That process began with their first single release, ”I’ve Got the World on a String,” which hit the pop charts in the summer of 1953. It continued with the albums ”Songs for Young Lovers,” released in early 1954, and ”Swing Easy,” which came out six months later.
The collaboration hit its artistic peak with three albums. ”In the Wee Small Hours,” a 16-cut collection of classic torch songs sung in a quietly anguished baritone, was released in the spring of 1955. ”Songs for Swingin’ Lovers,” released a year later, defined Sinatra in his adult ”swinging” mode. It included what many regard as his greatest recorded performance: Cole Porter’s ”I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”
”Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely,” released in the summer of 1958, expanded on the mournful, introspective tone of ”Wee Small Hours” by adding shadings that were at once jazzier and more operatic. The album, which included his classic recording of ”What’s New,” inspired Linda Ronstadt‘s hit 1983 album ”What’s New,” which in turn spurred a revival of interest in elegant 50′s pop styles.
Sinatra‘s Capitol albums were among the first so-called concept albums in the way they explored different adult approaches to love and invoked varied aspects of the singer’s personality. These were the fun-loving hedonist (”Songs for Swingin’ Lovers” and its equally brilliant 1957 follow-up, ”A Swingin’ Affair”), the romantic confidant (”Close to You,” recorded with the Hollywood String Quartet), the jet-set playboy (”Come Fly With Me”), the romantic loner (”Where Are You?,” ”No One Cares”) and the hardened sensation-seeker (”Come Swing With Me”).
The Hit Maker And Prolific Actor
In 1959, ”Come Dance With Me!,” a hard-swinging album arranged by Billy May, won Sinatra his first Grammy Awards, for album of the year and best male vocal performance, and stayed on the sales chart for 140 weeks, longer than any other Sinatra album.
Sinatra’s career as a maker of hit singles was also rejuvenated. ”Young at Heart,” which hit the pop charts in February 1954, reached No. 2 on Billboard’s pop singles chart, and ”Learnin’ the Blues” reached No. 1 the following year. His other significant hits from the late 1950′s included ”Love and Marriage,” (which was written for a television production of ”Our Town,” in which Sinatra played the Stage Manager), ”The Tender Trap” (1955), ”Hey! Jealous Lover” (1956), ”All the Way” (1957) and ”Witchcraft” (1958).
During this period, the versatile team of Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn, who had become partners in 1954, functioned almost as Sinatra’s house songwriters, supplying both movie song hits and the title songs for albums.
After ”From Here to Eternity,” Sinatra’s movie career boomed, with the roles many and varied. He played the perennial gambler Nathan Detroit in the film adaptation of the Broadway musical ”Guys and Dolls” (1955), a heroin addict in ”The Man With the Golden Arm” the same year and an Army investigator tracking a would-be assassin in the political thriller ”The Manchurian Candidate” (1962).
His performance in ”The Man With the Golden Arm” won him an Academy Award nomination for best actor.
In his better movie roles — playing a would-be Presidential assassin in ”Suddenly” (1954), the comedian Joe E. Lewis in ”The Joker Is Wild” (1957) and a vulnerable intellectual in ”Some Came Running” (1958) — Sinatra conveyed an outsider’s edgy volatility that matched the film-noirish mood of his more introspective albums.
His roles in the film musicals ”High Society” (1956) and ”Pal Joey” (1957) as well as ”Guys and Dolls” effectively played off his scrappy, streetwise image.
Assessing his film career, the critic David Thomson said Sinatra had a ”pervasive influence on American acting: he glamorized the fatalistic outsider; he made his own anger intriguing, and in the late 50′s especially he was one of our darkest male icons.”
”Sinatra is a noir sound,” he said, ”like saxophones, foghorns, gunfire and the quiet weeping of women in the background.”
Chairman of the Board, Leader of the Rat Pack.
[...] legally music, me, music, music industry, music piracy, sinatra, with — kronaz @ 3:48 pm Sinatra remained a top box office draw for nearly a decade, and his success as both singer and actor led [...]
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