Bing Crosby: Born at Eleven Twelve North J Street

The house his father built was at eleven twelve North J Street in Tacoma, and that is where Harry Lillis Crosby Junior entered the world on May third, nineteen hundred and three. He was the fourth of seven children. His family called him Harry.

The nickname Bing came later, from a comic strip character named Bingo from Bingville, which Harry had reportedly enjoyed as a child. The family lived in Tacoma for three years before moving to Spokane, where Harry Crosby grew up. He sang in a church choir.

He played drums in bands. He learned, on the radio stations of Spokane and then in the clubs and theaters of the Pacific Northwest and then California, how to do something with his voice that was genuinely new. The prevailing style for male popular singers in the early nineteen twenties was operatic, voices projected from the diaphragm with theatrical force, trained for concert halls without electronic amplification.

Crosby developed a different approach, intimate and conversational, calibrated for the microphone that was then transforming popular entertainment. He sang as if he were talking to you personally. In a medium built on projection, he whispered.

By the mid-nineteen thirties, Bing Crosby was the most commercially successful entertainer in the United States, dominant across radio, film, and recordings simultaneously in a way no performer before or since has quite replicated. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for Going My Way in nineteen forty-four. He recorded White Christmas, which remains the best-selling single in the history of recorded music.

He died on October fourteenth, nineteen seventy-seven, in Spain, having just finished a round of golf. Tacoma today has the street named for him that most cities give to their famous sons. The house on North J Street still stands.