Bing Crosby interview on wildlife, hunting, bird songs 1975

Bing's interview for the BBC radio program "Sounds Natural", recorded on July 28, 1975. The interviewer was Derek Jones and the interview aired in January 1976.
John F. Burton, one of the fellas who came to interview him, recalled in 2014:
"An enthusiastic golfer, Bing had become friends with the BBC’s golfing commentator, the late Henry Longhurst, who, as it happened, was also very interested in wildlife and had already agreed to participate in one of the Sounds Natural programmes. I mentioned to him that I would like to invite Bing. [...]
[...] The regular Sounds Natural interviewer, the late Derek Jones, a popular West Country broadcaster, and I arrived together with a BBC recording engineer based in London. As soon as we had set up our recording gear ready to go, Bing joined us and quickly made us feel at home. I explained the form that the programme would take. This included the subsequent insertion of sound recordings from the BBC’s collection of wildlife sounds to illustrate his anecdotes and memories, plus extracts I had selected from a few of the songs that he had recorded that were appropriate to the programme’s theme.
I had previously discovered that he was a very good mimic of those American wild birds with which he was familiar. In discussing these with him, I mentioned that one would be an extract from ‘My Blue Heaven’, which refers to the call of the whip-poor-will, a bird related to our nightjar, which also calls at night. Bing said he had sung so many different songs in his lifetime and he couldn’t remember them all including that one. So rather self-consciously in the presence of such a famous crooner, I crooned the first couple of lines to him, which sparked his memory and he joined in, quipping at the end, ‘We should have got together sooner, John!’ Other songs of Bing’s that I included were ‘Mr Meadowlark’, where Bing gives very good imitations of the song of this American bird of fields and meadows, and bobwhite. The bobwhite is a common small American gamebird related to our quail whose name is onomatopoeic: its typical call sounding like a whistled ‘bob-bob-white’, also mimicked perfectly by Bing.
To demonstrate just how good his imitations were, in the final programme as transmitted, I subsequently added actual sound recordings of these birds for comparison.
Provided by me with a series of questions in addition to his own that I knew would launch Bing on a string of his wildlife memories, Derek, a masterly interviewer, evoked a delightfully chatty conversation that pleased me immensely. Bing had been a keen wildfowler, hunting within United States laws, but his concern for the conservation of water birds and other wildlife was sincere.
After the interview had finished, Bing, Derek, the recording engineer and I continued to chat for another hour about birds, fishing, colour blindness (from which Bing suffered) and other topics. Derek and I both felt that Bing genuinely enjoyed chatting about his interests in wildlife and its conservation as a change from being asked about his show business career…
Altogether, as Derek Jones wrote in his account of the occasion (Microphones and Muddy Boots, David & Charles, Newton Abbot, Devon, 1987), it was ‘two hours of absolute joy’.
Like Derek, I am happy that we were able to meet and talk with Bing, a charming man whose distinctive singing voice we had both greatly admired. A couple of years after our meeting, Bing passed away, appropriately enough, on a golf course. To both of us life wasn’t the same without him.
A couple of months after the repeat broadcast of the programme in January 1976, I received a very nice personal letter from Bing, saying, among other topics, that he had listened to the tape of the programme I had sent him and was ‘much impressed’ by it. I still have and treasure the letter."

[@CliffMcAulay]

The more I hear about Bing, especially from your lovely site, the more I realise how grateful he was for his life...
And doesn't it show in his music! Thank you for uploading this interview EP .

[@brokenarrowproductions7981]

Thank you for this. Awesome interview of a legend in America. Glad to see he appreciated the things God gave us in this amazing country.

[@oldcarnocar]

very nice!