Russ Columbo was one of the first crooners on American radio. His talents and efforts seriously rivaled those of Harry "Bing" Crosby, the preeminent vocalist of this genre. Russ was forging a promising career even before the Stock Market Crash of October 1929. His voice's intimate timbre was, like Crosby's, ideal for the new carbon springs microphone and its revolutionary use on the airwaves. He was quite the "hearthrob" and his songs of lost love and other laments of pining Romeos (in fact, he was dubbed the "Romeo of Radio"), ushered in an era where sexuality and celebrity would both strengthen their respective impacts immeasurably and unceasingly, as they have evidently continued to do so, up to the present time. Yet the raucous and libertine zeitgeist of the Jazz Age was abating as Columbo's career was beginning to soar. Exhaustion with the excesses of the post war era's freneticism, disillusionment and suppression of tender sensibilities, allowed for the "sweet" sounds to come to the fore in American music, both among vocalists like Russ and orchestras like Guy Lombardo and His Canadians, Les Brown and His Band of Renown and Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra, to name a few. These groups were really a continuation of the Society orchestras that flourished early in the century and that were so popular with New York's and other urban upper class circles.
But what was the new spirit at the dawn of the Great Depression? The nation's economy was obviously front and center for most, while the totalitarian mindset was beginning to attract more and more persons who tired of democracy's seemingly anemic response to unemployment and poverty. Fascists or bolsheviks: they both were able to push reality away from the minds of many with stirring appeals to darker impulses and quick fixes for our various ailments. Still, a certain gentleness, a feminine spirit, contrastingly seemed to pervade the arts, particularly pop music. Columbo himself, though a sex symbol, seemed to cause more women to want to nurture him rather than be ravished by him. His big hit "I'm Through With Love" (the above title of this blog entry is a fragment of one of the song's lyrics) was like many another in which themes of unrequited love, rejection and the slavery of obsession and other dicta of the libido were the foci of a great number of consumers of musical entertainment. Perhaps the subject of angst, though unremarkably on the minds of so many relative to the basics, such as putting food on the table, was permeating all spheres of life. Then again, there's nothing new or trailblazing about sorrowful love songs. Barbara Allen and Greensleeves tell forcefully of their ancient pedigree. Some songs of the '30s even directly addressed the existential and/or economic pain. Al Bowlly's Twentieth Century Blues and Got The Jitters by Ben Pollack were among them as was of course, Rudy Vallee's As Time Goes By. This one though had an upbeat message that really fit (and hopefully, fits) the American character, namely that the old verities are just that: immutable because they are true and are grounded in something that in some way can melt the most determinedly frozen tickers over time.
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