Real Men Don't Sing: Crooning in American Culture. By Allison McCracken. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

Abstract

Men with high voices often stand accused. They are regarded as adolescent, effeminate, gay-as not quite men. The gender queering of pop icons like Michael Jackson and myriad "boy bands" bears this out. In Real Men Don't Sing: Crooning in American Culture, American studies scholar Allison McCracken locates the origins of our current vocal essentialism in the crooning pop idols of the 1920s and 1930s. "Crooning" in this era applied primarily to white male singers performing sentimental, romantic repertory in a soft, usually high, voice. The crooner's rise and subsequent fall, McCracken argues, depended upon a confluence of technological and social factors. Early microphones and electronic amplification were particularly amenable to high voices, and the nascent radio, recording, and film industries made possible a national audience. An expanding urban middle class combined with the easing of Victorian sexual mores empowered female consumers to assert a greater influence over this new national culture. Threatened by women's rising power and the economic instability of the Depression, male cultural authorities used popular media to denounce crooners as effeminate and sexually deviant. This backlash formed part of a white, masculinist cultural nationalism beginning in the 1930s that is still very much alive today; as McCracken explains, "the popularity of early crooners instigated the imposition, for the first time, of masculine norms for voices on a mass scale in American society" (4). Analyzing sheet music, recordings, films, and publicity materials through the lens of media and gender studies, McCracken's book offers the first nuanced account of crooning's heyday and its continued legacy in pop vocal performance. 1 Like so many other forms of twentieth-century popular entertainment, crooning has its roots in blackface minstrelsy. The early chapters of Real Men Don't Sing trace crooning's transition from the racialized genre of minstrelsy to a white, female-coded style. Sheet music in the late 1800s used the word "croon" to describe the voice of the black "mammy" stereotype. White men typically sang the earliest of these nostalgic "mammy songs," emphasizing their sentimental affect. By 1910, female minstrels and black composers were adapting crooning to other ends, undercutting its racialized origins while leaving its emotionalism intact. The word "crooning" began appearing in romantic Tin Pan Alley ballads to refer to tender speech whispered between lovers. This coincided with the entry of female audiences into vaudeville theaters and other formerly homosocial male spaces; seeking greater respectability and profitability, theater managers increasingly preferred romantic balladry to crass minstrelsy. McCracken concludes that "women's