The one singer Frank Sinatra thought could change lives
When rock and roll was first coming into view, you couldn’t have picked a better enemy to the genre than Frank Sinatra.
While anyone that thought Chuck Berry and Little Richatrd were nothing but noise could have come off as horribly out-of-touch, but when listening to how suave ‘Ol Blue Eyes’ could be whenever he opened his mouth, there’s no way to really question him when he talked about how much he hated what the genre stood for. That’s not what pop music was intended to be in his mind, but all he really needed was the right artist to change his mind when he dug a little bit deeper.
Then again, it’s easy to see what he would have had a problem with if you look at where he was coming from. He wanted to have pop music be taken seriously as an art form, and when a lot of the biggest names in music were making songs that sounded like a non-stop party every single time they played, it was practically spitting in the face of the kind of music that he wanted to make. These were heathens in his mind, but all they needed was the right push to go in the right direction.
After all, Sinatra managed to get swayed by what The Beatles did in their prime. The moptop era may have been a bit too juvenile for him, and while he did end up rejecting a song by Paul McCartney in the early 1970s, he had no problem calling ‘Something’ one of the greatest love songs ever written. But even if a song was brilliantly written, the whole point was how the musician delivered every single word.
‘My Way’ would have gone over terribly if the wrong person was holding it, but when Sinatra sang it both times, he brought depth to every single line. He was able to boastfully close the door on one era of his career the first time that he played, but when he was ready to sing his final notes in the 1990s, hearing him in his older age sing those lyrics almost came off as an apology to those he stepped on along the way.
So when rock and roll started to turn towards easy listening, it would have been easy for Sinatra to write off Elvis Presley when he started singing tunes like ‘My Way’. He was the fixture of everything that was wrong with American music when he first came out, but by the time he had passed, Sinatra was able to look past all of his hangups and see the real musician behind all of those records.
For as much as he didn’t care for rock and roll, Sinatra would have been a fool to say Presley was anything less than a legend, saying, “I’m just a singer. Elvis was the embodiment of the whole American culture. Life just wouldn’t have been the same without him. There have been many accolades uttered about Elvis’s talent and performances through the years, all of which I wholeheartedly agree with.”
It was a long time coming, but there’s a good chance that no one could have argued with the kind of passion that Presley sang with. Him shaking his ass may have been a little too risque for people to take back when he was singing ‘Hound Dog’, but even when he was playing the more kitschy tunes in the final years of his life, there’s no one who can look at him singing ‘An American Trilogy’ and claim that he wasn’t one of the greatest singers to ever walk the Earth.
Because as much as someone like Sinatra can focus on proper diction, posture, and whatever else goes into making a great pop song, there’s no way to fake the kind of passion that Presley had. This was the kind of musician that put his all into everything that he played, and he wasn’t going to let any physical limitation get in the way of him making the best music that he knew how to make.
