Back in January 2008, when Dwight Garner was editing the "Living with Music" blog for the New York Times, I got to write a column on my top twenty Sinatra tracks from the 1940s, an enviable assignment and one that I had a swellegant, elegant time with. Here it is. -- DL
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David Lehman’s January 2008 “Young Blue Eyes” Playlist:
Sometimes overshadowed by the Capitol Years (1953-1961) or the years after when “our hoodlum singer” (as Johnny Carson put it) became the iconic leader of the Rat Pack, the 1940s are the closest thing to a forgotten decade in Frank Sinatra’s career. This is a lovely way to spend an evening:
1) All or Nothing at All (music by Arthur Altman, words by Jack Lawrence). Though initially recorded on the day before the Nazis invaded Poland, this most famous of the songs Sinatra sang with the Harry James Orchestra is eligible here on a technicality. The 1939 recording didn’t become a hit until it was re-released as a single four years later, during a prolonged (and ruinous) musicians’ strike, when Columbia Records was desperate for material. Sinatra in 1944: “It’s a funny thing about that song. The recording we made of it five years ago is now in one of the top spots among the best sellers. But it’s the same old recording. It’s also the song I used to audition for Tommy Dorsey who signed me on the strength of it. And now it’s my first big record.” The final bar of the vocal is miraculous.
2) I’ll Never Smile Again (Ruth Lowe). As recorded on May 23, 1940, by the Dorsey orchestra with Sinatra and the Pied Pipers vocal group. Jo Stafford, then the golden female voice of the Pied Pipers, likes to say that within a few bars of first hearing Sinatra sing, she knew. You’ll hear why the first of his nicknames was “The Voice.”
3) Oh! Look At Me Now (Joe Bushkin music and John De Vries lyrics). January 6, 1941. Another gem from the three years Sinatra spent as Tommy Dorsey’s boy singer. In the allegory of Sinatra’s career, this song –– which he recorded as a solo on “A Swingin’ Affair” in 1957 –– figures heavily: “I’m so proud I’m bustin’ my vest.” Sung here as a duet with Connie Haines backed by the Pied Pipers.
) Be Careful, It’s My Heart (Irving Berlin). June 9, 1942. Like Artie Shaw, Sinatra recognized the value of recording not only current hits but a repertory of songs written by the masters, and thus he did as much as anyone to (1) extend the life of the music and (2) launch the concept of the “standard.” In this excellent Dorsey arrangement of an underrated Berlin ballad, Tommy’s trombone beautifully states the melody all the way through and then comes Sinatra’s vocal. Among other songs he recorded with the Dorsey orchestra I would name “East of the Sun (and West of the Moon”), “The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else,” “Fools Rush In,” “How About You?” Too bad he never recorded “Our Love Affair.”
5) (There’ll be a) Hot Time in the Town of Berlin (Joe Bushkin music and John De Vries lyrics). I’ve heard two versions of this tune that Bushkin (Lee Wylie’s pianist) wrote to boost morale among the troops abroad. The CBS radio broadcast of Oct. 17, 1943, which became a V-disc, is interesting for its variant lyrics (“Michigan” rhymes with “gimme some skin”), but I prefer the more relaxed delivery of March 4, 1944 (arranged by Axel Stordahl; available on the “Frank Sinatra in Hollywood” boxed set; disc 1, number 19). This is one of “the songs that fought the war,” in John Bush Jones’s phrase. Our lads were going “to take a hike / through Hitler’s Reich / and change his Heil to whatcha-know-Joe.”
6) Dick Haymes, Dick Todd, and Como. October 23, 1944. Sammy Cahn, Sinatra’s personal lyricist, who could craft a song at a moment’s notice, took “Sunday, Monday, and Always,” the Johnny Burke and James Van Heusen hit, and wrote this about some of the competition in the continuing battle of the baritones that marked the Big Band Era. You’ll find it on Columbia’s “The V-Discs” (disc 2, number 6). “Every time I sing / I’m compared with Bing.” Jokes about how skinny he is (“They say that I need weight, / I’m just a mass of joints”) and the bobbysoxers’ adoring screams, which may yet cause him grief, “but if they ever stop / I’ll find that I’m back on relief.”
7) All the Things You Are (music Jerome Kern, lyrics Oscar Hammerstein). Recorded January 29, 1945. Axel Stordahl and orchestra. The apotheosis of the great American love song from one of America’s two greatest melodists. Concluding crescendo illustrates young crooner’s amazing range. From “The Best of the Columbia Years, 1943-1952.”
8) Where or When (music Richard Rodgers, lyrics Lorenz Hart). See comment (above) on “All the Things You Are” recorded on the same day.
