Ba-ba-bummm...

In the recent post about Dame Vera Lynn, I mentioned "crooning".  Very much a word of its time, it's little heard today, but its importance in the history of popular music cannot be overstated.  In the early days of the 20th century, if you sang in public, you needed a BIG voice in order to be heard at the back of the hall.  But as every singer knows, there is a trade-off between volume and expression.  The louder you sing, the less you can convey the nuances of the melody and lyric.  So when, in the early 1920s the microphone came along - or more precisely, the amplifier that came with it - suddenly you could sing softly and still be heard by those in the cheap seats.  And this type of singing became known as crooning.  Of course, as ever, there were those who pushed it too far, and crooning quickly became associated with a mushy, schmaltzy type of delivery   Certainly Dame Vera was not a crooner by this definition, and, surprisingly perhaps, Frank Sinatra maintained that neither he nor Bing Crosby were crooners. Come the middle 1950s there was the inevitable backlash when rock 'n' roll brought back a loud and raucous style.  But it was the microphone that changed everything.