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Crosby had begun his career just as the condenser microphone was perfected, replacing the silly looking megaphones he had used in his school band. He realized that the mike was an instrument. He understood instinctively the modernist paradox: electrical appliances made singing more human, more expressive, more personal. They also enriched his unique style: rich, strong, intimate and smart. Listeners who were put off by vernacular growls and moans could enjoy his relatively immaculate approach. His focus on the meaning of lyrics helped reshape the popular song. With his combination of intelligence and rhythmic acuity, Crosby could transfigure trite songs tritely arranged (''I Found a Million Dollar Baby''), but also underscore the banality of June/moon bromides, hymns to a mother's tears and ''dark town'' caricatures. A new generation of lyricists -- Larry Hart, Cole Porter, Leo Robin, Al Dubin, Mitchell Parish, Yip Harburg and the self-renewing Irving Berlin -- found in Crosby an interpreter who brought their subtlest verbal conceits to life.

Everything came together during the Depression, when Crosby proved you could be all things to all men and all women. At the same time that he reached jazz peaks in his flights on ''Sweet Georgia Brown'' and ''Some of These Days,'' he transformed other songs into Depression anthems, including the vivid protest song ''Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?'' and ''Home on the Range,'' a little known saddle song that he turned into the most renowned of western ballads. As the most popular singer in the world, he recorded an unparalleled variety of songs: hymns, minstrel arias, singspiel, rhythm and blues -- not even Sinatra, who would deepen the interpretation of lyrics, could handle such a spectrum.

On a 1943 edition of ''Command Performance,'' a radio series recorded on transcription discs for shipment to overseas forces, the M.C., Dinah Shore, remarked, ''You know, Bing, a singer like Frank Sinatra comes along only once in a lifetime.'' Bing's famous response: ''Yeah, and he has to come along in my lifetime.'' From 1931, when Crosby first triumphed on network radio and his rivals faded, through 1940, when Tommy Dorsey took the country by storm with ''I'll Never Smile Again'' and other records featuring vocals by Sinatra, Crosby ruled mainstream pop. Armstrong, Bailey, Billie Holiday and Jimmy Rushing prospered in jazz, just as other singers found audiences in country, gospel and other idioms. But Crosby was king of the mountain -- the national voice, America's troubadour. In Sinatra, he had at long last a worthy heir, a contender. By the end of 1943, Sinatra beat him in the Down Beat poll of popular singers. High school and college clubs as well as professional pundits routinely debated their respective merits.

Yet, contrary to the Sinatra myth, at no time in the 1940's did Sinatra seriously crimp Crosby's popularity. This was the period when Bing was twice nominated for best-actor Oscars (he won in 1944 for ''Going My Way''), when he recorded the most successful record of all time, ''White Christmas,'' and when he was named in a poll of servicemen as the man who had done most for Army morale. (Enlisted men had little use for Sinatra, who was disparaged as a draft dodger and seducer.) When the troops came home, Crosby enjoyed a new crest in popularity, while Sinatra's career dimmed and almost faded to black. It was Crosby who best captured the tenor of the times in recordings like ''It's Been a Long, Long Time,'' a definitive home-from-war anthem, which never mentions the war.

By 1955, things began to change. The previous year had been a glorious one for Crosby. He had starred in the top-grossing picture of the year, ''White Christmas,'' and scored his third Oscar nomination for his stunning portrayal of an alcoholic has-been in ''The Country Girl.'' Yet what a difference a year made. Sinatra revived himself, retooled as a jet-age hipster balladeer, with a deepened voice and style and a poise fine-tuned by tribulation. Elvis Presley was knocking them dead in the South and about to break nationally. Crosby's vocal style had changed little. He could still croon with swinging élan, as demonstrated on his 1957 album, ''Bing With a Beat,'' and he continued to enjoy other triumphs. He joined with Sinatra, Armstrong and Grace Kelly for the musical film ''High Society,'' in 1956, and was widely thought to have outshone his rival -- he once chose his duet with Sinatra (''Well, Did You Evah?'') as his favorite movie scene. Crosby's television specials, through the mid-1960's, were highly musical and invariably successful. Yet in this new climate, his greatest strength was considered a liability. Sinatra rang the rafters, Tony Bennett poured out his heart and Presley rocked, but Crosby's preternatural cool, his canny gentleness, was too laid-back, too easy for the nuclear age.

