THE VOICE BORN IN SILENCE

By Manuel Muñoz

Sinatra’s first recordings on Columbia Records

A baby comes into the world without showing any apparent signs of life. The doctors evict him while they desperately try to save the life of the battered mother, who will not be able to conceive again. The baby’s grandmother doesn’t give up on everything. She quickly puts him under a stream of ice water. The little one reacts. His crying breaks the silence. It is the first musical note of Francis Albert Sinatra

Several years later, in another broken silence, his artistic consecration as the most important musical star of the moment took shape.

In August 1942, the American Federation of Musicians called a strike against record companies that left instruments dormant in their cases for two years.

The origin of the conflict must be sought in the growing popularity of jukeboxes in venues with smaller capacity, to the detriment of groups and soloists. Among artists, recordings are beginning to be perceived as the main threat to their continued employment: radio stations offer more and more hours of broadcasting of recorded music, a more affordable and less problematic method than having Big Bands live, usually from outdoor places. To make matters worse, musicians are paid very little compensation for recording sessions while they observe the enormous sales achieved by recordings they have helped make fashionable and ask to be paid royalties in addition to the sessions themselves. The record companies refuse to accept it and the leader of the Association calls a strike on August 1, 1942, declaring that no musician will record again until an agreement is reached.

Capitol and Decca soon reach an agreement with the Federation, passing a Performing Rights Act. Columbia and Victor are mistakenly convinced that Congress will declare a wartime strike unconstitutional, and they will not sign such an agreement until November 1944.

The strike does not silence the singers, who record some albums accompanied by vocal choirs. The audience can appreciate even more the value of good voices by enjoying them without the sumptuous curtain of the orchestra. When metals, woods and strings vibrate on records again, nothing will be like before. The vocalists will become the stars and the orchestras, their natural complement.

The music stops in the studios but the dancing continues. A choreography of primal hysteria with the fans fainting, collecting Frank’s footprints in the snow and making a reliquary of cigarette ashes and shreds of the artist’s clothes, wetting the theater seats, letting their bras be autographed, paying by the minute of guilt between hotel sheets warmed by The Voice’s body…

Like an accusatory Greek chorus, the establishment criticizes Frankie, doubting his qualities and judging his followers for such a waste of hormones, a decade before doing exactly the same with Elvis Presley and two before repeating the ritual before the audience. beatlemania.

As far as Frankie is concerned, leaving the strict discipline imposed by Tommy Dorsey allows him to exploit all of his potential among his already dedicated fans and make his first inroads with the adult and sophisticated audiences who reserve a table at the Riobamba or the Waldorf. Astoria. The reception among the elite is gracious and the distinguished surroundings prove ideal for Sinatra’s growing artistic refinement. Music critic Leonard Feather writes of Frank’s concert at the Riobamba in Manhattan: “Sinatra, my children, is the new idol, the man who in a few months has gone from the role of orchestra singer to soloist in a one-man show. great radio network, headliner in one of the fashionable night clubs in New York and an advertising achievement that places him as the greatest since Bing Crosby.”

Columbia, the record company that has just signed Sinatra as a solo artist, is pleased with this success and astutely reissues “All or nothing at all”, which Frankie recorded with the Harry James orchestra in August 1939. On its re-release, the single It will remain on the best-seller list for 18 weeks, occupying second place in a few days.
Frank doesn’t need to draw on his past to shore up his present; During the strike his name and his voice have been heard on dials and stages, exempt from the fall of the instrumentalists’ work stoppage.

But Columbia Records needs to capitalize on his newest signing as soon as possible. Mannie Sachs, the label’s A&R manager, decides to organize a cappella sessions mainly to have something to offer the singer’s millions of fans. But the quality of the professionals involved in the project means that they are pieces that, despite not being known to the general public, have faced the passage of time with unprecedented splendor.

I am surprised that, three quarters of a century after their recording, there has not been a special reissue of the first nine songs recorded by Frank Sinatra at Columbia, with the accompaniment of the vocal choir The Bobby Tucker Singers. They are wonderful miniatures worth knowing, full of beauty, musical quality and historical importance. They were recorded during a musicians’ strike whose consequences drastically changed the musical scene, giving singers the prominence that large orchestras had until now. And in the midst of that transition, Frankie, flying to the moon with tulle wings, after leaving Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra, became The Voice of voices.

Apparently there are a total of fourteen takes, enough in themselves for a salable album, and if more material has to be added, it occurs to me that the versions of those same songs, already orchestrated, that Frank made later, could well be used.

