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Steinbeck Studies 16.1 & 2 (2005) 133-135

A Question of Memory:
Bing Crosby and The Grapes of Wrath
John Ditsky

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Illustration 1
Thomas Hart Benton's illustration for The Grapes of Wrath of musicians performing at a Goverment Camp
[End Page 132]

In the "hamburger stand" fifteenth chapter of The Grapes of Wrath, there are three mentions of crooner Bing Crosby that almost seem to give structure to this single intercalary exercise. In the first paragraph, for instance, a typical such traveler's stop is described, with a trio of slot machines sitting next to a juke box—Steinbeck calls it a "nickel phonograph"—with its "records piled up like pies, ready to swing out to the turntable and play dance music, 'Ti-pi-ti-pi-tin,' 'Thanks for the Memory,' Bing Crosby, Benny "Goodman" (208). At this point the five terms seem an arbitrary listing of one genre, two specific numbers, and two artists— though what relationship in logic they might have to the hamburger stand's clientele (truck drivers, haughty tourists, migrants) can only be guessed at.

Five pages later, when tourists have come and gone and a pair of truck drivers have entered, we have also been introduced to the proprietors, Al and Mae, who have a respect for the working men of the road. Then it is that one of the latter "puts a nickel in the phonograph, watches the disk slip free and the turntable rise up under it. Bing Crosby's voice—golden. Thanks for the memory, of sunburn at the shore— You might have been a headache, but you never were a bore—'And the truck driver sings for Mae's ears, you might have been a haddock but you never was a whore—"(213).

As the truck drivers finish their coffee, the recording comes to an ending:

. . . Bing Crosby's voice stops. The turntable drops down and the record swings into its place in the pile. The purple light goes off. The nickel, which [End Page 133] has caused all this mechanism to work, has caused Crosby to sing and an orchestra to play—this nickel drops from between the contact points into the box where the profits go. This nickel, unlike most money, has actually done a job of work, has been physically responsible for a reaction.

(214)

Thereafter, the chapter occupies itself with an account of a horrific accident involving migrants on the road, and the visit of the stand of actual needy migrants to whom Al and Mae respond with unostentatious generosity. The chapter, in which physical aspects of mechanisms and sweetness are raised to a level of observations Steinbeck would not match until The Wayward Bus, ends with another pair of trucks about to indulge in a rich pie while "cars whizzed viciously by on 66" (221).

The philosophical implications of round wheel, pie, and recording will have been covered amply—or nearly so—by now. What concerns me here is a smaller business intimately tied into what the singularly useful nickel causes—the creation of music, if not also the benign behavior of its listeners. It is, specifically, a recording of "Thanks for the Memory" as sung by Bing Crosby.

Wheel, pie, and music; the sweetness of selectively remembered time. It all goes together. But wait a minute! Surely "Thanks for the Memory" belongs not to Bing Crosby, but to Bob Hope, who (tributes on his recent death most ceaselessly reminded us) broke into motion pictures by singing the song in a segment of The Big Broadcast of 1938—and was associated with it ever after—not Bing Crosby (the likelihood of whose appeal to truck drivers being best left for another venue). Crosby and Hope as a radio team were still off in the future in 1938, and their Road pictures far over the horizon. I can't find an entry for a Crosby cover of "Thanks for the Memory" at all, and most certainly not by 1938.

Ralph Rainger wrote the lyrics to...

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