Real Men Don't Sing: Crooning in American Culture

Refiguring American Music

by Allison McCracken

The crooner Rudy Vallée's soft, intimate, and sensual vocal delivery simultaneously captivated millions of adoring fans and drew harsh criticism from those threatened by his sensitive masculinity. Although Vallée and other crooners reflected the gender fluidity of late-1920s popular culture, their challenge to the Depression era's more conservative masculine norms led cultural authorities to stigmatize them as gender and sexual deviants. In Real Men Don't Sing Allison McCracken outlines crooning's history from its origins in minstrelsy through its development as the microphone sound most associated with white recording artists, band singers, and radio stars. She charts early crooners’ rise and fall between 1925 and 1934, contrasting Rudy Vallée with Bing Crosby to demonstrate how attempts to contain crooners created and dictated standards of white masculinity for male singers. Unlike Vallée, Crosby survived the crooner backlash by adapting his voice and persona to adhere to white middle-class masculine norms. The effects of these norms are felt to this day, as critics continue to question the masculinity of youthful, romantic white male singers. Crooners, McCracken shows, not only were the first pop their short-lived yet massive popularity fundamentally changed American culture.

 

Genres: History, Music, Nonfiction, Gender Studies

448 pages, Hardcover

First published September 25, 2015

Reviews

[Biblio Files (takingadayoff) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Real Men Don't Sing took me a long time to finish -- I had to keep stopping to find youtubes of the music and movies Allison McCracken was writing about. Although I'm fairly familiar with Bing Crosby's songs, even the earlier examples, I didn't know what Rudy Vallee sounded like or any of the other popular crooners of the 1920s and 1930s. Hearing and seeing them in action was entertaining and made the book's arguments clearer.

Today if you think of "crooners," Bing Crosby might still come to mind, and Tony Bennett and Michael Buble perhaps. There's nothing especially effeminate about those singers, but when crooning became a phenomenon in the 1920s, it was a term associated with young white men with untrained voices who sang quavery pleading ballads about their mothers or their girlfriends, or more likely, about girls they hoped would somehow become their girlfriends. They appeared vulnerable and became enormously popular with young women and older women alike. Many men liked them too, some because they appreciated the way the songs put their wives and girlfriends in a romantic mood, others because they found the crooners, with their metrosexual makeup and collegiate clothing, exciting.

McCracken makes the obvious connections with later singers such as David Cassidy and Michael Jackson (although there does seem to be a difference between the adult audiences of earlier crooners and the teen and pre-teen audiences of the later singers.) More interesting is the comparison she draws between proto-crooners Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby. When there was a conservative backlash against crooners for not being manly enough, Vallee virtually ignored the criticisms and played to his audience in all its variety. Crosby on the other hand, made an all out effort to combat the "sissy" accusations, playing up his he-man credentials.

McCracken even takes issue with what is probably the definitive biography of the first half of Crosby's life, Gary Giddins' A Pocketful of Dreams, for playing down Crosby's concerns on questions of his masculinity. She backs up her argument with plenty of evidence.

After reading real Men Don't Sing, I am more deterrmined than ever, when I get my time machine, to go back and visit America in the 1920s, when everything was changing and it seemed that it was truly an age when "Anything Goes."

(Thanks to NetGalley and Duke University Press for a digital review copy.)

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Allison McCracken in her book explores the breadth, scope and influence of crooning as a song style and brilliantly charts its influence on the formation of Pop music in America. Without question she has written the definitive history of the crooner and its impact on American gender norms especially in regards to masculinity. It is a historical study that combines a theoretical perspective and one that will become the go to work for understanding not only crooners but also American popular culture in the 1920s and early 1930s.

[Duke Press]

"[A] rich, intriguing account of how microphone assisted heartthrobs won over American ears in the early 20th century." — Ann Powers NPR Book Concierge
12/08/2015

[Mills College Library]

782.42164 M1321 2015