1375 Crooner

I was listening to a radio commercial not long ago for a guy performing at one of the local casinos. The commercial said the entertainer was one of America’s celebrated icons, whatever that means, and also that he was a legendary crooner.
I’m not sure which I’d rather be, an icon or a crooner. An icon sounds like a little picture on my computer desktop. But crooner...what the heck is a crooner?
It certainly implies that at some point one is engaged in the act of crooning. Which sounds, for some reason, not unlike the act of mooning.
If you play with the conjugation of the verb to croon, you don’t get too much help. I croon. He croons. We once crooned. They will be crooning. It all sounds so painful. Like a lounge lizard mating ritual.
Where did this word creep into our language?
Did it have something to do with sooners, those folks that were early settlers of Oklahoma? Did one of those sooners start caterwauling and get a cramp? So they called the sounds emerging from his cramped caterwauling sooner lips “crooning”? Or did he have a crumpet at noon and call it a croon and sing till he rattled his spoon and a cow jumped over the moon?
The etymology dictionary says “croon” comes from a Scottish word that originally meant, “to bellow like a bull,” and then for some reason evolved to mean “to lament” and eventually “to sing softly and sadly.”
Perhaps the cow had a crumpet at noon. Or the bull was in the process of becoming a steer. And a soft and tender steak was on the way.
That explains the German phrase, “When the bull bellows in pain, say danke schoen.”
America, ya gotta love it.