Why Sinatra Matters by Pete Hamill

made his entrance and the fans roared, December 30,
     1942
4
THE SONG IS YOU
    H IS FINEST ACCOMPLISHMENT, of course, was the sound. The voice itself would evolve over the years from a violin to a viola to a cello, with a rich middle
     register and dark bottom tones. But it was a combination of voice, diction, attitude, and taste in music that produced the
     Sinatra sound. It remains unique. Sinatra created something that was not there before he arrived: an urban American voice.
     It was the voice of the sons of the immigrants in northern cities – not simply the Italian Americans, but the children of
     all those immigrants who had arrived on the great tide at the turn of the century. That’s why Irish and Jewish Americans listened
     to him in New York. That’s why the children of Poles in Chicago, along with all those other people in cities around the nation,
     listened to him. If they did not exactly sound like him, they
wanted
to sound like him. Frank Sinatra was the voice of the twentieth-century American city.
    In life even the mature Sinatra would sometimes speak in the argot of the street. He could be profane, even vulgar. The word
them
could become
dem,
and
those
could become
dose
. It depended on the company. But in the songs the diction was impeccable. The children of the Italians, the Irish, and the
     Jews wanted to believe that they could express themselves that way, and many of them did. In my Brooklyn neighborhood, many
     of us understood that we were not prisoners of the Brooklyn accent,
because
Sinatra’s singing refused to use it. And he was like us. His diction was something that Sinatra learned early, from the movies.
    “I’d go to the movies, and hear the leading man speaking English – not just Cary Grant, but Clark Gable and all the other
     guys – and I knew that my friends and I were talking some other version of the language,” he said once. “So I started becoming,
     in some strange way, bilingual. I talked one kind of English with my friends. Alone in my room, I’d keep practicing the other
     kind of English.”
    His taste in music was formed early. He grew up listening to and memorizing the words and music of the great popular composers
     and lyricists of the first forty years of the twentieth century. These included Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter,
     Harold Arlen, and Johnny Mercer, to mention only a few of this extraordinary generation. Many were themselves part of the
     immigrant saga. Arthur Schwartz was the grandson of a buttonmaker from Russia. Harry Warren was the child of immigrants from
     Italy. Yip Harburg’s parents were from Russia. Irving Berlin, author of “God Bless America” and a thousand other tunes, was
     himself an immigrant from Siberia. All were very American, creators of most of those songs that became known as the “standards”
     of twentieth-century American music.
    As the reigning citizens of Tin Pan Alley, they wrote music for the Broadway theater. They wrote for musical revues. They
     wrote for the movies. Above all, they were city people, and their audiences were composed of city people. Often building on
     forms derived from African American rhythms, adapting European melodic structures and harmonies, the best of their music was
     full of wit, regret, insouciance, and sly humor. During Prohibition the music celebrated good times and a sophisticated hedonism,
     becoming the unrecorded sound track of the speakeasies. When the Depression hit, there was a chastened undertone to the music,
     a feeling of rue (as there was in the late writing of Scott Fitzgerald). Some writers were capable of biting social commentary,
     as in Harburg’s “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” Most of the time, the attitude was less direct. Perhaps the apocalypse was
     here, the songs declared; if so, let’s dance. That music was absorbed by the men and women of an entire generation. Sinatra
     was one of them, but he had begun to hear the music in a new way.
    He heard