Why Sinatra Matters by Pete Hamill Page A

it through the diverse filters of the streets of Hoboken, his own childhood, his personal solitude, and above all
     through the masculine street codes forged in the years of Prohibition. When the Noble Experiment ended on December 5, 1933,
     Americans didn’t revert in the morning to the kind of people they were before Prohibition started; they had emerged from the
     era a lot more cynical and a lot tougher, qualities that would get many of them through the Depression. Sinatra applied some
     of those attitudes to his music.
    If love lyrics were too mushy, he could sing them and make wised-up fun of the mush, and still, in some part of the self,
     acknowledge that there was some truth to the words. He could be tender and still be a tough guy. Ruth Etting could sing her
     weepy torch songs, but for men, whining or self-pity was not allowed; they were forbidden by the male codes of the city. Sinatra
     slowly found a way to allow tenderness into the performance while remaining manly. When he finally took command of his own
     career, he perfected the role of the Tender Tough Guy and passed it on to several generations of Americans. Before him, that
     archetype did not exist in American popular culture. That is one reason why he continues to matter; Frank Sinatra created
     a new model for American masculinity.
    Sinatra was not, of course, a jazz singer, but his process resembled the way many jazz musicians worked. The best of them
     listened
creatively
to the tunes of Tin Pan Alley but heard them through the filter of their own experience, which was dominated by being black
     in segregated America. They transformed those songs, edited them, reinvented them, found something of value in even the most
     banal tunes. The instrument didn’t matter. Over the years Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis found something different in the
     same tunes; so did Clifford Brown and Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young and Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins and Dexter Gordon. They
     understood the specific lyrics of what had become known as American standards and the general intentions of the songs; they
     insisted on making them more interesting as
music,
more authentic, more personal, finding a subtle core that more closely resembled the blues. The results could be entertainment,
     a transient diversion from the hardness of life; but the songs could be art, too, digging deep into human pain and folly.
     They could also be both. But these musicians approached the music with a seriousness that was pure. Sinatra worked in a similar
     way. He didn’t play trumpet, trombone, saxophone, or piano; he rarely composed music or wrote lyrics; but he did function
     as a musician.
    “I discovered very early that my instrument wasn’t my voice,” he said to me once. “It was the microphone.”
    II
. In the tradition of the Old Country, Frank Sinatra served a long apprenticeship. He seems to have conceived the notion of
     being a professional singer when he was fifteen. Again, the instinct to create legend or myth obscures the facts, and not
     even Sinatra was a reliable witness to his own beginnings, and he knew it.
    “Sometimes I think I know what it all was about, and how everything happened,” he said one rainy night in New York. “But then
     I shake my head and wonder. Am I remembering what really happened or what
other
people think happened? Who the hell knows, after a certain point?”
    One thing that really happened was the discovery that he actually did have a voice and could sing. I reminded him once of
     the story that Rocky Marciano, the old undefeated heavyweight champion, used to tell. He said that when he first knocked out
     a man in a gymnasium when he was a kid, it was like discovering he could sing opera.
    “Hey,” Sinatra said, “when I first realized I could sing a song, I felt like I’d just knocked out Jack Dempsey.”
    But in Hoboken in 1930 there were dozens of young men (and surely a few women) who could sing well. They could carry a tune.