Frank Sinatra |
Frank Sinatra was arguably the most important popular music figure of the 20th century, his only real rivals for the title being Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley, and the Beatles. In a professional career that lasted 60 years, he demonstrated a remarkable ability to maintain his appeal and pursue his musical goals despite often countervailing trends. |
The son of a fireman, Sinatra dropped out of high school in his senior year to pursue a career in music. In September 1935, he appeared as part of the vocal group the Hoboken Four on Major Bowes' Original Amateur Hour. The group won the radio show contest and toured with Bowes. Sinatra then took a job as a singing waiter and MC at the Rustic Cabin in Englewood, NJ. He was still singing there in the spring of 1939, when he was heard over the radio by trumpeter Harry James, who had recently organized his own big band after leaving Benny Goodman. James hired Sinatra, and the new singer made his first recordings on July 13, 1939. At the end of the year, Sinatra accepted an offer from the far more successful bandleader Tommy Dorsey, jumping to his new berth in January 1940. Over the next two and a half years, he was featured on 16 Top Ten hits recorded by Dorsey, among them the chart-topper "I'll Never Smile Again," later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. During this period, he also performed on various radio shows with Dorsey and appeared with the band in the films Las Vegas Nights (1941) and Ship Ahoy (1942). |
1940 |
I'll Never Smile Again |
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Sinatra left Dorsey's band in 1942 and started his solo career. His
first hit was... |
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Night and Day |
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His big breakthrough came due to his engagement as a support act to Benny Goodman at the Paramount Theatre in New York, which began on New Year's Eve. It made him a popular phenomenon, the first real teen idol, with school girls swooning in the aisles. | |||
Meanwhile, the label had signed Sinatra as a solo artist, and in a temporary loophole to the recording ban, put him in the studio to record a cappella, backed only by a vocal chorus. This resulted in four Top Ten hits in 1943, among them "People Will Say We're in Love" from Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's musical Oklahoma!, and a fifth in early 1944 ("I Couldn't Sleep a Wink Last Night") before protests from the musicians union ended a cappella recording. | |||
1943 |
3 |
People Will Say We're In Love | |
1943 |
2 |
You'll Never Know | |
1945 |
5 |
Dream | |
1945 |
8 |
I Should Care | |
1945 |
7 |
If I Loved You | |
1945 |
10 |
Nancy (With the Laughing Face) | |
1945 |
2 |
Saturday Night is the Loneliest Night of the Week | |
1947 |
20 |
Almost
Like Being In Love |
|
1947 |
16 |
Time After Time |
|
1948 |
7 |
Nature
Boy |
|
1949 |
6 |
Some Enchanted
Evening |
I’m
A Fool To Want You (cowritten
by Sinatra in 1951) |
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1952 |
27 |
The
Most Beautiful Girl In the World |
|
1953 |
14 |
I’ve Got The World On A String | |
1953 |
18 |
South of the Border | |
Sinatra had begun working with arranger/conductor Nelson Riddle, a pairing that produced notable chart entries in February 1954 on both the singles and albums charts. "Young-at-Heart," which just missed hitting number one, was the singer's biggest single since 1947, and the song went on to become a standard. (The title was used for a 1955 movie in which Sinatra starred.) | |||
1954 |
2 |
Young At Heart | |
Then there was the 10" LP Songs for Young Lovers, the first of Sinatra's "concept" albums, on which he and Riddle revisited classic songs by Cole Porter, the Gershwins, and Rodgers and Hart in contemporary arrangements with vocal interpretations that conveyed the wit and grace of the lyrics. The album lodged in the Top Five. In July, Sinatra had another Top Ten single with Styne and Cahn's "Three Coins in the Fountain." | |||
Three Coins In the Fountain |
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Luck Be A Lady |
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1955 |
1 |
Learning the Blues | |
On September 15, 1955, he appeared in a television production of Our Town and sang "Love and Marriage" (specially written by Sammy Cahn and his new partner James Van Heusen), which became a Top Five hit. | |||
1955 |
5 |
Love And Marriage | |
Early in 1956, he was back in the Top Ten with Cahn and Van Heusen's "(Love Is) The Tender Trap," the theme song from his new film, The Tender Trap. | |||
1955 |
7 |
The Tender Trap |
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As part of his thematic concepts for his albums of the '50s, Sinatra alternated between records devoted to slow arrangements and those given over to dance charts. | |||
1956 |
I've Got
You Under My Skin (Eb, first chord Fm7) |
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1957 |
2 |
All the Way - from The Joker's Wild | |
He was also represented in the LP charts in November by the soundtrack to his film Pal Joey (based on a Rodgers & Hart musical), which hit the Top Five. | |||
Lady Is A Tramp |
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In February 1958,
Sinatra reached the Top Ten with "Witchcraft," his last single to
perform that well for the next eight years. |
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1958 |
6 |
Witchcraft | |
That month, Capitol released Come Fly with Me, a travel-themed rhythm album, which hit number one. | |||
Come Fly With Me | |||
1959 |
30 |
High Hopes |
|
1960 |
His next regular album was a year in coming, and when it did, Nice 'n' Easy was a mid-tempo collection, breaking his pattern of alternating fast and slow albums. | ||
Nice
'N' Easy |