Frank Sinatra

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Frank Sinatra
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Background information
Birth name	Francis Albert Sinatra
Born	December 12, 1915 Hoboken, New Jersey, USA
Died	May 14, 1998 Los Angeles, California, USA
Genre(s)	Vocal Jazz Pop Big Band Swing Traditional Pop
Years active	1935 – 1995
Label(s)	Columbia Capitol Reprise
Website	www.franksinatra.com

Francis Albert Sinatra (December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998) was an American singer and Academy Award-winning actor who many consider to be one of the finest male popular song vocalists of all time. ^{[citation needed]} Renowned for his impeccable phrasing and timing, ^{[citation needed]} critics place him alongside such artists as Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and The Beatles as one of the most important, popular and influential musical figures of the 20th century.^[1]. He has sold over 250 million records worldwide. ^[2]

Sinatra, over a seven-decade career in show business, became an American icon. His brash, sometimes swaggering attitude was perhaps best embodied by his signature songs "My Way", and "New York, New York", and more generally by his frequently gutsy cinematic performances. He also garnered considerable attention due to his alleged connections with the Mafia.

Contents 1 Life 1.1 Early life 1.2 Early career 1.3 Post-war revival of career 1.4 1980s 1.5 1990s and death 1.6 Love and marriage 1.7 Alleged organized crime links 2 Recorded legacy 2.1 Influences 2.2 Genres 2.3 Songs and albums 2.4 Awards and legacy 3 Discography 4 Filmography 5 Commercials 6 See also 7 Notes 8 Further reading 9 External links

[edit] Life

[edit] Early life

Francis Albert Sinatra was born in a Paterson, New Jersey hospital to a family living at 415 Monroe St., Hoboken, New Jersey. He was the only child of a quiet Sicilian fireman, Anthony Martin Sinatra (1894-1969). Anthony had emigrated to the United States in 1895. His mother, Natalie Dolly Garaventa (1896-1977), was a talented, tempestuous Ligurian, who worked as a midwife, Democratic party ward boss, and part-time abortionist. Known as "Hatpin Dolly," she emigrated in 1897. Although it is part of the Sinatra folklore that Frank had an impoverished childhood, he was actually brought up in a middle-class environment, due to his father's secure job as a fireman and his mother's strong political ties to the Democratic Party in Hoboken. More exactly, the home he was raised in, especially after the age of 5, was comfortably middle-class even as the surrounding neighborhood tipped toward lower middle class.

Following his teen years in New Jersey, Sinatra was interested in serving his country during World War II. But on December 9, 1941, close to his 26th birthday, Sinatra was classified as 4-F at Newark Induction Center, due to a punctured eardrum he suffered from a difficult forceps delivery. This allowed Sinatra to pursue entertainment, rather than being enlisted in the Army Air Corps.

DeVice Records.

[edit] Early career

In September of 1935 he appeared on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour as part a group called the Hoboken Four. The group won the show's talent contest and toured with Bowes. Sinatra then took a job as a singing waiter and MC at the Rustic Cabin in Englewood, NJ. (Legend has it that Frank Sinatra was actually not going to get this job but when the first choice Frankie Manion turned down the job the owner chose Sinatra.) In 1939 bandleader and trumpet player Harry James heard Sinatra on the radio. James hired Sinatra and the two recorded together for the first time on July 13, 1939.

At the end of the year he left James to join the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, where he rose to fame as a ballad singer. His first and biggest hit with the band was 1940s "I'll Never Smile Again," which spent several weeks at number one on Billboard magazine's then-new chart of America's top-selling records. His vast appeal to the "bobby soxers," as teenage girls were called, revealed a whole new audience for popular music, which had appealed mainly to adults up to that time. (The complete span of his career with Dorsey was released in the 1994 box set The Song Is You.)

In 1943, he signed with Columbia Records as a solo artist with initially great success, particularly during the musicians' recording strikes. Vocalists were not part of the musician union and were allowed to record during the ban by using a cappella vocal backing. Sinatra scored several hits during the strike, then enjoyed one of his biggest hits when the strike ended with "Saturday Night Is the Loneliest Night of the Week." He also starred on radio programs during this period and was widely considered the nation's second-most-popular singer, behind Bing Crosby.

However, Sinatra's career began a decline in the late 1940s, as novelty tunes became popular with audiences, and Sinatra moved into his 30s, causing some loss of appeal to new teen-age audiences. He also strained his voice from overwork, and committed a series of public-relations gaffes -- including the punching of newspaper columnist Lee Mortimer -- that severely tarnished his public image.

