“The Voice of Frank Sinatra,” his very first studio album as a soloist, included “Someone to Watch Over Me” by George and Ira Gershwin. Sinatra’s first number-one hit, “I’ll Never Smile Again,” recorded with Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra, was written by Jewish-Canadian songwriter Ruth Lowe and perched atop the pop charts for 12 weeks. Sammy Davis Jr.’s daughter understood her father’s commitment to Judaism Benjamin Ivry November 20, 2020 Sinatra supposedly pointed to the stairs and said, “‘You and me, pal, we got blue eyes, we’re from up there… These other bums are from down here.” Significantly, Dylan recorded several albums of pre-rock pop songs associated with Sinatra in the 2010s, in which his vocal interpretations cut right to the heart of the longing and poignancy buried within the melodies and lyrics. Speaking of blue eyes, Sinatra and Bob Dylan - whose eyes Joan Baez once described in song as “bluer than robin’s eggs” - there is an oft-told story of the two singers finding themselves alone outside on a Hollywood balcony one night, seeking refuge from the chaos and din of a music-industry party going on inside. Dylan later revealed that it was Ol’ Blue Eyes himself who asked the future Nobel Prize-winner to perform that number. At an 80th birthday tribute to Sinatra in 1995, Dylan performed his song “Restless Farewell,” an obscurity for which even Dylan fanatics would be hard-pressed to hum a few bars. While Sinatra never recorded a Dylan tune, he was apparently intimately familiar with the singer’s catalog. That same figure has been bandied about this past week in reference to Bob Dylan, in the wake of the sale of his publishing rights to Universal Music Publishing Group for an undisclosed figure thought to be $400 million. Sinatra was one of the best-selling recording artists of all time, having sold more than 150 million records worldwide. Sinatra, as it turned out, just happened to become the greatest interpreter of that body of work. And while the songwriters for the most part expressly tried to leave behind the accents and inflections of the Yiddish-speaking world from whence they came, the songs nonetheless often betrayed the influence of Jewish Eastern Europe in outlook and emotional temperament. That songbook, however, was largely written by Jewish-Americans, including immigrants and children of immigrants. 12, 1915 - grew up to become synonymous with the so-called Great American Songbook. Frank Sinatra was arguably the most famous Italian-American Catholic of the 20th century.
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