Why Sinatra Matters by Pete Hamill Page B

They could remember the words. Few of them thought they could become stars. That required an act of the imagination, the kind
     of gleaming vision that is often unique to artists, along with the type of will that is sometimes mistaken for arrogance.
     Above all, it took guts. To walk out of the safety of the parish is never easy; to do so during the Depression was an act
     of either foolishness or courage. And yet a small number of people chose to go out and try to make it in America, no matter
     what the odds against them.
    “There really was nothing to lose,” Sinatra said later. “Yes, you might fall on your ass. But so what? You could always work
     on the docks or tend bar. What was important was to
try
.”
    The lure of big-time success was underlined by the grinding horrors of the Depression. Crime was one way out; with audacity
     and a gun, a kid might become a big shot. But talent was another. By the early 1930s the radio and the phonograph record,
     along with sound movies, were creating the first national pop singing stars. One was Russ Columbo, who had a light operatic
     voice and made an immense hit of “Prisoner of Love.” He showed that an Italian American could be accepted beyond the boundaries
     of the parish, but his career was cut short in 1934 by his accidental death while cleaning an antique pistol. Rudy Vallee
     was another early star. But his voice was light and tremulous, he looked a bit goofy, and in personal appearances he used
     a megaphone; he couldn’t play college sophomores forever. In the cities of the Northeast there weren’t many college sophomores
     to identify with him anyway. Certainly kids like Frank Sinatra never wanted to grow up to be Rudy Vallee. But Bing Crosby
     was an altogether different model.
    “You can’t imagine now how big Crosby was,” Sinatra said in the 1970s. “He was the biggest thing in the country. On records.
     On the radio. In the movies. Everybody wanted to be Bing Crosby, including me.”
    Crosby did understand the microphone – and the camera. He knew he didn’t have to hit the second balcony with the belting style
     forced upon Broadway singers. The microphone permitted a more intimate connection with the audience. He didn’t have to italicize
     his acting in movies, the way theater-trained actors did; the close-up allowed him to be natural. Crosby was relaxed, casual,
     and very American.
    The story of Sinatra’s inspiration by Crosby has been told in all the biographies: how he would sing along with the records,
     and how one night in 1935 he took his best girl, a dark-haired beauty named Nancy Barbato, to the Loew’s Journal Square theater
     in Newark to see Crosby in a live appearance. On the way home he said to her, “Someday, that’s gonna be me up there.”
    Nancy Barbato, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a plastering contractor, was skeptical; on an average Saturday night that
     year, about a million young American males must have been saying roughly the same thing. But Frank Sinatra had begun to believe
     in his own possibilities. This was America, wasn’t it? And in America anything was possible. So he watched Crosby and listened
     to him, simultaneously opening himself to other kinds of music too. Crosby’s stardom obviously inspired Sinatra, but in the
     deepest, most substantial ways, his musicianship did not (the truest heirs to the Crosby singing style were Perry Como and
     Dean Martin). The most important and enduring influence on the young Frank Sinatra was swing music.
    Beginning with Benny Goodman’s breakout in the mid-1930s, and steadily gathering force, this jazz-inspired big band music
     was soon cutting across all racial and ethnic lines, becoming
the
music of the generation dominated by the children of immigrants. The growth of radio as a national medium accelerated this
     process: white kids could hear Count Basie or Duke Ellington; black kids could listen to Goodman (who included black musicians
     Lionel Hampton and