The artist Bob Dylan said influenced every singer ever: “Few could match his phrasing”
For any career-focused musician, trends may as well be optional. Most artists try to keep up with whatever they can to grow with the times, but if someone has a certain sound and sticks with it, there’s no limit to where they can go if they have the tunes to back it up. Bob Dylan may have been one such artist who danced to no other tune but his own, but he knew that everyone taking their craft seriously in the pop sphere had to take cues from what Bing Crosby had done years before.
But that era of music seemed to be actively trying to kill rock and roll by the time that Dylan was strumming folk tunes on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. There had been plenty of artists who exposed the genre to the masses, like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, but for every teenager who had their mother’s record collections to draw from, Crosby was the kind of square that could never have sung a track like ‘Tutti Frutti’ if he tried.
If anything, Dylan’s sharp tongue was about as far away from Crosby’s baritone as you could get. People may have been arguing that what Elvis Presley did hardly counted as proper music, but if that vibrato sent shivers down people’s spines, they might as well have been listening to a tone-deaf crow on the microphone when Dylan first stepped up to the microphone.
Dylan never tried to be that kind of performer, either. He was the kind of artist who wanted to shake people up by listening to what he had to say, and when people heard tracks like ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’, they knew that they weren’t just listening to some snot-nosed kid trying to rally against authority. He had some genuine questions, but it’s not like Crosby didn’t influence his delivery.
Taking away genre for a second, both Dylan and Crosby both knew how important it was to get the ear of the public before the eyes of the public. Anyone can put on a show and make a spectacle of themselves onstage, but without being too over-the-top, people were hanging on each performer’s every word just to figure out what the hell they were trying to say and whether or not they identified with it.
Although Dylan has come a long way since his revolutionary days, he admits that Crosby’s voice is still influencing people decades down the road, telling Rolling Stone in 2012, “A lot of people would like to sing like Bing Crosby, but very few could match his phrasing or depth of tone. He’s influenced every real singer, whether they know it or not. I used to hear Bing Crosby as a kid and not really pay attention to him. But he got inside me nevertheless.”
It’s not like Dylan is wrong in that assessment, either. David Bowie saw enough in the crooning icon to duet with him on the interpolation of a Christmas carol on ‘Peace on Earth’, and anyone who has tried to don their best tuxedo and try to make a syrupy lounge version of pop music inadvertently has Crosby in their head when they are approaching the microphone.
Beyond just the style of music, Crosby taught everyone that it was about more than just the smoke and mirrors in music. Anyone can have massive shows that entertain audiences, but if they don’t have the songs to back them up, they aren’t going to go all that far.
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