Word: groaners
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American popular music, from groaner's moan to Dixieland jazz, is a highly exportable commodity. So the State Department has learned from its new international disc jockey, Martin Block, whose weekly half-hour of music and informal chatter has become the Voice of America's most popular program. Even behind the Iron Curtain, where Communists are furiously attacking "decadent American music," thousands of recalcitrant Slavs continue to carry a torch for Dinah Shore or Gene Autry, Benny Goodman or Lena Home. Last week the Czech government skirmished with some of these incorrigibles and came off badly scorched...
...Groaner's Friend. In Westville Grove, N.J., Louis Lichtman, who plays music to his 4,000 hogs to help fatten them, announced authoritatively that Bing Crosby and Guy Lombardo have greatest hog appeal...
...versions of another Chopin tune, I'm Always Chasing Rainbows, and Dig You Later ("A Hubba, Hubba, Hubba") which has sold over a million records, are on the current jukebox best-selling lists. Como sings them straighter than slow-drag Sinatra, but with somewhat less ease than The Groaner, Crosby. Says Como: "I can't explain the different techniques in Crosby, Sinatra and me, unless it's that one's bald and one has curly hair and I wear my hair short...
...Brother Bing, 41, ducked reporters in Manhattan last week. The Groaner had refused to go back on the Kraft Cheese Co.'s Music Hall after his summer vacation; the company claimed that his contract didn't expire until 1950. Bing and his business-managing brothers, Larry and Everett, insisted that the contract was technically dead. And until Der Bingle could name his own terms, including the right to transcribe his programs weeks before they are broadcast, he was deter mined to cheese it. Kraft took its grievance to court...
Nobody could put a finger on the exact point at which Bing Crosby attained this distinction, but the honor was definitely, securely his. For the past ten years "The Groaner" has averaged a new record every other week. Number of copies sold since he first began recording two decades ago: about 75 million. The Crosby voice has been heard oftener and by more people than even these figures hint at. Most U.S. radio stations play about twelve hours of recorded music a day. Day in & day out, from coast to coast, the singing voice heard oftenest in canned concerts...