By then he had begun to retreat from the stage. He now had a young wife, Kathryn Grant, and three small children, and he was determined not to repeat the mistakes of his first marriage to Dixie Lee, when his work kept him away for long stretches and he tried to compensate by imposing strict disciplinary measures on his four sons. He continued to broadcast Christmas specials, which led to a famous duet with David Bowie (''The Little Drummer Boy'') and was seen frequently on the variety show ''Hollywood Palace.'' Yet his film career came to an end with ''Stagecoach,'' in 1966, and American record companies no longer wanted to record him; his 1970's comeback was fueled with albums made and released in England, including a treasurable 1975 duet with Fred Astaire, ''A Couple of Song and Dance Men.'' At Crosby's death, two years later, his contemporaries mourned him, but to a younger generation he had become a Norman Rockwell poster, an irrelevant holdover from another world.

His art, however, retains its power in unexpected ways. His versions of late-19th-century and early-20th-century songs are oddly compelling, and it is difficult to imagine another singer -- Sinatra, for example -- attempting them; I once saw an opera expert reduced to tears by Crosby's ''Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.'' His great Depression waltzes (''Mexicali Rose,'' ''The One Rose'') recapture the dark side of that era as nothing else does. Crosby's early collaborations with Bix Beiderbecke and Ellington and later ones with Armstrong, Eddie Condon, Connie Boswell, Johnny Mercer, Woody Herman, Bob Crosby (his kid brother), Eddie Heywood, Bob Scobey, Rosemary Clooney and many others retain their ingenuity and rhythmic zest. No matter how popular he became, his prowess and his jazz beat kept him honest. For that reason, he continues to speak to us, and in that sense, he remains our contemporary.

Bing, for Starters

One obstacle to a serious reconsideration of Bing Crosby's music has been availability: many of the best performances were never reissued on LP, let alone on CD. Here are 10 splendid avenues into the immense labyrinth of Crosby's recorded legacy.

'BING CROSBY 1926-1932' (Timeless CBC 1-004). A representative sampling of the Whiteman years, expertly remastered.

'BING -- HIS LEGENDARY YEARS 1931-1957' (MCA MCAD4-10887). An essential four-disc survey of Crosby's most fruitful period -- with Decca Records.

'BING CROSBY 1928-1945' (L'Art Vocal 20). A French import and the best single-disc introduction to Crosby in print.

'BING CROSBY AND SOME JAZZ FRIENDS' (Decca/MCA GRD-603). A one-volume anthology of the Decca years, focusing on jazz collaborations.

'BING'S GOLD RECORDS' (MCA MCAD-11719). Also from Decca, a collection of all 26 Crosby million-sellers.

'I'M AND OLD COWHAND' (ASV AJA 5160). Western songs, including his hymnlike ''Home on the Range," a favorite of Franklin Roosevelt.

'BING CROSBY KRAFT SHOWS' (Lost Gold Records LGR 7598). Two complete radio broadcasts, with Duke Ellington and Nat (King) Cole as guests.

'HAVIN' FUN' (Jazz Unlimited JUCD 2034). Highlights from Crosby's radio broadcasts with Louis Armstrong.

'BING WITH A BEAT' (RCA Victor LTM-1473). A masterly 1957 album with Bob Scobey's Frisco Jazz Band, long out of print. Write BMG or your congressman.

'THE VOICE OF CHRISTMAS' (MCA MCAD2-11840). The ultimate mistletoe collection, two discs, complete with a rejected take of ''White Christmas.'' GARY GIDDINS

Photos: Bing Crosby on the cover of the December 1934 issue of a music magazine. (Gary Giddins Collection)(pg. 1); Above, Bing Crosby, left, and Frank Sinatra in 1944; far left, Ethel Waters, who was a major influence on Crosby, in 1953; and Crosby, circa 1940. (Sam Falk/The New York Times)(pg. 37)