What did Sinatra do when rock and roll was born?
Sinatra and Rock and Roll… Alan Freed was an experienced disc jockey settled in Cleveland whose main raw material were jazz and popular music. In the bar that used to go to take a drink, it coincided several times with Leo Mintz, owner of the Record Record Rendezvous store, who had observed how the number of customers who asked for Rhythm and Blues albums, and many of them were white.
Freed began to be interested in gender and on July 11, 1951 he issued his first program dedicated exclusively to such an exciting sound. The term “rock and roll“, whose origin could be in the jargon of the seventeenth century sailors, had been used in recent decades among the African -American community to refer to sex, and Freed decided to use it to avoid the obvious label of “Rhythm and blues “.
The most important characteristic of the program was that it only issued the original black versions of the songs, to the detriment of the white rereadors that seemed to prefer other clicks. The program was a resounding success and marks the beginning of the era of rock and roll.
Meanwhile, in the world of Frank Sinatra …
In 1951 both the life and Frank’s career were going through a sea full of sargassum. His separation from Nancy to be able to marry Ava was not flowing as desired and the records dragged the lists hard. To show, say that its greatest success of the year was the theme “Castle Rock“, a powerful Rhythm and Blues with Harry James that could only reach the 8th Billboard position and stay on the lists just 8 weeks.
His reputation was so devalued that, looking for a way to recover the glory loss he recorded a song called “Mama Will Bark“, framed in the fashion subgenner at that time, the “Novelty Songs” (novel songs, usually adorned with sound effects with sound effects and similar resources) in which he sang with a mediocre vedette called Dagmar and included dog barking. The bloodiest of this album is that the wonderful “i’m a fool to want you“, one of Sinatra’s most shocking recordings, who practically opens his chest to give everything he has inside him to Ava Gardner.
His other professional fronts do not bear very sweet fruits; It is unbearable in the filming of “Meet Danny Wilson“, its television program sinks before the competition of Milton Berle and Perry as and the acceptance of its radio interventions decays without brake.
In November 1951, while Frank and Ava finally managed to marry, Billboard magazine advanced that the singer would not renew his contract with Columbia Records and that he was in contact with RCA and Capitol.
In spite of so much darkness, two candles were lit that would become headlights: he gave his first concerts in Las Vegas, a city that for decades will be his fief, and met Bill Miller, who became his head pianist during the header during the next five decades.
Article written by Mahnuel Muñoz, https://www.facebook.com/mahnuelmunozoficial
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