Okay. Let's Settle This Once & For All Times!!!

[MagicHef]

Originally Posted by KC Dan

Bing Crosby was something, that is true especially for his generation. However, the question was "Which one of the above had the greatest impact on popular music?" I sincerely doubt Bing and his music had a massive influence on popular music going forward. I would go so far as to say that his music brand died in the mid-late fifties except with his generation.

Just because his exact style of music is not among the most popular right now does not mean that he didn't have an impact on popular music going forward. I don't think you can argue that music would be the same today without his influence.

With Crosby, as Henry Pleasants noted in The Great American Popular Singers, something new had entered American music, something that might be called "singing in American," with conversational ease. The oddity of this new sound led to the epithet "crooner."

Crosby perfected an idea that Al Jolson had hinted at, that the popular performer did not have to limit himself to a mere series of shticks but could be a genuine artist — in this case, a musician. Before Crosby, art was art and pop was pop; opera singers worried about staying in tune and reaching the upper balcony, vaudevillians concerned themselves with their costumes and facial expressions.
Crosby rendered the difference between the two irrelevant. Where earlier recording artists had displayed strictly one-dimensional attitudes, Crosby not only perfected the fully rounded persona, but brought with it the technical ability of a true concert artist. Crosby projected with a majestic sense of intonation that afforded Tin Pan Alley the musical stature of European classics and a jazz influenced time that made him the dominant voice of both the Jazz age and the Swing era.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_Crosby

Or, in terms of performance, you could go with Al Jolson:

According to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, "Jolson was to jazz, blues, and ragtime what Elvis Presley was to rock 'n' roll." Being the first popular singer to make a spectacular "event" out of singing a song, he became a “rock star” before the dawn of rock music. His specialty was building stage runways extending out into the audience. He would run up and down the runway and across the stage, "teasing, cajoling, and thrilling the audience," often stopping to sing to individual members, all the while the "perspiration would be pouring from his face, and the entire audience would get caught up in the ecstasy of his performance."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jolson