9) Saturday Night (is the Loneliest night in the Week) (music Jule Styne, lyrics Sammy Cahn). Recorded February 3, 1945. Cahn and Styne turned out hit after hit for Sinatra in the mid-1940s (“Five Minutes More,” “Time After Time,” “Let it Snow, Let It Snow, Let it Snow”). Maybe more than any other song of 1945, “Saturday Night” is an instant metonymy for the home front during World War II. Superb uptempo George Siravo arrangement.
10) Put Your Dreams Away (Ruth Lowe, Paul Mann, Stephen Weiss). Recorded May 1, 1945. Sinatra’s radio and later his TV theme music. A full-throated display of his ability to sustain a note seemingly past the breaking point, a function of the breathing technique he learned from Dorsey’s trombone. This is what they played at Frank’s funeral recession.
11) Oh Bess, Where's My Bess? (George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, Du Bose Heyward). Recorded February 24, 1946. An early example of Sinatra’s “method acting” approach to singing. The emotional identification of the singer with his material reaches operatic heights.
12) That Old Black Magic (music Harold Arlen, lyrics Johnny Mercer). Recorded March 10, 1946. Arlen, the jazziest of the songwriters, and according to Ethel Waters, the “Negro-est” white man she knew, wrote songs of extraordinary complexity. In Mercer he found his ideal lyricist: “For you’re the lover I have waited for, / The mate that fate had me created for.”
13) The Coffee Song (They’ve Got an Awful Lot of Coffee in Brazil). (Music Dick Miles, lyrics Bob Hilliard). Recorded July 24, 1946. Charming night-club number reflecting the late 1940s fascination with South America. “And when their ham and eggs need savor / Coffee ketchup gives them flavor, / Coffee pickles way outsell the dill. / Why, they put coffee in the coffee in Brazil.” Close your eyes and you’re at The Copa.
14) Begin the Beguine (Cole Porter). Oct 19, 1946. Arranged by George Siravo, responsible for Sinatra’s best charts until Nelson Riddle at Capitol. Porter liked to say that the key to writing Broadway hits was to “write Jewish music.” Listen to this amazing tropical-sounding dance number - which veers even further from the 32-bar structure than Arlen’s “That Old Black Magic” - and you’ll appreciate Richard Rodgers’s remark that the popular composer who “has written the most enduring `Jewish’ music” is Porter, “an Episcopalian millionaire who was born on a farm in Peru, Indiana.”
15) All of Me (Gerald Marks music, Seymour Simons lyrics). Arrangement by George Siravo, November 7, 1946. Sinatra recorded this number many times, most notably on the “Swing Easy” album he did with Nelson Riddle’s arrangements in 1953 or ‘54. That will remain the touchstone, but the Siravo version comes close, a sexy example of “kidding the lyrics.” The singer’s cocky confidence belies the words (“Your goodbye left me with eyes that cry”) and ends up sounding as defiant as, say, “Why Should I Cry Over You?” Of numerous alternate takes, I like best the one that ends not with the Sinatra whistle but a mutter: “You better get it while you can, baby. I’m gettin’ outta here.”
16) My Romance (Rodgers and Hart). April 25, 1947. In contrast to the fabrications of old age, Sinatra excelled at live duets during his radio years - with such as Peggy Lee, Doris Day ("Let's Take an Old-Fashioned Walk"), Eileen Barton ("Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are"), Sy Oliver and here Dinah Shore. (His duets in the 1950s with Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong and Jo Stafford are equally grand.). Criterion for judging duets: When the performers sound like they’re genuinely having fun.
17) The Song is You (Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein). Oct 26, 1947. Definitive version of great standard.
18) Body and Soul (Johnny Green music, Edward Heyman lyrics). Recorded November 9, 1947, with Bobby Hackett on trumpet. See note on track 17 above. Gary Giddins calls this the best “straight” (i.e. non-jazz) rendition of the song.
19) It All Depends on You (Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, Ray Henderson). Recorded July 10, 1949 with Hugo Winterhalter’s orchestra, and a fine sax solo from Wolf Taninbaum. Sinatra does a nice little be-bop scat following the bridge of this swing classic. Track five on “Swing and Dance with Frank Sinatra” is the best among many satisfactory takes. Compare to how Ruth Etting does this 1920s song –– or how Doris Day playing Ruth Etting does it in “Love Me or Leave Me.”
20) Bye Bye, Baby (music Jule Styne, lyrics Leo Robin). July 10, 1949. Swell brassy number from Jule Styne’s “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” Leo Robin’s lyric cleverly transforms goodbye to its opposite through the agency of a pun: the song begins with the title words and ends with the lovers re-united: “I know that I’ll be smiling / with my baby, by and by.” Sinatra was a natural at the finger-snapping style that he made his own increasingly in the 1950s. Compare this version with the duet of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell and male chorus in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
This list was incorporated in Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World by David Lehman (HarperCollins).
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