Of this first phase of Sinatra's career, it can be said that it anticipated virtually every phase of what, in the 1960s, would be called "the youth movement." His sudden--and for many his alarming--appeal to teenagers became a topic of journalistic and even sociological comment. Later musical idols would pass through the same stages of massive initial appeal, decline, and retrenchment, but few, however, would manage to attract as many new audiences as Sinatra did. This became essential to any popular music career that aspired to longevity.

[edit] Post-war revival of career

What might be called Sinatra's second career began as a full-fledged dramatic actor when he played the scrappy Pvt. Angelo Maggio in the eve-of-Pearl Harbor drama From Here to Eternity (1953), for which he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. This role and performance became legendary at the time as the key comeback moment in Sinatra's career. Virtually overnight, his career recovered after several years in the wilderness.^[3] Throughout his early Hollywood career, he would associate with Humphrey Bogart's "Rat Pack," a group of actors who had grown dissatisfied with the studio system. It was Bogart himself who bestowed upon Sinatra the long-lasting nickname "The Chairman of the Board".

The following year, Sinatra played a crazed, coldblooded assassin determined to kill the President in the thriller Suddenly (available freely online here). Critics found Sinatra's performance one of the most chilling portrayals of a psychopath ever committed to film. This was followed in 1955 by his portrayal of a heroin addict in Nelson Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm, for which he received an Academy Award for Best Actor nomination.

Musically, Sinatra reinvented himself with a series of complex adult albums featuring darker emotional material starting with In the Wee Small Hours. In 1953, he had signed with Capitol Records, where he worked with many of the finest arrangers of the era, most notably Nelson Riddle, Gordon Jenkins, and Billy May. By the early 1960s, he was a big enough star to start his own record label: Reprise Records.

The famous Sinatra comeback is the stuff of American legend, and, indeed, there seemed little in either his 1940s film career or his radio and television performances of the early 1950s to predict the dramatic success he would enjoy on screen in the 1950s and 1960s. However, the musical turnaround should not have been unexpected. At the very end of his Columbia recording career, in two performances in 1952 Sinatra had given advance warning of what would become the new sound he achieved in the 1950s at Capitol. In "The Birth of the Blues" it would be the sound of the new and "swinging" Sinatra: a hipper, tougher, more masculine persona than the sometimes boyish Sinatra of the 1940s. In "I'm A Fool To Want You" he anticipated the darker, melancholic sound of the great "torch" albums of the 1950s. Neither performance was sufficient to prevent Columbia from declining to renew his contract, in what must surely rank as one of the great errors in the business history of American popular music.

In the 1950s and 1960s, this new Sinatra would become the most popular attraction in Las Vegas, the venue of choice for performers of his era as the rise of rock and roll began to reduce the market for their recordings. He was friends with many other entertainers, including Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr, actor Peter Lawford, comedian Joey Bishop, and sometimes Shirley MacLaine. They formed the core of the Rat Pack, a loose group of entertainers who were friends and socialized together--and whose wild and unpredictable antics would dominate show business news for much of the period from 1958 to 63.

Sinatra played a major role in the desegregation of Nevada hotels and casinos in the 1960s. Sinatra led his fellow members of the Rat Pack in refusing to patronize hotels and casinos that denied service to Sammy Davis Jr. With the release of the film Ocean's Eleven (1960), the Rat Pack became the subject of great media attention, and this gave the Rat Pack, Sinatra in particular, the leverage he needed to force hotels and casinos to end segregation.

In 2001, Las Vegas named Frank Sinatra Drive, a new street parallel to Interstate 15 and Las Vegas Boulevard, in his honor.

Sinatra was close to the Kennedy family and was a friend and strong supporter of President John F. Kennedy. Years later, Sinatra's youngest daughter Tina would state that Sinatra and mob figure Sam Giancana had helped Kennedy win a crucial primary election in 1960 by helping to deliver the union votes.^[4] Sinatra is said to have introduced Kennedy to Judith Campbell, who had been a girlfriend of both Sinatra's and Giancana. Campbell allegedly began a relationship with Kennedy; eventually Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy became alarmed and told his brother to distance himself from Sinatra. This soured Sinatra's relationship with the Kennedy family and the Democratic Party, and by the late 1960s Sinatra had become a Republican and supporter of Richard Nixon, who became President in 1968. ^[5] Sinatra would lose his Nevada casino license in 1963 when Giancana was seen in the Cal-Neva Lodge casino, of which Sinatra was a part owner.^[6]

Sinatra resumed his strong film work with the 1962 paranoid classic The Manchurian Candidate, in which he played the troubled, frequently blinking, but nonetheless resolute protagonist. In 1965's Von Ryan's Express, Sinatra added dimensionality to a World War II action role. His other film appearances during this time were either cameos or, as in the case of 1964's Robin and the Seven Hoods, critically-panned efforts to trade in on his image.

