If you know about Kurt Cobain, there’s a good chance you may not know about Bing Crosby. That’s because there was a half century between their music, and their influence. And sitting right between them in that musical timeline is a fellow by the name of Jimi Hendrix. Yet they share a fundamental connection: they were Washington state natives, and they used our “edge of the world” location to push musical and cultural boundaries.

Amanda Wilde, host of KUOW’s “The Swing Years and Beyond”, will explore those superstars at the next Redmond Historical Society’s Saturday Speaker Series presentation on Nov. 12.

Each artist arrived on three different cusps of economic change — the 1930s, the 1960s and the 1990s — and each helped push popular music forward in revolutionary ways.

Speaking courtesy of Humanities Washington, Wilde will show how they influenced the technology, business, and notoriety of Washington state.

“These artists reflected popular culture and also challenged it, and that’s what moved it forward,” Wilde told Humanities Washington in describing the focus of her presentation. “I think what’s also interesting is that these three artists came from three distinct areas of the state, in different eras and different boom periods.”

“We might not even know Bing as ‘Bing,’ if he hadn’t grown up in Spokane, where he received a nickname from a friend — after a comic strip he loved dearly called ‘The Bingville Bugle,’” Wilde said. The strip was published in the Spokesman-Review, the newspaper that Harry Lillis (Bing) Crosby Jr. delivered as a boy.

“As we look at Bing Crosby, we see a music scene developing just by virtue of Spokane as the growing center of economic development in eastern Washington,” she added.

Hendrix, for his part, was influenced by having gone to Seattle’s Garfield High School, “one of the most diverse schools in the country at the time,” Wilde said. “I think that had a profound impact on him and what he carried into popular culture. He wasn’t a certain religion, he wasn’t black, he wasn’t white — but he was. He was feminine, he was masculine, and he encompassed so much of race and gender. I think that comes from having the education that he had, and being in an environment that was so mixed, at a time when that really wasn’t as prevalent across the country as it is today.

“Also what’s distinctly ‘Washington’ about him is that he came to represent this generation where anything could happen, and we were open to all of these influences,” she added. “That’s exactly how he grew up, in a Washington state that was opening up in terms of technology and business, and becoming a leader in flight, and building the World’s Fair.

“With those influences, he then creates a style of rock that spoke for a generation — a generation that came up, by the way, in the wake of World War II – The Bing Crosby generation.”

Cobain, on the other hand, grew up in Aberdeen and never embraced his roots as he established Nirvana as the premiere grunge rock band before taking his life in 1994 at the age of 27.

“He hated it there,” Wilde said. “It felt imprisoning to him. It was a small town, and it was a depressed economy — so not only was there not much to do and not much stimulation, he was growing up in a sort of crumbling logging community that had had its heyday long before. That’s a different era of music entirely.

“The Bing Crosby years are the hopeful, World War II, looking forward, we-can-do-anything era. The Jimi Hendrix era is about searching and discovery and exploration. But then in the 1980s and the 1990s, while Kurt Cobain might have only been 30 miles away from the tech boom, he may as well have been three million miles away. He emerged from that boom, but by reacting to it — as sort of the antithesis of it. His life and death reflect his whole genesis, emerging from the quiet desperation of the dying logging town of his early life.”

The Saturday Speaker Series is presented by the Redmond Historical Society on the second Saturday of the month with three programs each in the fall and spring. It is held at 10:30 a.m. at the Old Redmond Schoolhouse Community Center, located at 16600 N.E. 80th St. Topics range from local, state and Pacific Northwest historical interest.

There is a suggested $5 donation for non-members.

The Redmond Historical Society is a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization that receives support from the City of Redmond, 4 Culture, Nintendo, the Bellevue Collection, Happy Valley Grange, Microsoft and 501 Commons as well as from other donors and members.