Bing Crosby
How It All Started
Bing Crosby's solo radio career began on September 2, 1931, with a 15-minute CBS program called 15 Minutes with Bing Crosby, accompanied by guitarist Eddie Lang and an orchestra conducted by Victor Young. That modest debut came after years of apprenticeship on the air — Crosby had already been performing as part of The Rhythm Boys vocal trio with Paul Whiteman's orchestra on NBC radio as far back as 1927–1928. The jump to solo work was swift and decisive. Just two months after that first CBS appearance, he launched The Cremo Singer, a sponsored series that aired six nights a week on CBS starting November 3, 1931. The pace was relentless almost from the first broadcast.
What made Crosby's rise so fast was that radio and his particular talent fit each other almost perfectly. The format mixed singing with short comedy skits and easy back-and-forth conversation with guests — nothing rigid, nothing that required much setup. Much of what listeners heard was simply Crosby talking with people and telling jokes, which turned out to be exactly what audiences wanted. His voice was warm and unhurried on the microphone, and the format let that come through.
The Kraft Music Hall Years
The biggest platform of Crosby's radio life arrived on January 2, 1936, when he took over NBC's Kraft Music Hall. He hosted the program until May 9, 1946 — a decade-long run that drew roughly fifty million listeners each week at its height. That is the number most often cited for his peak Kraft audience, and it gives some sense of the scale of the enterprise. This was not a niche program; it was one of the central fixtures of American broadcast life during those years.
The team Crosby built around Kraft Music Hall stayed remarkably stable. Musical director John Scott Trotter shaped the sound of the broadcasts. Announcer Ken Carpenter, who would eventually work alongside Crosby for 27 years, became one of the most familiar voices in radio simply by association. Writer Carroll Carroll handled the comedy material that filled the gaps between songs.
The decade on NBC ended with a dispute that foreshadowed something historically important. In 1945, Crosby wanted to pre-record his broadcasts on transcription discs rather than perform them live. NBC and Kraft refused. Crosby walked out. He eventually returned in February 1946 to finish out the season before leaving for good — and the argument he had been making, that recorded broadcasts could be just as good as live ones, would shortly be proved right in a way nobody had anticipated.
The Tape Experiment That Changed Broadcasting
After leaving Kraft Music Hall, Crosby moved to ABC and launched Philco Radio Time on October 16, 1946, with Bob Hope as his first guest. The new show aired Wednesdays for 30 minutes. The real story of Philco Radio Time, though, was not the format or the guests — it was what happened behind the scenes in 1947.
Crosby worked with engineer Jack Mullin and became the first broadcaster in the United States to use magnetic tape for a network radio program. Philco Radio Time made its first tape-delayed broadcast on October 1, 1947, a genuinely new thing in American broadcasting. To make it happen at professional quality, Crosby invested $50,000 in a company called Ampex to help it develop broadcast-grade magnetic tape recorders. The first two Ampex Model 200 units produced — serial numbers 1 and 2 — went directly to the Crosby show.
One side effect of all this tape work turned out to be at least as consequential as the recording technology itself. Producer Bill Morrow, working with the recorded material, saved audience laughter from an unusable take and inserted it into a later broadcast. That workaround is credited as the origin of the laugh track, which would go on to shape the sound of American radio and television comedy for decades. Crosby's insistence on recorded broadcasts, which started as a scheduling convenience, ended up leaving a mark on the entire medium.
Philco Radio Time ran until June 1949, giving Crosby three years on ABC before he moved back to CBS.
Back to CBS — The Chesterfield and GE Years
Crosby returned to CBS in September 1949 with The Bing Crosby Show for Chesterfield, a 30-minute weekly musical variety program that ran until June 1952. The guest roster during those years included Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, Al Jolson, and Judy Garland, among others. In January 1951, CBS and Paramount Pictures jointly declared the month "Bing's Month" in recognition of his 20th year as a solo artist in show business.
When the Chesterfield sponsorship ended, General Electric stepped in. The Bing Crosby Show for General Electric ran on CBS from October 1952 to May 1954, continuing the same weekly variety format. After that series wrapped, Crosby shifted to a smaller, more stripped-down setup: a 15-minute program, five nights a week on CBS, beginning November 22, 1954, built around Buddy Cole and his trio, with Ken Carpenter back as announcer and Murdo MacKenzie handling editing duties.
Running alongside all of this, the annual Christmas Sing with Bing aired on CBS from 1955 to 1962 as a one-hour special sponsored by the Insurance Company of North America. Crosby performed Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" regularly on those broadcasts — a song that had been bound to his name since the 1940s.
The Later Years and the Clooney Partnership
Crosby's radio work continued well into the late 1950s and early 1960s, longer than is sometimes remembered. He hosted The Ford Road Show Featuring Bing Crosby on CBS from 1957 to 1958, a five-minute, five-days-a-week program that kept him on the air between larger commitments. Then, from 1960 to 1962, he co-hosted The Bing Crosby–Rosemary Clooney Show on CBS, a daily 20-minute morning program that paired him with singer Rosemary Clooney. The morning format and the conversational dynamic between the two made it a different kind of program than the big-audience variety shows of his earlier years, but it was a genuine working partnership, not a celebrity cameo arrangement.
His long friendship and professional relationship with Bob Hope was a consistent thread through much of his radio career. Hope was the first guest on Philco Radio Time in 1946, and the two appeared together on radio regularly across the years — the same partnership that produced six of the seven "Road to" film comedies between 1940 and 1962.
What the Catalog Holds
The catalog entry for this series runs 403 episodes, with the earliest known broadcast dated September 2, 1931, and the latest dated April 1, 1965 — a span that touches nearly every significant phase of Crosby's radio work. Episode titles in the collection range from early musical programs like "Gems from George White's Scandals" and "Pennies from Heaven" to guest-driven broadcasts like "Lucille Ball" and "Bob Hope - It's Love, Love, Love." A broadcast titled "Salute To Bing - 20th Anniversary" marks the milestone CBS and Paramount recognized in January 1951.
Crosby's career in radio was never confined to a single network or a single format. He worked across CBS, NBC, and ABC over three decades — one of the few performers of his era to build major franchises on all three. Outside radio, he recorded an estimated 1,600 or more songs, won the Academy Award for Best Actor for Going My Way in 1944, was the number-one box-office attraction in film for five consecutive years from 1944 to 1948, and in 1963 received the first Grammy Global Achievement Award. He is one of 33 people to hold three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, in the categories of motion pictures, radio, and audio recording. Yank magazine recognized him as the person who contributed the most to American G.I. morale during World War II, and in 1948, multiple polls named him the most admired man alive. Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, and Dean Martin all acknowledged him as the primary influence on their own approaches to singing.