In the 1970s Sinatra staged a retirement and several comebacks, recording less frequently but continuing to perform in Las Vegas and around the world. It was a period during which, by taking to the road again, Sinatra sought to bring the great American songbook of the 1920s and 1930s to a much wider audience than the one that frequented the casinos of Las Vegas.

[edit] 1980s

In the 1980 U.S. presidential election, after a lifetime of supporting Democratic presidential candidates, Sinatra supported Ronald Reagan, and donated $4 million to Reagan's campaign. Sinatra said he supported Reagan as he was “the proper man to be the president of the United States…it's so screwed up now, we need someone to straighten it out” ^[7].

Reagan’s victory gave Sinatra his closest relationship with the White House since the early 1960s, as a result of which Sinatra arranged Reagan's Presidential gala ^[8], as he had done for John F Kennedy, some twenty years previously.

In 1980, Sinatra also decided to apply for a Nevada gaming licence, with President Reagan submitted as one of his references. In February 1981, Sinatra was quizzed by the Nevada Gaming Control Board about his relationships with Mafia figures, and his fifty percent ownership of the Cal-Neva lodge ^[9]. The board eventually voted four to one to reinstate Sinatra's gaming licence ^[9].

In 1980, Sinatra's first album for six years was released, Trilogy: Past Present Future, a triple album marking the three distinct epochs of Sinatra's career, with the final disc, 'The Future' being a free form suite of songs. The album provided Sinatra's first career retrospective since 1965's A Man and His Music, and garnered six Grammy nominations. Sinatra built on the success of Trilogy the following year, with 1981's She Shot Me Down, an album that revisited the dark tone of his Capitol years, and which has subsequently been praised by critics ^[10]. Sinatra also returned to acting in The First Deadly Sin.

Sinatra was embroiled in controversy in 1981 when he worked a ten day engagement for $2 million in Sun City, South Africa. He was criticized for the trip by Jesse Jackson, and the United Nations special committee on Apartheid condemned Sinatra as a collaborator in Apartheid ^[11] .

1982 saw Sinatra return to the recording studio as a conductor, for Sylvia Syms, album Syms by Sinatra. Sinatra suffered the deaths of several people close to him in the 1980s, losing Buddy Rich in 1987, and Don Costa and Harry James in 1983. Sinatra delivered the eulogy at Joe Louis's 1981 funeral, and paid for his medical bills during his final illness ^[12].

In 1983 Sinatra was selected as one of the five Kennedy Center Honors, alongside Katharine Dunham, Jimmy Stewart, Elia Kazan and Virgil Thomson. Quoting Henry James in honouring Sinatra, Reagan said that 'art was the shadow of humanity', and said that Sinatra had “spent his life casting a magnificent and powerful shadow” ^[13].

Shortly after the Kennedy Centre Honors, Sinatra and Dean Martin were involved in an altercation at the Golden Nugget casino in Atlantic City. Rather than deal from the sealed plastic box, Sinatra told a blackjack dealer to deal by hand, which was prohibited under New Jersey state law. Sinatra was eventually accommodated, and the New Jersey Casino Control Commission fined the Golden Nugget $25,000, and suspended four employees following the incident ^[14].

Sinatra made his last acting appearance alongside his fellow Rat Packers in 1983's Cannonball Run II.

In 1984, for the first time in decades, Sinatra publicly returned to his birthplace in Hoboken, New Jersey, bringing President Reagan with him, who was in the midst of campaigning for the 1984 U.S. presidential election. Reagan had made Sinatra a fund-raising ambassador as part of the Republicans 'Victory 84’ get-the-vote-out-drive' ^[15].

Earlier that year, Sinatra had worked with Quincy Jones for the first time in nearly two decades on the album L.A. Is My Lady.

The following year, on the May 23, 1985, Sinatra received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and later that day was awarded an honorary Doctor of Engineering degree from the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, despite the protests of the student body ^[16].

