Did you know...
That Frank Sinatra referred to himself as a saloon singer? He started his career in 1935 singing with the Hoboken Four which led to a national tour. Two years later he began his solo career as a singing waiter at the Rustie Cabin in Englewood, New Jersey. Harry James discovered him and hired him as a band singer in 1939. He made his first commercial studio recording when he was 23 years old. In 1940 Sinatra joined Tommy Dorsey, but he left in 1942 to pursue his solo career which lasted for more than fifty years with one short “retirement” in 1970. He returned as the reinvented “Ol’ Blue Eyes.”
He influenced everybody, even great jazz musicians. Other singers sang the notes; Frank Sinatra sang the meaning. He made you listen to a song for the first time even if you had heard it a hundred times. He invited you to listen to the song “his way” and listening to a Frank Sinatra song is like looking at yourself in a mirror. You are hearing him, but you are seeing yourself. Sinatra took his job seriously, and no one will ever sing a saloon song better!
Frank Sinatra was born in the Italian section of Hoboken, New Jersey, on December 12, 1915 and died a million miles away in Palm Springs, California on May 14, 1998.