“Only Forever” by Bing Crosby

At #1: October 19, 1940 to December 14, 1940 (9 weeks)
Still alive? No. Der Bingle died on October 14, 1977
Extra info: The song is from the 1940 movie “Rhythm on the River”



Unlike “I’ll Never Smile Again”, this song is credited to its performer, Bing Crosby. It would be very hard to explain how big Bing Crosby was. You’d have to equate Bing Crosby with Elvis Presley, or The Beatles, or Elton John, or Michael Jackson or Mariah Carey, or Eminem - all of whom were named as the Billboard Artist of the Decade from the decades of the 1950s to 2000s, respectively. If Billboard was giving out an award for Artist of the Decade for the 1930s, Crosby would have walked away the winner. They wouldn’t have even nominated anyone else.

The best fit for Bing is probably Elvis Presley, because Bing was as great a movie star as he was a singer. Crosby was a huge movie star during the 1940s. (Elvis, by contrast, just made a lot of movies. Bing made a lot of good movies.) Furthermore, Crosby controlled his career – unlike Elvis, who never confronted his management. I don’t believe that any modern artist really approaches Bing Crosby – in the sense that Crosby had success in most of what he chose to do - except maybe Madonna, and most people would rather see an Elvis Presley movie than a Madonna one.

That’s the mark of greatness – when there is no good match for you. There was no good match for Bing Crosby.

Reading the Wikipedia article on Crosby, I learned a little bit about “crooners”. Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby were both characterized as crooners. (I don’t know how much Crosby influenced Sinatra, but they were both in the same category in terms of musical style. I understand that Crosby was one of Sinatra’s idols and that after seeing Crosby perform in New Jersey in 1935, Sinatra made the decision to become a singer. The two met backstage briefly after the performance, established performer meets star-struck fan.)

Crooning owed a lot to technological advancements and good microphones. The style of music before the crooner – typified by Al Jolson – was to sing very loudly, so that the people in the back of the theater could hear you. Once sound technology improved, this became unnecessary and sound amplification could showcase the human voice in a way that it never had before. Music moved away from the bombastic Vaudeville sound and towards a more conversational sound with someone who could sing sweetly – the quality of the human voice took center stage. Bing didn’t have to scream to be heard.

What do I think of “Only Forever”? Well, Bing can certainly sing even though the song is an artifact. The comment thread in YouTube devotes itself to answering the question of whether “Only Forever” deserves the honor of being the second song ever to be a #1 song. (The answer depends on whether or not you count the other methods Billboard uses to tabulate top sellers, which were limited to one sort of medium (sheet music) or which were not nationwide polls.)

Lyrically, it’s no masterpiece:

If someone should ask.
How long would it take me
To be near if you beckoned?
Off hand I would figure
Less than a second.

There is a Wikipedia entry on “Only Forever” – a short one. The song was written by James V. Monaco and Johnny Burke - Burke wrote a lot of songs for Crosby. Monaco would be dead of heart failure by 1945. Both Monaco and Burke would end up in the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

My theory is that the success of the song depends on “Rhythm on the River”, a movie with Bing Crosby and Mary Martin. Crosby and Martin perform the song at the end of the film, briefly – I suspect the song was sung earlier in the film by can’t prove it. But there are holes in this theory. “Rhythm on the River” wasn’t a big hit in theatres, not as far as I can tell. It wasn’t even Bing Crosby’s best movie that year. (That would probably be “Road to Singapore”, the first of the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope “Road” movies.)

There must have been something great about this song to deserve nine weeks at Number One, although 72 years later I suspect that I’ll never know what it was. I guess you just had to be there.


Extra: The Crosby/Martin performance from the movie.