It's the birthday of Frank Sinatra, (music by this artist) born in Hoboken (1915), who got a job with his first singing group only because he had his own car and could drive the group to gigs. They won an amateur singing contest on a radio show with the largest call-in vote in the show's history. Sinatra eventually began working on his own, singing in bars, and the trumpeter Benny Goodman saw one of his performances, and offered to hire him as a vocalist for $75 a week. But he told Sinatra that he had to change his awful name. Sinatra said, "You want the voice, you take the name." And so he got to keep it.
His first booking as a soloist was an eight-week run at New York's Paramount Theatre, longer than any other solo engagement at the Paramount up to that time. His press agent was so nervous about his debut that he hired a dozen girls to stand at the front of the theater to swoon and scream, but it wasn't necessary. Hundreds of other women showed up and did the same thing. Sinatra became famous as a crooner, but his vocal chords ruptured during a performance at the Copacabana. He was photographed in the company of known mobsters, he was constantly in the tabloids, and his record label dropped him. So he went back to singing small joints, theaters, and saloons and slowly built his confidence back up. He approached Capitol Records for a new recording contract, and the result was a new Sinatra. Instead of a crooner, he sounded like an everyman. He could sing all kinds of songs: pop, swing, jazz, show tunes, and ballads, and he went on to become one of the most successful solo singers in history, recording "I Get a Kick Out of You," "Young at Heart," "All of Me," "What Is This Thing Call Love?" and "That's Life. -From The Writers Almanac
2 comments:
Your post gave me goose bumps as I read it, I'm talkin shivers, yea.
If he'd been born three years earlier his birth date would have been 12-12-12, cool
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