Until that happens, you can find the songs on the Columbia box set.

REPERTOIRE

“Close to You” was the first song from the sessions, on June 7, 1943.

The theme is the work of Jerry Livingston, Carl Lampl and Al Hoffman. Livingston is famous for his work for television series and films, and for the general public, it is worth mentioning that he is the author of the song “Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo” from Disney’s “Cinderella.”
Frank recorded it again on December 26, 1943, with orchestra and arrangements by Axel Stordahl, and on November 1, 1956 for Capitol Records, with arrangements by Nelson Riddle, as part of an album of the same title in which Frank sings backed by the Hollywood String Quartet.

“People will say we’re in love” and “Oh what a beautiful morning” are from “Oklahoma!”, the first musical written jointly by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, and released in 1943. It is based on the play by Lynn Riggs “Green Grow the Lilacs”, 1931. In 1955 a musical film was made starring Gordon MacRae, Shirley Jones, Rod Steiger, Charlotte Greenwood, Gloria Grahame, Gene Nelson, James Whitmore and Eddie Albert. The direction was provided by Fred Zinnemann. It is a classic romantic story set in the rural world of the United States, and remains valid to this day, as it has continued to be performed inside and outside the United States until 2015.

“You’ll Never Know” was the third and final song recorded on June 7, 1943. It is a popular song with music by Harry Warren and lyrics by Mack Gordon, and is based on a poem written by Dorothy Fern Norris, the wife of a soldier sent to the front in the war. It was featured in the 1943 film “Hello, Frisco, Hello” – in which Alice Faye sang -, and won the Oscar for Best Song. In that same year Frank Sinatra and Dick Haymes (another brilliant vocalist) recorded their versions with the accompaniment of a vocal choir. They were among the first great singers to contribute to the perpetuation of this melody.

Haymes employed the group The Song Spinners. In the fight between the two to top the charts, Haymes beat Sinatra, achieving a number one for four weeks on the Billboard charts. Frank had to be content with second place for two weeks.

Rosemary Clooney, great singer (and George Clooney’s aunt) recorded the magnificent version of it in 1952 with the Harry James orchestra (with whom Frank debuted in 1939). Half a century after it, Bette Midler included it in her tribute album to Rosemary. “You’ll Never Know” was also the recording studio debut for Barbra Streisand, in 1955, when she was only thirteen years old.

The song has remained alive to this day. Over the last fifty years it has been recorded by dozens of artists, including Doris Day, Shirley Bassey, Al Hirt, Trini Lopez, Denny Doherty (vocalist of The Mamas & The Papas), Lew DeWitt (member of The Statler Brothers), Michael Bublé, Rod Stewart and Frank Sinatra Jr. himself. And the message of this song never goes out of style.

In November 1943, the last recording sessions of the songs that Frank Sinatra recorded a cappella with the vocal group The Bobby Tucker Singers took place. In them, Frank chooses three songs included in the film “Higher and Higher”, the second of his filmography: “I couldn’t sleep a wink last night”, “The music stopped ” and “A lovely way to spend an evening”, all by Jimmy McHugh and Harold Adamson.

“I Couldn’t Sleep a Wink Last Night” is a ballad of teenage love that was nominated for an Oscar for Best Song, and “A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening” has earned Standard status over the years, with many versions, including those by Shirley Bassey, Engelbert Humperdinck and Oscar Peterson.

Jimmy McHugh (1894-1969) is one of the most prolific composers of the period 1920-1950. To his credit are standards such as “I ca n’t give you anything but love”, “On the Sunny side of the street”, “I’m in the mood for love” or Chet Baker’s anthem “Let’s get “lost”.

Harold Adamson (1906-1980) composed, among many other songs, the melody for the television series “I love Lucy” starring Lucille Ball.

These iconic and little-known recordings are important to the particular history of Frank Sinatra and the general history of music for the reasons already stated above.

In October 1944, Frank Sinatra performed a series of concerts at the Paramount Theater in New York whose impact was unprecedented: the heart of the Big Apple collapsed, the forces of order were completely overwhelmed when it came to controlling the masses, and the hysterical manifestations of his fans surprise society as a whole, even giving rise to psychological studies that suggest or openly affirm that the followers of this new artist are nothing short of mentally ill. With some variants, these schemes have been repeated in each and every youth cultural phenomenon up to the present. Sinatra’s first recordings for Columbia Records, those small works of art born in the midst of the silence caused by the musicians’ strike in the United States, are, without exaggeration, the opening act of popular musical culture as we know it.

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