Abstract
Allison McCracken’s Real Men Don’t Sing contributes to the emerging scholarship that unsettles truisms about men’s bodies. Previous studies have denaturalized cultural assumptions regarding how men appear, desire, or move. McCracken reveals the multiple layers of social and technological construction behind the “natural” sound of a man’s natural singing voice.
She tells the story of the gendering of voice by following the rise in the late 1920s of the singer Rudy Vallée and his fall in the early 1930s, as intensifying homophobia and misogyny led critics to disparage Valleé’s singing and his fans. The early 1930s constituted a crucial formative moment in the making of masculinity in the United States when journalists and other cultural arbiters convinced the public that men’s voices had to be deep. Vallée was the epitome of a 1920s crooner. These singers, most of whom were men, softly sang romantic songs with high-pitched voices and audible, unabashed emotion. Their voices, carried to mass audiences via radio programs, were adored by devoted fans who felt directly addressed by the loving lyrics of crooners’ songs.
McCracken explains the rise of crooning as the product of the convergence of cultural, social, commercial, and technological change. Romantic crooning developed in the 1920s, a time when there was a somewhat wider public space for gender and sexual expression than in the immediately preceding of following decades. Newly developed microphone technology and radio broadcasts enabled listeners nationwide to hear a novel kind of voice. Before the availability of the microphone stage, singers had to develop muscular voices that were loud enough to be heard in large concert halls. The microphone and radio gave listeners a new intimate sound, a voice that whispered sweet words and melodies into their ears. Huge audiences of women and substantial numbers of men loved that sound.
McCracken draws on a wide array of sources ranging from fan letters to the business meeting minutes of the J. Walter Thompson publicity firm to write a book that is a history of performers, producers, their audiences, music critics, and the gender conventions that arose from the struggles among them. As popular theatrical entertainment expanded from homosocial male spaces to venues for mixed-sex audiences, women’s desires were initially catered to and then ridiculed and denied. McCracken draws on a treasure trove of Vallée’s fan mail. While critics denounced crooning as the sound of depravity, Vallée’s mainly but not exclusively female fans heard in Vallée’s voice the kind of lover they desired. A broad wave of conservatism in the 1930s carried a tightening of gender norms whose most formal cultural expression was the 1934 Hollywood Production Code. The stars women adored were ridiculed by the press as fairies and their performance styles banned. The entertainment industry retained female audiences by supplanting the crooners of the 1920s with a new romantic lead, Bing Crosby. Crosby sang with a deeper voice, performed masculinity as emotionally distant, and McCracken argues, established an enduring masculine ideal for pop singing.
Centered on the careers of Rudy Vallée and Bing Crosby, this is a history of white masculinity as it was constructed in the United States. The book begins with crooning’s roots in staged performances of black “mammy” figures singing to children, before the term’s meaning shifted to become the name for soft romantic singing by men. After describing crooning’s racialized origins, race is largely peripheral to the book’s argument and to its descriptions. McCracken’s argument regarding the construction of masculinity through voice is innovative and convincing; the entanglement of that construction with whiteness could have been more developed.
That said, Real Men Don’t Sing is a forcefully argued and thoroughly engaging book that would be an ideal text in courses on popular culture or gender and the body. Assign it to your students and they will turn to YouTube to hear Rudy Vallée croon and experience what we have all lost. McCracken demonstrates that popular culture can be a place where audiences, especially young ones, can find alternative ways of being. Mass media can also narrow the possibilities, as in the 1930s when the Hollywood Production Code eliminated all but the most conservative heteronormative images from films. But desires exceed what mainstream media offer. McCracken shows that in the struggle between audiences and the producers of pop culture, sometimes girls get what they want.