Rodgers–Present Arms, You Took Advantage

We are going to start a new series of “supporting” music clips on Wednesday’s and Saturday’s, using Bing Crosby as our anchor. We will try to wrap any number of musical threads around his songs. This may sound very formal, as though we spent a lot of time planning this, when in fact, we more or less stumbled on it, like the man who fell into a hole and found buried treasure.

Bing’s early success came as a member of a trio, called The Rhythm Boys, singing with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. Many see Whiteman as a jazz musician and jazz band leader. Actually, he was just a dance band leader who picked up recently composed songs and wrapped a fox trot arrangement around them. However, he hired a plethora of jazz musicians, such as Bix Beiderbecke, to fill out his orchestra. They played parts from sheet music, but they never really played hot jazz and so never made the transition into the swing band era, along with Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller.

Bing went solo around 1931 and sang on the radio before landing jobs singing in movie shorts. Many of his early hits came in this manner. Eventually, he made his way into feature-length releases, although he still used studio sessions to pump out single hits. We can see his music becoming less bouncy and more “croony” in the 1930’s, but this was just a sign of the times on Broadway and in Hollywood. In the 1930’s, the public started to see movies that featured swing bands (such as Orchestra Wives or Sun Valley Serenade) and movies that featured popular songs (which may have had a jazzy or swing arrangement, such as the Fred and Ginger movies). Broadway was enjoying songs from Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter that were not as edgy as George Gershwin’s music from the 1920’s.

By 1941, Bing would be making movies that looked back nostalgically on the roots of New Orleans jazz (Birth of the Blues); but then, old-time jazz musicians would be doing the same thing in the 1940’s as we saw with Kid Ory, Sidney Bechet and Jack Teagarden. As we went from Good News in 1927 to Oklahoma! in 1943, we went from an era of entertainment searching for a genre to a dramatic play imbibing all of the best elements of American music.

This excursion should be a lot of fun and should also help to set up the musicals on Broadway in the 1930’s and 1940’s. However, in a way, it will also usher in a cessation of the Wednesday and Saturday posts, as we start to study the more mature Broadway musicals of the 1920’s and 30’s. I will need additional time to research and write books on Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, such as Carousel and South Pacific. Sorry, but it is what it is.

Let’s start our look at the “Bing Crosby era” with a recording by Paul Whiteman. Taking a song from the 1928 Rodgers and Hart musical, Present Arms, Whiteman put a dance band arrangement over the song and released a good record of “You Took Advantage of Me.” We are told that Bing sang with Jack Fulton, Charles Gaylord and Austin Young on this recording; as we know from past posts, these men often provided vocal harmony on Whiteman’s recordings.