Bing Crosby- Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral (That's An Irish Lullaby)

Album Year: 1982
Age: 0
Track Number: 1



“Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral (That’s an Irish Lullaby)” is an obvious first selection for a mixtape revolving around my first year of life as it’s probably the first song I ever remembered. As a series of melodic ascents and descents, the song properly fits the qualifications for a lullaby. It’s simple, easy to remember, and easy to sing along to.

“Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is a tune that, like the song itself says, my mother used to sing to me many years ago in a voice so sweet and low. Since she was still singing this to me by the time I could remember her doing it, my educated guess is that she was singing it to me when I was even younger, even at zero years old. In turn, I have sang the song to my daughter to get her to sleep and hope to continue this tradition in our household until she can remember music too.

Bing Crosby though belongs more to my grandparent’s generation than my parents. By the time my parents had their music (60s and early 70s rock n’ roll), Crosby was a fogie, an establishment figure. Yet, a cassette of a Christmas album with a bunch of crooners, as well as some Crosby songs still linger in my parent’s personal music collection. Still, I associate Crosby more with my maternal grandparents’ music collection, whose tastes (Crosby, Andy Williams, Pat Boone) were distinct from my paternal grandfather’s (Nat King Cole, Al Martino), which bore the imprint of jazz, even if it was safe, somewhat wholesome jazz.*

This is perhaps because Crosby was not only a national treasure in his heyday, but something of an Irish folk icon for his popularization of traditional and modern Irish music. My family’s not quite as Irish as my grandmother and mother always made us out to be, but there dwelled within the Irish part of my family0 an old country pride, the kind specifically evoked in “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” (more on that in a minute). I never got a chance to ask, but I’m guessing this sentiment was instilled so deeply within my grandmother (a second generation American) because her generation was not far off from the anti-immigrant/anti-Irish/anti-Catholic antagonism that was prevalent around the turn of the century.

“Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” has roots around this era. It was written in 1914 by James Royce Shannon, a songwriter and actor who, like my grandmother, was likely more English than Irish. Shannon was born James Royce and adopted the last name “Shannon” after moving to New York, possibly to sound more Irish. The song played a minor role in an even more minor Broadway play called Shameen Dhu, a product of the final in a series of collaborations between the prolific stage writer Rida Johnson Young and composer Chauncey Olcott (with additional music by Ernest R. Ball and Shannon). A love story set in the 18th century amidst the backdrop of Irish-British struggle, the play ran for 3 weeks and was never performed again. Though Olcott received the main credit for the play’s music and sang the song in the cast as lead mean Dare O’Donnell, “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is solely attributed to Shannon. According to the comprehensive Broadway International Database, Shameen Dhu was the only Broadway play Shannon would ever compose for.

The song was used as a theatrical cue to rouse the spirits of the expatriate Irish audience using the nostalgia of a homeland in Killarney, a place associated with a mother’s warmth, as its ammunition. Whether the mother of the song is now departed or simply miles away (and the song doesn’t reveal this), the song, an Irish lullaby, bridges the distance.

Somehow the song survived as a parlor tune, leading to the myth that it actually was a traditional Irish ditty. After some 30 years out of the public, “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” eventually made its way to Hollywood and into the hands of Bing Crosby under the musical direction of former Broadway director Robert Emmett Dolan. Though Crosby was already a super-duper star of radio, film, and popular song at the time, the film Going My Way, the film which spawned the return of “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral”, catapulted what was already a practically unstoppable rise, one which culminated with the 1954 film White Christmas, whose title track is the best selling single of all time.

The story of two rival priests and their differing approaches towards troubled youth, Going My Way was a commercial and critical blockbuster, earning seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Actor for Bing Crosby. It was the highest grossing film of 1944. It’s hard to understand the film’s appeal nowadays, even if it was packed with a number of memorable songs. Going My Way was released during the last years of WWII in the throes of a period of extreme censorship under the Hays Code. Perhaps it’s this that made folks move in droves to a film about a crisis of archaic clergy practice. The film’s trailer proclaims that it is “For a world that needs the lift of its wonderful story, which I buy, given the nature of the atrocities going on at the time. Yet, the film is rarely recognized as a classic and seems a bit dry by today’s critical standards. Likewise, the titles in Crosby’s filmography give little indication to younger film buffs that he was actually one of the top grossing actors of all time.

Crosby’s music survives better, but only slightly. His fanbase is slowly dying off and becoming the stuff of records by The Caretaker (more on him late in the mixtape series). Yet, in nursing homes and veterans hospitals across America, Bing Crosby is being pumped through the air like Oxygen in Vegas, keeping elderly folks alive several years longer thanks to the help of an old undead friend. The Going My Way Soundtrack was issued by Decca nearly a year after its release because Paramount had re-released the film to theaters with enormous success. The soundtrack was a Billboard number one hit for six weeks, but it has never been reissued to cassette or CD.



In a scene from Going My Way where the older, stricter priest played by Barry Fitzgerald lays down to sleep, Fitzgerald mawkishly asks Crosby “Do you know ‘Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo’?” (further suggestion that the song ran deep throughout Irish tradition), to which Crosby proceeds to sing and mostly hum to the elderly priest. As the verses do not feature in this scene, they were likely popularized from the ensuing soundtrack LP (which also features the first version of “Swinging on a Star”, now largely known as a children’s song), as well as Crosby’s ensuing albums and greatest hits collections.
The Crosby recording chosen here is drippy with sentimental gloop strings, twinkling crescendos, and fluttering woodwinds, as close to a Disney Orchestra as Crosby could muster. The lightness of the arrangements, they way they seem to sometimes defy gravity in cute, playful ways emphasizes the utopian nature of the longing, while the final refrain of the chorus is far more sturdy, almost signaling a return to reality from the Oedipal fantasy. This simple tonal emotional tear-jerk appears so often in Disney films (and far too many Hays Code era musicals) because it offers a psychic environment which is uncluttered and uncomplicated. Children need this kind of narrative for psychological development. Their thinking is not abstract enough to grasp the tenuous nature of emotion as it actually exists, so music in children’s films can provide an elementary guide to the “rules” of human cognition (which leaves a wide open space for ideology). This arrangement of “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” chooses the form of the lullaby to provide the listener with their most safe and most vulnerable position, cradled next to his or her mother (Ireland) where he or she is safest from the poisons and pitfalls that surround him or her.

One day, “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” will be too hard to listen to, because it will never cease to be a substitute for my mother. The song has become the very fantasy it evokes. The mother of my “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is not my real mother as she is, but the religious figure the song exalts her to be. Such is the power of music as an energy. “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is a permanent establishment in my mind, an institution of fantasy and memory, itself a safe place, a Killarney. I can go there at will, lull myself into dream by simply listening to the song. It will never prevent the decay of mortal flesh or protect me in the ways that my mother could when she sang it to me, but “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” is far more affixed to me than any organ in my body. It is part of my genetic code. It is written into me.



*Crosby got his start in jazz too, fronting The Rhythm Boys at the behest of Paul Whiteman, whose unfortunate name proves an apt indicator to what type of jazz he was involved in. During the Harlem Renaissance, a period characterized by a kind Jazz continuum of Dixieland, Ragtime, Swing, and Big Band, Paul Whiteman was making these musicks safe for White America and being dubbed “The King of Jazz” for it. Crosby came out of this school.