Frank Sinatra. The Voice. Ol’ Blue Eyes. The Chairman of the Board. Plus, I imagine, a whole other host of nicknames that haven’t survived the years or, at the very least, aren’t very flattering. Easily one of the most successful and famous of the pre-rock pop singers, Frank Sinatra certainly qualifies as an icon even if you’ve never heard a single note that he sung in his almost sixty year long career. He managed to evolve with the times, going from being a teen idol in the 1930s and 1940s, to a more mature and sophisticated singer in the 1950s and onward.
Or, at least, so Wikipedia tells me.
Admittedly, my own knowledge of Sinatra, especially before I
embarked on this project, was limited and basically amounted to the follow:
- Sinatra was a famous old pop singer and died before I was especially interested in music.
- He sang “My Way”, “It Was A Very Good Year,” a cover of The Beatles’ “Something,” “New York, New York”, a nice version of “The Christmas Song,” and “Blue Moon” (Which I only know because they play it on the radio in Fallout: New Vegas)
- Took on some acting roles, which he was apparently pretty good at it.
- Made a bunch of famous concept albums in the 1950s.
- Helped kick off the whole “older artist does duets of iffy-quality with other, sometimes younger artists” trend.
- Allegedly had ties to the mob at one point.
So, yeah, certainly famous by most cultural standards, but
for someone my age, there’s a good chance that he’s less known for anything in
particular and more just for being a famous, beloved American icon. Neither of
my parents are Sinatra fans themselves, so I never heard it around the house,
and the number of venues for hearing Sinatra’s particular brand of pop music in
public was pretty limited come the 1990s/2000s/2010s. You don’t hear a lot of
Sinatra on the radio these days and, outside of certain special occasions, you might,
at best, run into his music because it was used in movie or because someone you
know likes it. Not the best kind of exposure for an act that everyone “knows
about” but which a lot of people don’t listen to regularly.
So, to get a better idea of what Sinatra’s music is actually
like, I did a little research, picked out a few one-CD compilations, and at
least tried to get a sense of how it evolved during his career. A lot of this
amounted to comparing how many songs were on a specific CD and what whoever
reviewed a given album on allmusic.com thought about it, but I think I managed
to get a selection that would at least be informative, if not necessarily the
best of all possible choices.
Broadly speaking, there are 4 distinct eras of Sinatra’s
career: singing with Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra for RCA from 1940-1942/43, his
first major solo recordings for Columbia from 1943-1952, his Capital albums
from 1953-1961, and his Reprise albums of 1961-1981. There are other recordings
outside this, like his short tenure singing with Harry James’ Orchestra, an
album down with Quincy Jones in the mid-1980s and, of course, the duet albums
his did near the end of his career, but I won’t discuss these smaller pockets
of material unless a compilation uses any of there material.
And now, it’s time to give these CDs a listen and see what,
in fact, all the hubbub is about.
Next Time: Frank Sinatra and the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra on
RCA
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