In 1986, investigative journalist Kitty Kelley published a biography of Sinatra entitled His Way. Sinatra had been to court in 1983 to try to prevent it from being published, according to Kelley, seeking '$2 million in punitive damages from me for presuming to write about him without his authorization' ^[17]. He also accused her of allegedly misrepresenting herself as his authorized biographer. He later withdrew his lawsuit amid much publicity and the book went on to become number one on the New York Times best seller list and was a bestseller not only in the US but also in England, Canada, and Australia.

[edit] 1990s and death

1990 saw Sinatra celebrate his 75th birthday with a national tour ^[18], and he was awarded the second ‘Ella Award’ by the Los-Angeles-based Society of Singers. At the award ceremony, he performed for the final time with Ella Fitzgerald. ^[7]

In August, Sinatra was involved in a controversial verbal exchange with Sinéad O'Connor, as he promised to 'kick her ass' after his dismay at her apparent disrespect shown toward the American national anthem.

In December as part of Sinatra's birthday celebrations, Patrick Pasculli, the Mayor of Hoboken, New Jersey, made a proclamation in his honour, declaring that "no other vocalist in history has sung, swung and crooned and serenaded into the hearts of the young and old... as this consummate artist from Hoboken" ^[9]

The following year saw Sinatra embark on a hectic European tour of engagements, accompanied by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, to mark his sixty years in show business. After the deaths of Ava Gardner and Sammy Davis, Jr. in 1990, Sinatra’s life was once again affected by tragedy when his close friend and confidant Jilly Rizzo was killed in a car crash in Mission Hills, California, in 1992.

In November 1992, the CBS miniseries Sinatra, produced by Tina Sinatra and Warner Bros., was broadcast with the full cooperation and involvement of the Sinatra family. Frank Sinatra had long wanted any cinematic portrayal of his life to be produced whilst he was alive, claiming that "If they do it when I’m dead, they’ll screw it up so I want to be around to see it’s done right." ^[19]

In 1993 Sinatra made a surprise return to Capitol Records and the recording studio for Duets, which was released in November. Sinatra’s duet with Bono on I've Got You Under My Skin contributed to the album's great commercial success, which reached 2 on the Billboard charts, and eventually selling over 2 million copies in the United States alone.

The artists who added their vocals to the album worked for free, and a follow-up album (Duets II) was released in 1994, which reached 9 on the Billboard charts. Duets II marked Sinatra's last recording with Antonio Carlos Jobim, as well as his last studio recordings, bringing to an end his sixty-year recording career.

Sinatra was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1994 Grammy Awards, and was introduced by Bono. Sinatra's acceptance speech was crudely cut off, as it apparently cut into advertising space ^[20]

The Empire State Building glowed blue to mark Sinatra's eightieth birthday in 1995 ^[21], followed by a star-studded birthday tribute at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. This was his last televised appearance, and with the death of Dean Martin a few days later, Sinatra entered a period of seclusion and health difficulties, suffering both a mild heart attack and stroke in November 1996, and a heart attack in January 1997. ^[21].

After suffering another heart attack, Frank Sinatra died at 10:50 p.m. on May 14, 1998, at the age of 82. Sinatra's final words were 'I'm losing'. ^[22].

Bill Clinton led tributes to Sinatra, claiming that he had managed 'to appreciate on a personal level what millions of people had appreciated from afar.' ^[23]

On May 20, 1998 at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills, Sinatra's funeral was held, followed by a private ceremony at St. Theresa's Catholic Church in Palm Springs.

Sinatra was buried a short distance east of St. Theresa's next to his parents in section A-8 of Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City, a quiet, unassuming cemetery on Ramon Road at the border of Cathedral City and Rancho Mirage and near his famous Rancho Mirage compound, located on tree-lined Frank Sinatra Drive. Jilly Rizzo is buried nearby in the same cemetery.

Legend has it that Sinatra was buried in a blue suit with a flask of Jack Daniel's and a roll of ten dimes which was a gift from his daughter, Tina, along with a card that said "Sleep warm, Poppa - look for me." The ten dimes were a habit dating back to the kidnapping of his son, Frank Sinatra, Jr., due to the kidnappers' demands that negotiations be made via pay phone. A Zippo lighter (which some take to be a reference to his mob connections) is purported to be buried with him as is a pack of Camel cigarettes. The words The Best Is Yet to Come are imprinted on his tombstone.

