THE STORY TELLER:

Before Sinatra, the lyrics were given at most a casual attention.  Why did we start listening?....

What made us stop dancing and crowd up close to the bandstand to listen?  He was making sense of the words. He was telling a story, honoring the American songbook in a way that had never been done, the poems-to-music of Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Lorenz Hart, Sammy Cahn, Oscar Hammerstein, Yip Harburg, Johnny Burke, and other giants....

(In the Dorsey years) Sinatra sang a lot like the way Dorsey played trombone, long lines often carried past the end of an eight bar phrase.  You can really hear it in his recording with Dorsey of "Without A Song."  At the end of the release, Sinatra hits the word "soul" quite big, and without a breath, sails diminuendo into the start of the next eight, "I'll never know..."

(With Nelson Riddle) The ballads are touching, heartbreaking even, and the sense of identification is incomparable. In the reprise of "My Funny Valentine" when he sings "But donnnn't change a hair for me..." oh, the pain.  And rhythm songs now were fun.  "I get a kick...mmmm, you give me a boot!"

By now we knew what he was: A performing poet.  And by now he had influenced a whole generation of singers, Vic Damone and me (both of us from Brooklyn) among them.  But he created a dilemma for us too.  If you phrased the way he did, you were bound to sound a little like him.  But on the other hand, as Gene Lees wrote, "Once you had heard him do it, what was a singer to do?  Not phrase for the meaning of the lyrics?"