To say that he was a big influence on popular music is an understatement.
I'm going to post an exerpt from the introduction to Gary Giddins's excellent Crosby biography below, but that doesn't really even deal with the fact that he was the first star baritone of the recording era, and the first to take advantage of the microphone; for the first time, you could sing quietly. He was easily one of the most important and most influential male pop vocalists ever, along with a select few like Sinatra and Armstrong.
Anyway:
Popular culture, like sports, is beset with statistics, a fixation on chart and box-office rankings, grosses and salaries, and prizes. But whereas sports statistics live forever, pop stats are ultimately transitory and meaningless - no recitation of past sales figures can incline us to listen to Billy Murray records or to read Lloyd C. Douglas novels or to buy Walter Keane paintings. The only pop stats that continue to matter involve artists who continue to matter.
It is impossible to regard Bing Crosby as a historical figure without considering some of his statistics. If nothing else, they reveal his dominance over popular entertainment from Prohibition until the mid-1950s, when his decline as the nation's preeminent muse was signaled by the comeback of a newly charged Sinatra and the arrival of Elvis - the former marketed to adults, the latter to their children. During Crosby's reign, that split did not exist.
- He was the first full-time vocalist ever signed to an orchestra.
- He made more studio recordings than any other singer in history (about 400 more than Sinatra).
- He made the most popular record ever, "White Christmas," the only single to make American pop charts twenty times, every year but one between 1942 and 1962. In 1998, after a long absence, his 1947 version hit the charts in Britain.
- Between 1927 and 1962 he scored 368 charted records under his own name, plus twenty-eight as vocalist with various bandleaders, for a total of 396. No one else has come close; compare Paul Whiteman (220), Sinatra (209), Elvis (149), Glenn Miller (129), Nat "King" Cole (118 ), Louis Armstrong (85), the Beatles (68 ).
- He scored the most number one hits ever, thirty-eight, compared with twenty-four by the Beatles and eighteen by Presley.
- In 1960 he received a platinum record as First Citizen of the Record Industry for having sold 200 million discs, a number that doubled by 1980.
- Between 1915 and 1980 he was the only motion-picture star to rank as the number one box-office attraction five times (1944-48 ). Between 1934 and 1954 he scored in the top ten fifteen times.
- Going My Way was the highest-grossing film in the history of Paramount Pictures until 1947; The Bells of St. Mary's was the highest-grossing film in the history of RKO Pictures until 1947.
- He was nominated for an Academy Award for best actor three times and won for Going My Way.
- He was a major radio star longer than any other performer, from 1931 until 1954 on network, 1954 until 1962 in syndication.
- He appeared on approximately 4,000 radio broadcasts, nearly 3,400 of them his own programs, and single-handedly changed radio from a live-performance to a a canned or recorded medium by presenting, in 1946, the first transcribed network show on ABC - thereby making that also-ran network a major force.
- He financed and popularized the use of tape, revolutionizing the recording industry.
- He created the first and longest-running celebrity pro-am golf championship, playing host for thirty-five years, raising millions in charity, and was the central figure in the development of the Del Mar racetrack in California.