[edit] Love and marriage

Sinatra was married to his childhood sweetheart, Nancy Barbato, in Jersey City, New Jersey on February 4, 1939. They had three children together: Nancy Sinatra (born June 8, 1940), Frank Sinatra, Jr. (born January 10, 1944), and Christina "Tina" Sinatra (born June 20, 1948). Although Sinatra did not remain faithful to his wife, he was by many accounts a devoted father. However, his affair with Ava Gardner became public and the couple was separated in 1950. They were divorced on October 29, 1951 despite Nancy Sr.'s (as she was sometimes known) religious qualms and objections. According to public reports Frank and Nancy Sr. remained on at least civil terms, if not better, and Nancy would recount how Frank still loved her cooking and would send someone by to pick up her home-made specialties many decades after they separated.

Sinatra married the actress Ava Gardner on November 7, 1951, only ten days after his divorce from his first wife became final. They were separated on October 27, 1953 but were not divorced until 1957.

Sinatra proposed to actress Lauren Bacall, whom he had been seeing since shortly after her husband Humphrey Bogart died in 1957, but reneged when word of their relationship became public.

On December 8, 1963, Frank Sinatra, Jr. was kidnapped. Sinatra paid the kidnappers' $240,000 ransom demand (even offering $1,000,000 though the kidnappers bizarrely turned down this offer), and his son was released unharmed on December 10. Because the kidnappers demanded that Sinatra call them only from payphones, Sinatra carried a roll of dimes with him throughout the ordeal, and this became a lifetime habit. The kidnappers were subsequently apprehended and convicted. A movie called Stealing Sinatra was made about the incident.

Sinatra married actress Mia Farrow, 30 years his junior, in 1966. They were divorced two years later.

In 1976, Sinatra married Barbara Blakeley Marx (formerly married to Zeppo Marx), who converted to Catholicism to marry him. She remained his wife until his death, although her relations with Sinatra's children were consistently portrayed as stormy, something Nancy Sinatra (Jr.) confirmed when she publicly claimed that Barbara had not bothered to call Frank's children even when the end was near, although they were close by, and the children missed the opportunity to be at their father's bedside when he died.

[edit] Alleged organized crime links

Sinatra has been frequently linked to members of the Mafia and it has long been rumored that his career was aided behind the scenes by organized crime.[4]

One of his uncles, Babe Gavarante, was a member of a Bergen County armed gang connected to the organization of Willie Moretti. Gavarante was convicted of murder in 1921 in connection with an armed robbery in which he had driven the get-away car. Sinatra was also allegedly personally linked to Willie Moretti, his first wife Nancy Barbato was a cousin of one of his senior henchmen and Sinatra sang at the daughter's wedding in 1948. According to testimony from Moretti, Sinatra received help from him in arranging performances in return for kick-backs.

He had associations with and did favours for Charles Fischetti, a notorious Chicago mobster dating back to 1946 according to the FBI. Sinatra was also friends with Charles's brother Joseph who ran the Fontainebleau Hotel complex in Miami, who arranged work for him and introduced him to Charles Luciano in Havana. After Luciano's deportation to Italy, Sinatra visited him at least twice, singing at a 1946 Christmas Party and gifting the famed mobster with a gold cigarette case engraved "To my dear pal Charlie, from his friend Frank" the next year.

These visits were widely reported by the media and used as further evidence of Sinatra's ties to the mob, haunting him for the rest of his life. Among the allegations was the $2 million that Sinatra gave Luciano. As Joseph "Doc" Stacher later recalled of the Havana meeting, "The Italians among us were all very proud of Frank. They always told me they had spent a lot of money helping him in his career ever since he was in Tommy Dorsey’s band. Lucky Luciano was very fond of Frank’s singing. Frankie flew into Havana with the Fischettis, with whom he was very friendly, but of course, our meeting had nothing to do with hearing him croon. Everyone brought envelopes of money for Luciano. But more important, they came to pay allegiance to him." The "Havana" allegations - while the basis of rumors for Sinatra's mob ties - have never been proved, and Luciano himself denied there was any criminal association in his autobiography.

Sinatra had a strong friendship with Sam Giancana who always wore a sapphire friendship ring given to him by Sinatra, and who ordered the killing of about 200 people. A number of alleged incidents have been noted where people who angered Sinatra had been threatened by Giancana's mob. Comedian Jackie Mason has alleged that after mocking Sinatra in his routine, he received threats and his hotel room was shot up in his presence. After he continued, he received death threats and was roughed up and his nose broken.

