Frank Sinatra's Recorded Legacy - Songs and Albums

Songs and Albums

Sinatra left a vast legacy of recordings, from his very first sides with the Harry James orchestra in 1939, the vast catalogs at Columbia in the 1940s, Capitol in the 1950s, and Reprise from the 1960s onwards, up to his 1994 album Duets II.

Some of his best known recorded songs include:

• Great American Songbook entries such as "Night and Day", "I've Got You Under My Skin", and "Fly Me To The Moon"
• Comic numbers such as "Love and Marriage" (used as theme for American television comedy Married... with Children)
• Torch songs such as "One for My Baby", "Angel Eyes", and "Drinking Again"
• "It Was a Very Good Year" and "Summer Wind", which capture his mid-1960s persona of sentimental nostalgia
• "That's Life", "My Way", and "New York, New York", which convey his late-stage attitude of bombastic defiance.

Three of his songs made #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 after the advent of the rock and roll era: "Learnin' the Blues" (1955), "Strangers in the Night" (1966), and "Somethin' Stupid" (1967), the last a duet with daughter Nancy.

Of all his many albums, Sinatra at the Sands, recorded live in Las Vegas in 1966, with Sinatra in his prime, backed by Count Basie's big band, remains his most popular and is still a big seller. Whether in nightclubs, casinos, arenas, or stadiums, Sinatra was one of the most mesmeric entertainers of the twentieth century, capable of turning the largest venue into a simulacrum of an intimate club. There are, however, few recordings or videos of his concerts. In addition to the Sands performance with Basie, three performances of Sinatra at the very peak of his career were captured: With Red Norvo Quintet: Live In Australia, 1959, Sinatra ’57 in Concert, a performance in Seattle with an orchestra conducted by Nelson Riddle and Sinatra & Sextet: Live in Paris, recorded in June 1962.

Sinatra is also credited with putting out perhaps the first concept album. 1955's In the Wee Small Hours is the prime example: a set of songs specifically recorded for the album, using only ballads, organized around a central mood of late-night isolation and aching lost love (supposedly due to his separation from Ava Gardner), with a now-classic album cover reflecting the theme. Rolling Stone magazine later named In the Wee Small Hours as #100 on its list of the 500 best albums of all time, an impressive showing given that its rankings reflect the outlook of the rock generation.

The following year's Songs For Swingin' Lovers took an alternate tack, recording existing pop standards in a hipper, jazzier fashion, revealing an overall exuberance; Rolling Stone placed it #306 on the above list.

It was the advent of the long-playing record that opened the door to these famous concept albums of the 1950s, but Sinatra's first efforts in this direction go back to the Columbia years and The Voice, when the 78 rpm disc made "album" less of a metaphor than it would become with the single-disc LPs of the 1950s. The Voice of Frank Sinatra was released on March 10, 1946 — it was re-issued as a 10" record in 1958. Four more albums would follow over the next five years, as would a Christmas album and a project in which Sinatra conducted the songs of Alec Wilder.

Other notable Sinatra albums include Where Are You? from 1957, which was his first stereo album and his first album recorded with Gordon Jenkins, Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely (1958), a bleak, introspective album, which Sinatra later claimed was his finest work.

The lavish The Concert Sinatra (1963) offered re-recordings of "Ol' Man River" and "You'll Never Walk Alone", backed by a 73-piece orchestra. 1965's September of My Years, according to critic Stephen Holden "summed up the punchy sentimentality of a whole generation of American men". Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim (1967) was a late foray into bossa nova, with Antonio Carlos Jobim.

1973's comeback album Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back was Sinatra's first album after being away from recording for three years; 1980's Trilogy: Past Present Future was an ambitious triple album using three arrangers that attempted to portray the past, present, and future of his career.

1981's She Shot Me Down is sometimes considered the last great Sinatra album. A collection of what Sinatra called "saloon songs", it includes Alec Wilder's "A Long Night".

Speaking to Robin Douglas-Home in 1961, Sinatra said, with regards to the making of his many concept albums, "First I pick the mood for an album, and perhaps pick a title. Or perhaps it might be that I had that title and then picked the mood to fit it... Then I get a shortlist of maybe sixty possible songs and out of these I pick twelve to record. Next comes the pacing of the album, which is vitally important... Once we choose songs that will be in a particular album, I'll sit with Bill Miller, my pianist, and find the proper key. Then I will meet with the orchestrator... Usually we wind up doing it the way the arranger feels it should be done, because he understands more than I do about it..."