Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World by David Lehman

Author:David Lehman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Autobiography, Non-Fiction, Popular Culture, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Singers, Biography
ISBN: 9780061780073
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

(43)

THE LINKAGE OF Sinatra and Marlon Brando at the top of the ticket in Guys and Dolls marks a confluence too rich to go unremarked, because Sinatra is to singing what Brando is to acting: a performer who doesn’t just sing a song but lives it. I am not the first to say so. Pete Hamill: “He inhabited a song the way a great actor inhabits a role”—the way Brando inhabits the roles of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, the rebellious biker in The Wild One, Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, and Don Corleone in The Godfather. “One of the writers at the time [the 1940s] said, with more than a touch of condescension, that Sinatra sang those love songs as if he believed them,” Gene Lees reports. “But of course. That was the secret. And far from manifesting a callow gullibility on Sinatra’s part, this was a striking advance in the art of singing.”

Take “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road),” the music by Harold Arlen, the words by Johnny Mercer, as recorded by Sinatra in June 1958. It was written for Fred Astaire, who introduced the song in the movie musical The Sky’s the Limit in 1943. Listen to Astaire do it. It’s good. It’s damn good. Mel Tormé lauded Astaire as a terrific jazz singer, and he wasn’t kidding. Or listen to Perry Como do it, or Etta James, or even Ella on her Harold Arlen Songbook. Both the song’s composer and lyricist recorded the song; they both sang well, and it’s a special pleasure, always, to hear a songwriter sing his own tune. Arlen called it a “wandering” song, a “typical Arlen tapeworm,” a “tapeworm” being industry slang for any song exceeding thirty-two bars. “One for My Baby” is half again as long, at forty-eight bars.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.