Word: bing
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...Henry Pleasants, in his ear-opening book "The Great American Popular Singers" (a 1974 work that deserves to be back in print), gets to the heart of Charles? vocal achievement: "Sinatra, and Bing Crosby before him, had been a master of words. Ray Charles is a master of sounds. His records disclose an extraordinary assortment of slurs, glides, turns, shrieks, wails, breaks, shouts, screams and hollers, all wonderfully controlled, disciplined by inspired musicianship, and harnessed to ingenious subtleties of harmony, dynamics and rhythm... It is either the singing of a man whose vocabulary is inadequate to express what...
DIED. PERRY COMO, 87, honey-smoke baritone whose casually masculine, almost sleepy stylings rivaled Bing Crosby's and Frank Sinatra's at the top of pop charts in the 1940s and '50s; in Jupiter Inlet Beach Colony, Fla. The seventh son of a seventh son, Pierino Ronald Como left work as a barber in 1933 for a career of such easy-listening hits as Till the End of Time and It's Impossible. He was also host of a string of popular TV shows. He died six days short of his 88th birthday...
...Bing helped Louis, he could be said to have given artistic birth to a generation of singing stars; baritones were the almost exclusive rage for the next two decades. Specifically, his example taught Sinatra that the pulp poetry in a good lyric could be enriched by honoring it, and showed Presley how the low range for his ballads could be as sexy as the squalling tenor of his rockabilly...
...Presley era and beyond, stars made an impact by going too far, by affronting community propriety (when the community still had propriety), by translating the lewd and the crude into popular art. Bing was just the reverse. He didn't outrage or astonish; he reassured. He was not on the edge; he created a new middle, which always should have existed but didn't until he eased into it. Imagine that, far into the history of food - say, around 1930 - someone had come up with the potato. That was the eureka element to Crosby's relaxed style. He was Everyman...
...Part Two: Bing in the Movies