Word: trios
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...later. Bing Crosby had got balder, and had become the most celebrated singer in the world. Harry Harris had written a few song hits, but was known very largely to his personal friends. Al Rinker had fattened up and looked like the radio executive he is. But when this trio, once known as the Rhythm Boys, held a reunion with Paul Whiteman's band in NBC's Hollywood studio last week, they sang Mississippi Mud, the song which made them famous in 1927, just as though the years and all the changes had made no real difference...
...process of discovering that what he called his "gravel throat" was one of the most sentimentally appealing voices in history. It was all but lost in the horseplay vocalism. But once he knew it was around, Crosby took good care to find it. In 1929 the trio broke...
...story is of the battle between Ray MacKenzie and the professor for the girl, complicated because Ray does not know until late in the battle that he is fighting anyone. The theme of Trio, troubling and unpopular, has the narrow importance of illuminating one aspect of the emotional disorder in American moral and educational life. What the simple Ray did not guess at first was that the relationship between the sharp professor and the trembling student had been intimate enough to drive Janet into a mental home. He discovered Pauline to be more than "a sort of good-looking clotheshorse...
...Where Trio fails, and fails badly, is in Author Baker's artificial simplicity. Fear of the frightening depths and complexities of human emotions, fear of her own sentimentality drives her, as it drives Steinbeck and Hemingway, to find safety in a false toughness, to gush, and at the same time to deny the gush by freezing it in the casual chilliness of slang and jargon. Example: "Suddenly look at him out of the bottoms of the green eyes with the fringy lashes, sock her fingers into that wig of hair, twist that lovely perplexed...
...Trio is written so badly. Much of it is clear, direct prose, with emphasis on a photographic clarity of detail. People, the objects in the professor's house and Ray's room, gestures appear with something of the shadowless quality of the paintings of Charles Sheeler. A promising second novel (her first: Young Man with a Horn-TIME, June 6, 1938), it is a good enough discussion of its subject to give readers reason to hope that Author Baker will write better ones...