Bing Crosby: Self - Host, Singer

Quotes 

• [first lines] 

  Bing Crosby : I suppose all great cities have their personalities - some more unique, more distinctive than others. Clear examples in America would be, well, New York, San Francisco, New Orleans... In Ireland, surely it's Dublin. And not because it's the biggest, but because of some curious charisma, some accidental mixture of gossip and bicycles and rain and sparkling sunshine. O'Connell Street here with its buses, the River Liffey, priests, the people, Trinity College, but most of all because of the people - cheerful, keen, alert and always glad to see you. Sometimes it seems to me they're more like Americans than anyone I know. Except for the patina of age which gilds its monuments, and its churches, its buildings - well, I feel like I never left home.

• Bing Crosby : You know, I've had a musical love affair with Ireland ever since I first heard John McCormick sing "The Rose of Tralee" on my father's gramophone - and that's more years gone than I really like to reckon. But I like to think that this affection is reciprocated... and I suppose it is, too, when you think of all the marvelous songs that Ireland has given me - and the world, too, for that matter - and how this wonderful material has enhanced, or advanced, what I loosely call my career. Now this program is conceived to bring you again some of this material and to sort of depict in part the background from whence it came.