Theoretically Speaking, S5:E5: What Makes Crooning, Crooning ?

A couple episodes ago, I mentioned that opera singers learn to project their voices so people can hear them in the back row of the highest balcony.

That raises the question, how did people in the back rows hear everything before the invention of opera singing? I mean, some of those ancient amphitheaters were pretty big.

Simple megaphones are conical tubes, like a funnel in reverse. The sound waves bounce around inside before coming out towards the listener. However, more sophisticated megaphones can have multiple cones inside, and that causes the sound to bounce around even more.

Let’s fast forward to the late 1800s and early 1900s:

Vaudeville shows were popular. They included acrobats, comedians, jugglers, and, of course, musicians. Some singers used megaphones to project their voices to distant ears.

The most famous of these is Rudy Vallée. His voice was pleasant but not very strong, and he needed all the help he could get to be heard in big venues.

Radio was another matter. Vallée loved using a microphone. When he sang live on the radio, he could get as close to the mic as he wanted. This closeness gave his voice an implied intimacy, and his love songs became very popular, especially with women.

The first recording studios didn’t even use microphones. They had a cone to collect the sound, like a megaphone in reverse. The engineer or producer’s job was limited to placing some instruments closer to the cone than others. Singers would stand off to the side until it was time to sing, then step in front of the cone, sing, and jump out of the way again when they were done.

Volume was crucial to the process. But the equipment, such as it was, couldn’t catch nuances like vibrato or whispering. We think now that they sang in a loud, nasal voice, but maybe they just sounded nasal because the equipment could only pick up the midrange frequencies.

Early microphones had a very small dynamic range.

They could pick up frequencies in the middle, but not high or low ones. That’s why early records sound like the musicians are on a bad phone connection. 

That’s all the inventors were trying to do. David Edward Hughes, Emile Berliner, and others wanted to pick up the speaking voice so it could be transmitted long distances. They were interested in communications, not high fidelity, and their early carbon microphones worked as designed.

Without these innovations, Rudy Vallée’s thin voice wouldn’t have been a sensation. He didn’t like the word, but his intimate singing style became known as crooning, and the singers were called crooners. As public address systems got better, singers could sound as intimate live as they did on the radio.

Better microphones revealed nuances that audiences couldn’t hear before and that singers couldn’t implement before. Singers learned how to use a mic to their advantage.

Better microphones could reveal mistakes, too. Good singers rose to the top.

Crooning got popular so that bandleaders, who had mostly played instrumentals before, looked for singers.

Sometimes asking their musicians to step up to the mic.

Russ Columbo was a violinist in many bands, and it turned out he had the perfect voice for this new style.

As an aside, Columbo’s mother was in the hospital recovering from a heart attack at the time of his death. The rest of his family worried that the news would cause another heart attack and kill her, so they kept it from her. They didn’t think she would live long, so a little white lie wouldn’t hurt anyone.

One of Colombo’s pallbearers was Bing Crosby.

They had been competitors.

They were actually good friends with similar voices and techniques.

Like Columbo, Crosby had a baritone and an easy way with ballads.

Crosby’s first solo #1, “Out Of Nowhere,” displays a lot of the old singing techniques, exaggerating vibrato and phrasing. At the start of the third verse, however, the volume drops and he isn’t reaching for the back rows anymore. Singers could now sing to someone near, like a dance partner or a lover. That’s crooning.

Crosby also became known for entertaining troops during World War II. He toured Europe throughout the war. Even the German people came to know him and gave him the nickname “Der Bingle,” which stuck when he got back home.

While in Europe, he discovered that German recording gear was much more advanced than what he had at home. Whether it was him or one of his entourage, someone allegedly stole some equipment and got it back to California. US recording studios improved greatly after that.

Les Paul was an innovator, not only as a musician but as an inventor.

He figured out that by removing the erase head, he could record many times over the same tape without losing earlier takes.

He called this “sound on sound” recording and it allowed him to add multiple guitar and vocal takes to the same song.

The couple sold millions of records with what would become called “The Sound.” It would lead to the invention of multi-track recording. Which was invented by Les Paul.

While we know Crosby as a singer and actor, he worked tirelessly to improve recording gear.

As a young man, Sinatra had looked up to Crosby and wanted a similar career in music and movies. At first, though, he had trouble getting noticed. Part of that was he tried to sound like Crosby, but so did everyone else. So he developed his own approach.

There’s a story I can’t verify but it’s a good one so I’ll tell it: He couldn’t read sheet music, but he knew its importance to musicians. He began buying it and keeping his collection up to date with the latest hits. He’d then rent it to bands with the understanding that it came with a singer. He got a lot of his early gigs that way.

He joined a band called The 3 Flashes, though he found out later they only accepted him because he had a car.

His fame grew as he jumped from band to band, each more popular than the last: Harry James, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman.

By the end of 1942, he was bigger than Bing. Women and girls mobbed him everywhere he went. A similar thing happened with Beatlemania twenty years later.

Though he couldn’t read sheet music, Sinatra had an innate understanding of how music works. He’d even conduct, and many musicians said he was as good as any trained conductor they had played under.

He also understood how to use a microphone.

The phrase “The Sinatra Effect” has two meanings. One is used in business and comes from the, “If I can make it there I’ll make it anywhere” line in his song “New York, New York.” It means to show potential clients that you can do for them what you’ve done for others.

It’s worth noting here that both Crosby and Sinatra won Oscars for their acting.

Sinatra was tuned in to all kinds of music.

He said Tony Bennett was the best singer in the world, but he called country singer George Jones the second best.

When rock & roll became popular in the late 50s, he didn’t start singing it a la Pat Boone, but he recorded more upbeat material.

Jones and Nelson aren’t known as crooners, but they know you don’t have to sing at top volume all the time.

Most of the music mid-century crooners sang over is considered jazz or traditional pop.

Sinatra leaned towards pop. But singers like Nat King Cole were more jazz, with a whole lot of crossover.

Crooning and high quality microphones had an effect on singers of all genres, from Billie Holiday to Roger Miller, David Byrne to Hope Sandoval to Billie Eilish.

Many singers belt it out.

But crooners have made some of the most beautiful and memorable music of the past one hundred years.

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