Chapter 6 - Ethical Culture Fieldston School

“Mr. Sinatra Gets Rejected”
famous in large measure for being famous, and one whose fame allowed him to
seemingly effortlessly cross into media like film and television even though his
primary claim to fame was music. As a young man, Sinatra smoked a pipe and
wore a hat in conscious emulation of his hero (upon finding a picture of Crosby
in his room, an exasperated Dolly threw a shoe at her son and called him a bum).
What he wanted, very clearly, was to become a show business personality just
like Crosby.
Significantly, however, there is one thing Sinatra pointedly did not copy
from Crosby: his style of singing. “I was a big fan of Bing’s,” he later told his
daughter. “But I never wanted to sing like him, because every kid on the block
was boo‐boo‐booing like Crosby. I wanted to be a different kind of singer. And
my voice was higher anyhow and I said, That’s not for me.” 17 To that end, Sinatra
cultivated a more expressive approach. It was comparatively mild to what came
later in his career, but was distinctive enough to win him attention, and,
eventually, accolades.
Of all the mysteries in Frank Sinatra’s career, few are more perplexing
than the nature of his talent. To put it simply: how was it that a man who could
not read music should be celebrated as an unparalleled interpreter of popular
song? How did someone with virtually no formal training come to be seen as a
musician’s musician, winning the admiration of unquestioned geniuses like
Duke Ellington and Miles Davis? Actually, in the context of American popular
music, these seeming anomalies are less contradictory than they might appear;
musical ability is often as much about instinct as it is about training, and it’s
likely that much of Sinatra’s originality came precisely from the absence of
formal models to follow. Moreover, much of what made him unique had less to
17 Nancy Sinatra, My Father, p. 13.
American History for Cynical Beginners
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