Bing Crosby
The 20th century’s greatest multimedia star, Bing Crosby was acclaimed in recording, radio, and motion pictures and has a star for each on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He sold close to one billion records, and Billboard named him America’s most successful recording act of both the 1930s and the 1940s. His “White Christmas” held number one for 11 weeks and holds the Guinness World Record for the best-selling physical single, at an estimated 50 million copies, and the Library of Congress has named it to the National Recording Registry. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for Going My Way and received the recording industry’s first Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. His childhood home in Spokane is now the Bing Crosby House Museum on Gonzaga University’s campus.
Crosby, born in 1903, moved to Spokane at the age of three and attended Gonzaga Preparatory School and Gonzaga University before leaving to pursue music. His recording career began on October 18, 1926, with “I’ve Got the Girl,” made with his early singing partner Al Rinker and the Don Clark Orchestra, and his first three number one records came as the vocalist in Paul Whiteman’s orchestra. In 1931 he launched the solo radio show that made him a household name and shortly after signed with Paramount Pictures, making about three films a year, and in 1934 he began a long association with Decca Records as the first star to sign with the new company.
From 1931 to 1962 he sang on the radio every week, hosting the Kraft Music Hall and Philco Radio Time among other shows and attracting as many as 50 million listeners, and in 1947 he used magnetic tape from Ampex, in which he was an early investor, to pre-record his Philco show, the first tape-delayed broadcast in the United States. He charted singles every year from 1931 to 1954 and scored 38 number one records. On film he introduced 13 Oscar-nominated songs, four of which won, among them Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” first heard in Holiday Inn and released as a single on October 3, 1942, and “Swinging on a Star,” from Going My Way. He made more than 70 feature films, was Hollywood’s top box-office star from 1944 to 1948, and worked with Louis Armstrong in movies, radio, and television for nearly 50 years.
Before his death on October 14, 1977, Crosby was also nominated for the Academy Award for The Bells of St. Mary’s and The Country Girl, received the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1960 and a Peabody Award in 1970 for his contributions to television, and won the first American Music Award for lifetime achievement in 1973. His 1932 recording of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” went into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2005, and he was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1978.
In October 2021 Primary Wave Music became his estate’s partner on his catalog, including the Bing Crosby Archives and its thousands of recordings. Bing Crosby’s Christmas Gems, a 14-track album of holiday classics and rare archive recordings, followed in October 2023 and brought select songs to streaming for the first time. Duets have followed: “White Christmas (with V of BTS)” in December 2024, released with the estate, Primary Wave, and Geffen Records as his first cross-generational duet since David Bowie in 1977, and “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” with Lainey Wilson in October 2025.
