Francis Albert Sinatra was an American singer, conductor, and actor. Nicknamed the "Chairman of the Board" and "Ol' Blue Eyes", he is regarded as one of the most influential entertainers of the 20th century.
real name: Francis Albert Sinatra
labels: Reprise Records, Columbia Records, Capitol Records, Warner Bros. Records, RCA Records, Philips Records
genres: vocal jazz, big band music, blues, jazz, traditional pop, swing, easy listening
influenced by: Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby
awards: Emmy Award, Golden Globes, SAG-AFTRA Life Achievement Award, Presidential Medal of Freedom, Austrian Decoration for Science and Art, Peabody Awards, Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, Grammy Trustees Award
plays: ukulele, triangle, castanets, friction drum
member of: Harry James and His Orchestra, Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra, Rat Pack
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Francis Albert Sinatra was born on December 12, 1915, in a tenement at 415 Monroe Street in Hoboken, New Jersey, the only child of Italian immigrants Natalina "Dolly" Garaventa and Antonino Martino "Marty" Sinatra. His mother was from Genoa, Liguria, while his father was from Lercara Friddi, Sicily. Sinatra weighed 13.5 pounds (6.1 kg) at birth and had to be delivered with the aid of forceps, which caused severe scarring to his left cheek, neck, and lifelong damage to his left eardrum, delaying his baptism to April 2, 1916. A childhood operation left major scarring on his neck, and during adolescence, Sinatra was further scarred by cystic acne. His excessively skinny frame as a child and young man later became the subject of jokes during...
When Sinatra was featured as a priest in The Miracle of the Bells, due to press negativity surrounding his Mafia connections at the time, it was announced that Sinatra would donate his $100,000 in wages from the film to the Catholic Church. By the end of 1948, Sinatra had slipped to fourth on DownBeat's annual poll of most popular singers, and the following year, he was pushed out of the top spots in polls for the first time since 1943. Frankly Sentimental (1949) was panned by DownBeat, who commented that "for all his talent, it seldom comes to life."
Santopietro stated that by the early 1980s, Sinatra's voice had "coarsened, losing much of its power and flexibility, but audiences didn't care." Kelley noted that by this period, Sinatra's voice had grown "darker, tougher and loamier", but he "continued to captivate audiences with his immutable magic." She added that Sinatra's baritone voice "sometimes cracked, but the gliding intonations still aroused the same raptures of delight as they had at the Paramount Theater."
Voice coach John Quinlan was impressed by Sinatra's vocal range, remarking, "He has far more voice than people think he has. He can vocalize to a B-flat on top in full voice, and he doesn't need a mic either". As a singer, early on, he was primarily influenced by Bing Crosby, but later believed that Tony Bennett was "the best singer in the business." Bennett himself claimed that as a performer, Sinatra had "perfected the art of intimacy." According to Nelson Riddle, Sinatra had a "fairly rangy voice", remarking: "His voice has a very strident, insistent sound in the top register, a smooth lyrical sound in the middle register, and a very tender sound in the low. His voice is built on infinite taste, with an overall inflection of sex. He...
Underlined songs have their story further down.
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"Fly Me to the Moon", originally titled "In Other Words", is a song written in 1954 by Bart Howard. The first recording of the song was made in 1954 by Kaye Ballard.
Frank Sinatra's 1964 version was closely associated with the Apollo missions to the Moon.
In 1954, when "Fly Me to the Moon" was first presented to the public, Bart Howard had been pursuing a career in music for over 20 years. He played piano to accompany cabaret singers, but also wrote songs with Cole Porter, his idol, in mind. In the book Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret James Gavin noted that Howard wrote the song "in response to his publisher's plea for a simpler song: why did he have to write such grandiloquent lyrics? 'In Other Words' talked about the verbosity of poets who 'use many words to say a simple thing'; 'hold my hand,' 'Kiss me.'"
Kaye Ballard made the song's first commercial recording, released by Decca in April 1954. A brief review published on May 8, 1954, in Billboard said that "In Other Words" was "...a love song sung with feeling by Miss Ballard." This recording was released as the flipside of "Lazy Afternoon", which Kaye Ballard was currently performing as star of the stage show The Golden Apple.
In 1960, Peggy Lee released the song on the album Pretty Eyes, then made it more popular when she performed it in front of a large television audience on The Ed Sullivan Show. As the song's popularity increased, it became better known as "Fly Me to the Moon", and in 1963 Peggy Lee convinced Bart Howard to make the name change official. Connie Francis released two non-English versions of the song in 1963: in Italian as "Portami Con Te" and in Spanish as "Llévame a la Luna".