Influences
Sinatra's vocal style represented a significant departure from the "crooning" style of his idol, Bing Crosby. Sinatra's generation represented the first generation of children that had grown up in the era of the microphone, and the amplification of sound enabled singers to sing in a much softer, personal and nuanced style. However Sinatra, as he himself once noted, sang more, by which he meant that he introduced a bel canto sound to the tradition begun by Crosby. And, more importantly, he might be said to have brought the Crosby tradition to artistic completion, taking it to levels of intensity and depth of feeling that, because of the displacement of the Crosby – Sinatra tradition by rock and roll and subsequent genres, are unlikely to be achieved again.
Two other great performers of the 1930s and 1940s were significant influences on Sinatra: Billie Holiday and Mabel Mercer. Sinatra regularly heard "Lady Day" in New York clubs in the 1940s and learned from her the importance of authenticity of emotion. From Mercer he learned the importance of the element of "story" in a song. For Sinatra a song is a three-four minute narrative — sometimes even the story of himself, his own life, his own heartaches, his own feelings of buoyancy — and this is why Ella Fitzgerald could say of him, "With Frank, it's always this little guy, telling this ... story." The archetypal examples of the Sinatra song as story could later be found in two selections from his 1958 Capitol album, Frank Sinatra Sings For Only The Lonely: "Angel Eyes" and "One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)".
Read more about this topic: Frank Sinatra's Recorded Legacy
Famous quotes containing the word influences:
“Do not seek anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“However diligent she may be, however dedicated, no mother can escape the larger influences of culture, biology, fate . . . until we can actually live in a society where mothers and children genuinely matter, ours is an essentially powerless responsibility. Mothers carry out most of the work orders, but most of the rules governing our lives are shaped by outside influences.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)