J. Edgar Hoover apparently suspected Sinatra over the years, and Sinatra's file at the FBI ended up at 2,403 pages[5], detailing allegations of extortion against Ronald Alpert for $100,000. Sinatra publicly rejected these accusations many times, and was never charged with any crimes in connection with them.

The character Johnny Fontane in the book and movie The Godfather is widely viewed as having been inspired by Frank Sinatra and his alleged connections. Indeed, Sinatra was furious with Godfather author Mario Puzo over the Fontane character and reportedly confronted Puzo in public with profane threats.

[edit] Recorded legacy

[edit] Influences

Sinatra's vocal style represented a significant departure from the 'crooning' style of his idol, Bing Crosby. Sinatra's generation represented the first generation of children that had grown up in the era of the microphone, and the amplification of sound enabled singers to sing in a much softer, personal and nuanced style. Crosby had begun this change, and established a new American singing style based around conversational ease.

However Sinatra, as he himself once noted, sang more, by which he meant that he introduced a bel canto sound to the tradition begun by Crosby. And, more importantly, he might be said to have brought the Crosby tradition to artistic completion, taking it to levels of intensity and depth of feeling that, because of the displacement of the Crosby-Sinatra tradition by rock and roll and subsequent genres, are unlikely to be achieved again.

Two other great performers of the 1930s and 1940s were significant influences on Sinatra: Billie Holiday and Mabel Mercer. Sinatra regularly heard "Lady Day" in New York clubs in the 1940s and learned from her the importance of authenticity of emotion. From Mercer he learned the importance of the element of "story" in a song. For Sinatra a song is a three-four minute narrative — sometimes even the story of himself, his own life, his own heartaches, his own feelings of buoyancy — and this is why Ella Fitzgerald could say of him, "With Frank, it's always this little guy, telling this ... story." The archetypal examples of the Sinatra song as story could later be found in two selections from his 1958 Capitol LP Frank Sinatra Sings For Only The Lonely: "Angel Eyes" and "One for My Baby (And One More For The Road)".

[edit] Genres

Sinatra would certainly have been considered a 'pop' singer before the Rock and roll era, and the epithets Traditional Pop or more specifically Classic Pop have perhaps been coined to describe Sinatra's style.

There still exists a much wider debate, as to whether Sinatra is a jazz singer. Certainly he performed with the finest jazz musicians, and largely performed material from the Great American Songbook. There are very few occasions when Sinatra was recorded scat singing, but minor nuances and slight deviations from the vocal line are a hallmark of the material he recorded, and he is also known for his impecable jazz timing and phrasing. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine the Sinatra of the great years after 1953 without the influence of jazz. It is no accident that he would be Lester Young's ideal singer in the band Young had hoped to lead, nor that Miles Davis identified Sinatra's phrasing as an influence on his own. The list of Sinatra's jazz admirers is long and stellar, including such figures as Count Basie, Stan Getz, and Oscar Peterson. The question of his status as a "jazz singer" has never seemed to matter as much to such artists as it has to critics and academicians.^[24]

[edit] Songs and albums

Sinatra left a vast legacy of recordings, from his very first sides with the Harry James orchestra in 1939, the vast catalogs at Columbia in the 1940s, Capitol in the 1950s, and Reprise from the 1960s onwards, up to his 1994 album Duets II.

Some of his best known recorded songs include:

• Great American Songbook entries such as "Night and Day", "I've Got You Under My Skin", and "Fly Me To The Moon"
• Comic numbers such as "Love and Marriage" (used as theme for American television comedy Married... with Children)
• Torch songs such as "One for My Baby", "Angel Eyes", and "Drinking Again"
• "It Was a Very Good Year" and "Summer Wind", which capture his mid-1960s persona of sentimental nostalgia
• "That's Life", "My Way", and "New York, New York", which convey his late-stage attitude of bombastic defiance.

Three of his songs made #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 even after the advent of the rock and roll era: "Learnin' the Blues" (1955), "Strangers in the Night" (1966), and "Somethin' Stupid" (1967), the last a duet with daughter Nancy.

Of all his many albums, At the Sands with Count Basie, which was recorded live in Las Vegas in 1966, with Sinatra in his prime, backed by Count Basie's big band, remains his most popular and is still a big seller. Whether in nightclubs, casinos, arenas, or stadiums, Sinatra was one of the most mesmeric entertainers of the Twentieth Century, capable of turning the largest venue into a simulacrum of an intimate club. There are, however, few recordings or videos of his concerts. In addition to the Sands performance with Basie, three performances of Sinatra at the very peak of his career were captured: With Red Norvo Quintet: Live In Australia, 1959, Sinatra '57 In Concert, a performance in Seattle with an orchestra conducted by Nelson Riddle and Sinatra and Sextet: Live in Paris, recorded in June of 1962.

