Good question! The answer, as you might suppose, is a bit complicated: yes, this style of singing was somewhat popular, but it was one of several competing styles in the diverse popular music of the day, and in fact was by 1938 on the cusp of "losing out," so to speak, to some of the others. Interestingly, this conflict between different styles of singing is itself a feature in the stories of many 1930s musicals, as I'll describe below. Walt Disney's own vision of cinema as popular art factors in here as well.

But let's get down to basics. What you’re hearing is a classically-trained soprano (Adriana Caselotti) singing a sentimental ballad in a semi-classical mode with a high degree of vibrato. This is precisely the sort of thing you would hear in an operetta – basically, opera-style singing paired with simple, easily-hummable melodies and straightforward, platitudinous lyrics (think Gilbert and Sullivan).

It’s hard to imagine from today’s vantage point, but singers working in the classical European idiom were a key component of the American popular music landscape from its origins in the 1890s through the mid-20th century. You’ve probably heard of Tin Pan Alley, two blocks on Manhattan’s west 28th street where a great deal of the popular music in the phonograph and early radio decades was written, recorded, and distributed. Despite its limited geography, the Alley worked with a remarkable array of styles, including “blues, hillbilly, folk, country, ragtime, and the capricious, multifaceted category of jazz” (Spring 29). Within those styles, contemporaneous songwriting manuals listed the most commercially viable genres as “sentimental ballads, Irish ballads, comic songs, ragtime numbers, old-fashioned waltzes, production songs (for Broadway musical comedies, operettas, and revues), patriotic songs, and topic songs whose categories included ‘mother songs’ and ‘home songs.’” (30). For much of that time, the popular ballad in particular was regarded as an evergreen favorite. If you don’t know it, Gene Austin’s “My Blue Heaven” is highly typical of the era.

Certainly, not all singers working in the ballad were classically trained, and in fact one of the key features of the Tin Pan Alley era was that songs were not as associated with individual singers as they would later be (though this process was underway by the 1920s). Still, tenors, sopranos and the like were a big part of the popular soundscape of the day. Consider this anecdote from January 1, 1925: “That night, Irish star tenor John McCormack sang Irving Berlin’s ‘All Alone’ over the airwaves, allegedly inciting combined sales of nearly 2.5 million records, sheet music copies, and piano rolls. Sponsored by the Victor Talking Machine Company and broadcast over NBC’s flagship station WEAF and seven affliliated stations on the East Coast, McCormack’s presentation, coupled with a performance by Metropolitan Opera star Lecrezia Bori, was said to have reached between six and eight million listeners and to have inspired confidence in station managers who saw economic value in transmitting ‘live’ celebrity voices over the radio” (Spring 20).

That said, European art music as such was only a small part of 20th century popular music landscape, to the extent that Paul Whiteman could write in 1927 that, “This great audience for Popular Music prefers its musical tastes in lighter, sentimental or dance-appealing form; Brahms and Chopin and Wagner and Rimsky-Korsakoff thy are frank enough to disown and leave for the intellectual minority.” Spring notes that popular music’s domination of the radio airwaves was to the great “chagrin of those who saw in the broadcasting of classical music great potential to educate the masses and inspire cultural edification” (20). Well, if you’ve ever seen Fantasia you know that Walt Disney was precisely one of these figures – someone who saw in cinema an even greater potential to “educate the masses” about the glory of classical music. It makes sense that he would have his heroine sing in an operatic rather than, say, blues-inflected idiom.

Interestingly, Elizabeth Upton points out a second possible reason: Snow White was the first-ever feature length animated movie, and moreover the first one to feature recognizably human (which is to say, “realistic”) figures. No one, including Disney, knew whether audiences would be able to countenance it, and in fact early character animation tests slammed hard into the wall of what we would today call the “uncanny valley” problem. So one solution hit on early by Disney and co was to draw on the suspension of disbelief audiences were already used to in the stage musical – namely, that people just randomly burst into song. “By the strategy of having the characters communicate almost exclusively through singing, something that never happens in real life but always does in musical theatre, Disney convinces the audience to accept painted drawings as genuinely sympathetic characters at least as real as any others portrayed on stage or screen by human actors. When Snow White sings, and sings, and sings, she can be seen not just as a cartoon character, but rather as a real person in a theatrical performance. Thus for Disney’s first heroine, the artifice of musical performance paradoxically enhances the aura of reality for her, for her story and for her world” (30).

(contd)