It’s almost obscene how big a star Crosby once was, and how little he seems to mean now

It’s almost obscene how big a star Crosby once was, and how little he seems to mean now. His hugeness can be proven with science. During the war, his radio programmes attracted fifty million listeners in America. Of the five highest-grossing Hollywood movies in 1946, three of them – The Bells of St Mary’s, Blue Skies, Road to Utopia – starred Bing Crosby; he was the number one box office star for five years straight, from 1944 to 1948. He recorded nearly four hundred hit singles, an achievement no-one – not Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Beyonce or Kanye West – has come remotely close to matching, and probably no one ever will.

B. Stanley, Let's do it: the birth of pop (2022), 220