Sinatra is also credited with putting out perhaps the first concept album. 1955's In the Wee Small Hours is the prime example: a set of songs specifically recorded for the album, using only ballads, organized around a central mood of late-night isolation and aching lost love (supposedly due to his separation from Ava Gardner), with a now-classic album cover reflecting the theme. Rolling Stone magazine later named In the Wee Small Hours as #100^[25] on their list of the 500 best albums of all time.

The following year's Songs For Swingin' Lovers took an alternate tack, recording existing pop standards in a hipper, jazzier fashion, revealing an overall exuberance; Rolling Stone placed it #306^[26] on the above list. It is worth noting that each ranking would have shocked the two generations that preceded the generation that founded Rolling Stone, suggesting that the final assessment of Sinatra's achievement in the history of American popular music must await a time no longer marked by the "conflict of generations" that began in the late 1960s.

It was the advent of the long-playing record that opened the door to these famous concept albums of the 1950s, but Sinatra's first efforts in this direction go back to the Columbia years and The Voice, when the 78 rpm disc made "album" less of a metaphor than it would become with the single-disc LPs of the 1950s.

Other Sinatra milestone albums include 1965's September of My Years, which according to critic Stephen Holden, "summed up the punchy sentimentality of a whole generation of American men," 1973's comeback album Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back, and 1980s Trilogy: Past Present Future, an ambitious triple album using three arrangers that attempted to portray the past, present, and future of his career. For many Sinatra admirers, 1981's She Shot Me Down is the last great Sinatra album. A collection of what Sinatra called "saloon songs", it includes Alec Wilder's "A Long Night", in a performance that can stand the test of comparison with the work Sinatra did in his Capitol years.

Sinatra also sought a musical legacy beyond singing. He conducted Peggy Lee's 1957 album The Man I Love (arranged by Nelson Riddle), Dean Martin's 1958 album Sleep Warm, Sylvia Syms' 1982 album Syms by Sinatra, and commissioned and conducted the 1956 album Frank Sinatra Conducts Tone Poems of Color.

[edit] Awards and legacy

Sinatra won ten Grammy Awards during his career, including Album of the Year for Come Dance With Me in 1959, September of My Years in 1965, and A Man and His Music in 1966, and Record of the Year for "Strangers in the Night" in 1966. (The Grammy Awards only began in 1958, after two peaks of Sinatra's recording career had already happened.)

In addition, Sinatra was named the Down Beat readers' poll Male Singer of the Year sixteen times between 1941 and 1966 and the Personality of the Year six times between 1954 and 1959, and was named the Down Beat critics' poll Male Singer of the Year twice, in 1955 and 1957. Sinatra was also named the Playboy Jazz All-Star Poll Male Vocalist of the Year seven times between 1957 and 1963.^[27]

Sinatra won his first Academy Award in 1945 for the short film The House I Live In, a film promoting racial tolerance, and his second as the Best Supporting Actor in From Here to Eternity. His performance in The Man with the Golden Arm garnered Sinatra his only Best Actor nomination.

In 1971 Sinatra accepted the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for a “lifetime of public philanthropy”.

On May 23, 1985, President Ronald Reagan awarded Sinatra the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In 1995, Sinatra was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.

In 2001 BBC Radio 2 named Sinatra as the "Greatest Voice of the Twentieth Century".^[28] Sinatra was inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame in 1980.

Stephen Holden wrote for the 1983 Rolling Stone Record Guide:

Frank Sinatra's voice is pop music history. [...] Like Presley and Dylan—the only other white male American singers since 1940 whose popularity, influence, and mythic force have been comparable—Sinatra will last indefinitely. He virtually invented modern pop song phrasing.

Two decades later, radio personality and musician Jonathan Schwartz's assessment in a 2005 book review for the New York Observer showed that Sinatra's musical reputation had not diminished: "I believe, based on a lifetime of consideration, that Frank Sinatra was the greatest interpretive musician this country has ever produced."

To honor Frank Sinatra's memory, each year on his birthday (December 12), the Empire State building in New York City lights up with blue lights to commemorate his nick name, "Ol' Blue Eyes".

