Bing Crosby: The Gonzaga Dropout Who Sang the Best-Selling Song in History

Harry Lillis Crosby was born in Tacoma, Washington, on May third, nineteen oh three. His family moved to Spokane when he was three years old, and Spokane is where he grew up: attending school on the city's north side, singing in church, developing the relaxed, conversational baritone that would make him famous.

He enrolled at Gonzaga University in nineteen twenty-one to study law, joined a jazz band called the Musicaladers, and left before completing his degree. He headed to Los Angeles. By the early nineteen thirties he was one of the most recognized voices in the country, a radio and recording phenomenon at a moment when radio reached into nearly every American home.

In nineteen forty-two, Crosby recorded 'White Christmas' for Decca Records. The song went on to sell more copies than any other single in the first half of the twentieth century. Music historians have measured it variously as the best-selling single of all time or among the three or four closest claimants to that distinction. By any measure, it is one of the most widely heard recordings in the history of the medium.

The Gonzaga University Foley Center library holds the primary archival materials on Crosby's Spokane years, including photographs, correspondence, and recordings from the period before his departure for Los Angeles. The university has maintained the archive as the authoritative record of Spokane's most commercially successful native son, who was in fact born two hundred fifty miles to the west and never quite got around to finishing his law degree.