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Francis Albert Sinatra (December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998 was a popular and highly acclaimed male vocalist. Renowned for his impeccable phrasing and timing, critics place him alongside such artists as Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley, and The Beatles as one of the most important, popular and influential musical figures of the 20th century.
Sinatra had a larger-than-life presence in the public eye, and over a seven decade career in show business, became an American icon, his brash, sometimes swaggering attitude, was embodied by his signature song "My Way", and his frequent gutsy cinematic performances. He also garnered considerable attention due to his alleged connections with the Mafia.
Early life
Frank Sinatra was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1915. He was the only child of a quiet Sicilian fireman, Anthony Martin Sinatra (1894-1969). Anthony had immigrated to the United States in 1895. His mother, Natalie Della Gavarante (1896-1977), was a talented, tempestuous Ligurian, who worked as a 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 middle-class surroundings, due to his father's secure job as a fireman and his mother's strong political ties to the Democratic Party in Hoboken.
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.
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 Club in Englewood, NJ. 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 singer. 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.) It was as a featured singer with Dorsey that Sinatra made his earliest film appearances, such as the 1942 Eleanor Powell/Red Skelton comedy, Ship Ahoy in which the uncredited singer performed a couple of songs.
He later signed with Columbia Records as a solo artist with some 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.
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, and Sinatra did it in the 1950s and repeatedly afterward, even into the final decade of his career.
Sinatra's singing career was in decline in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a period when novelty tunes became popular with audiences and during which Sinatra's ageing would cause some loss of appeal to new teen-age audiences. Nor was his career helped by the adverse publicity that follows would-be comebacks in the history of American show business: Sinatra would succeed not merely in re-establishing his popularity but in taking it far beyond what he had achieved in the 1940s. This renewal would come about not in the recording studio but in Hollywood.
Sinatra had begun appearing in movies in the early 1940s, but usually in musicals, often undistinguished ones. He also appeared on a weekly television show on CBS for two years from 1950-1952 (and would try again for one year on ABC from 1957-1958.
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.[2]
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 1955's The Man with the Golden Arm, for which he received an Academy Award for Best Actor nomination.
Soon after From Here to Eternity, Sinatra's singing career rebounded. During the 1950s, he 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, and with whom he made a series of highly-regarded recordings. By the early 1960s, he was a big enough star to start his own record label: Reprise Records. His position with the label earned him the long-lasting nickname "The Chairman of the Board".
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 1958-63.
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 the needed to force hotels and casinos to end segregation.
In 2001, after Sinatra's death, Las Vegas named Frank Sinatra Drive, a new street parallel to Interstate 15 and Las Vegas Boulevard, in his honor.
Sinatra had a larger-than-life presence in the public eye, and over a seven decade career in show business, became an American icon, his brash, sometimes swaggering attitude, was embodied by his signature song "My Way", and his frequent gutsy cinematic performances. He also garnered considerable attention due to his alleged connections with the Mafia.
Early life
Frank Sinatra was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1915. He was the only child of a quiet Sicilian fireman, Anthony Martin Sinatra (1894-1969). Anthony had immigrated to the United States in 1895. His mother, Natalie Della Gavarante (1896-1977), was a talented, tempestuous Ligurian, who worked as a 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 middle-class surroundings, due to his father's secure job as a fireman and his mother's strong political ties to the Democratic Party in Hoboken.
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.
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 Club in Englewood, NJ. 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 singer. 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.) It was as a featured singer with Dorsey that Sinatra made his earliest film appearances, such as the 1942 Eleanor Powell/Red Skelton comedy, Ship Ahoy in which the uncredited singer performed a couple of songs.
He later signed with Columbia Records as a solo artist with some 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.
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, and Sinatra did it in the 1950s and repeatedly afterward, even into the final decade of his career.
Sinatra's singing career was in decline in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a period when novelty tunes became popular with audiences and during which Sinatra's ageing would cause some loss of appeal to new teen-age audiences. Nor was his career helped by the adverse publicity that follows would-be comebacks in the history of American show business: Sinatra would succeed not merely in re-establishing his popularity but in taking it far beyond what he had achieved in the 1940s. This renewal would come about not in the recording studio but in Hollywood.
Sinatra had begun appearing in movies in the early 1940s, but usually in musicals, often undistinguished ones. He also appeared on a weekly television show on CBS for two years from 1950-1952 (and would try again for one year on ABC from 1957-1958.
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.[2]
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 1955's The Man with the Golden Arm, for which he received an Academy Award for Best Actor nomination.
Soon after From Here to Eternity, Sinatra's singing career rebounded. During the 1950s, he 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, and with whom he made a series of highly-regarded recordings. By the early 1960s, he was a big enough star to start his own record label: Reprise Records. His position with the label earned him the long-lasting nickname "The Chairman of the Board".
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 1958-63.
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 the needed to force hotels and casinos to end segregation.
In 2001, after Sinatra's death, Las Vegas named Frank Sinatra Drive, a new street parallel to Interstate 15 and Las Vegas Boulevard, in his honor.
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