[edit] Discography

• Chronological list of singles and albums recorded by Frank Sinatra
• Alphabetical list of studio recordings by Frank Sinatra

[edit] Filmography

See Frank Sinatra filmography.

Preceded by Anthony Quinn for Viva Zapata!	Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor 1953 for From Here to Eternity	Succeeded by Edmond O'Brien for The Barefoot Contessa
Preceded by Bob Hope 34th Academy Awards	"Oscars" host 35th Academy Awards	Succeeded by Jack Lemmon 36th Academy Awards
Preceded by John Huston, David Niven, Burt Reynolds, and Diana Ross 46th Academy Awards	"Oscars" host 47th Academy Awards (with Sammy Davis, Jr., Bob Hope, and Shirley MacLaine)	Succeeded by Goldie Hawn, Gene Kelly, Walter Matthau, George Segal, and Robert Shaw 48th Academy Awards

[edit] Commercials

In the United States, Frank Sinatra has appeared in commercials for Steve Wynn's Golden Nugget casino, and for Michelob beer (singing "The Way You Look Tonight"). In Japan, Frank Sinatra appeared in commercials for All Nippon Airways.

[edit] See also

• List of jazz musicians
• Best selling music artists
• Rat Pack
• Sinatra Doctrine
• 1920 US Census with Sinatras
• 1930 US Census with Sinatras

[edit] Notes

[edit] Further reading

• The New Rolling Stone Record Guide, Rolling Stone Press, 1983.
• "Frank Sinatra — Through the Lens of Jazz", Jazz Times Magazine, May 1998
• Freedland, Michael. All the Way: A Biography of Frank Sinatra. St Martins Press, 2000.
• Friedwald, Will. Sinatra! The Song Is You: A Singer's Art. Da Capo Press, 1999.
• Granata, Charles. Sessions with Sinatra: Frank Sinatra and the Art of Recording. Chicago Review Press, 1999.
• Hamill, Pete. Why Sinatra Matters. Back Bay Books, 2003.
• Havers, Richard. "Sinatra". Dorling Kindersley, 2004
• Jacobs, George and Stadiem, William. Mr. S The Last Word On Frank Sinatra. HarperCollins, 2003.
• Kelley, Kitty. His Way. Bantam Press, 1986.
• Lahr, John. Sinatra. Random House, 1997.
• Munn, Michael. Sinatra: The Untold Story. Robson Books Ltd, 2002.
• Mustazza, Leonard, ed. Frank Sinatra and Popular Culture. Praeger, 1998.
• Petkov, Steven and Mustazza, Leonard, ed. The Frank Sinatra Reader. Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Pugliese, S., ed. Frank Sinatra: "History, Identity, and Italian American Culture ". Palgrave, 2004.
• Rockwell, John. Sinatra: An American Classic. Rolling Stone, 1984
• Sinatra, Frank Jr. The Sinatra Treasures. Virgin Books, 2004.
• Sinatra, Nancy. Frank Sinatra 1915-1998: An American Legend. 1998.
• Smith, Martin. When Ol' Blue Eyes was a red. Redwords, 2005.
• Summers, Antony and Swan, Robbyn. Sinatra: The Life. Doubleday, 2005.
• Taraborrelli, J. Randall. Sinatra: The Man Behind the Myth. Mainstream Publishing, 1998.

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Frank Sinatra

• Frank Sinatra at the Internet Movie Database
• Frank Sinatra at the TCM Movie Database
• Frank Sinatra at the Internet Broadway Database
• Obituary, NY Times, May 16, 1998 Frank Sinatra Dies at 82; Matchless Stylist of Pop
• Sinatra family site
• FBI's Frank Sinatra file
• Sinatra! The Complete Guide An internet guide to all of Frank's works
• Fun Sinatra Facts Learn to talk like Sinatra
• Sinatra - The Main Event
• Watch Frank Sinatra movie - Suddenly
• Sinatra in Man w/ the Golden Arm
• A radio show containing an interview with Frank Sinatra, Junior's kidnapper
• Frank Sinatra's Hoboken: Walking Tour
• Last Will and Testament of Frank Sinatra

Persondata
NAME	Sinatra, Frank
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Francis Albert Sinatra, Ol' Blue Eyes, The Voice, Chairman of the Board
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Singer and Actor
DATE OF BIRTH	December 12, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH	Hoboken, New Jersey
DATE OF DEATH	May 14, 1998
PLACE OF DEATH	Los Angeles, California