosby, Bing Crosby's younger son from his second marriage, is a former high-level golfer who won the US Amateur in 1981 at age 19, becoming the youngest winner in the history of that event at the time.
121.
Harry Bing Crosby is an investment banker who occasionally makes singing appearances.
122.
Denise Bing Crosby, Dennis Bing Crosby's daughter, is an actress and is known for her role as Tasha Yar on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
123.
Bing Crosby appeared in the 1989 film adaptation of Stephen King's novel Pet Sematary.
124.
On October 13,1977, Bing Crosby flew alone to Spain to play golf and hunt partridge.
125.
The next day, Bing Crosby played 18 holes of golf at the La Moraleja Golf Course near Madrid.
126.
Bing Crosby, who had a 13 handicap, won with his partner by one stroke.
127.
About 20 yards from the clubhouse entrance, Bing Crosby collapsed and died instantly from a heart attack.
128.
At Reina Victoria Hospital, Bing Crosby was administered the last rites of the Catholic Church and was pronounced dead at the age of 74.
129.
On October 18,1977, following a private funeral Mass at St Paul the Apostle Catholic Church in Westwood, Los Angeles, Bing Crosby was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.
130.
Bing Crosby is a member of the National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame in the radio division.
131.
Bing Crosby has three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
132.
Four performances by Bing Crosby have been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, which is a special Grammy award established in 1973 to honor recordings that are at least 25 years old and that have "qualitative or historical significance".