Observers without number, noting the contrast between Sinatra’s life-always tempestuous and sometimes violent-and his tender, evocative, and sensitive singing, have wondered with the novelist Barbara Grizzuti Harrison “whether his life springs from one set of impulses and needs and his work from another, whether. . . No one could sing of loneliness better than Frank Sinatra- unrequited love, love gone wrong, love lost. But could anything be less easy, more unsettling than hearing Sinatra sing “One for My Baby” or “When Your Lover Has Gone,” music that he called “saloon songs” and that critics described as “suicide music”? In these songs and in many others like them, Sinatra sang about life at the bottom of the abyss. Parents or grandparents listened to when they were young, before the advent of rock, was easy on the ears. The assumption seems to be that anything your They are in the rack called “Easy Listening,” just east of Henry Mancini and just west of the Fred Waring Singers. The other, less obvious surprise that awaits the Sinatra hunter in a music store is where his records are kept. And unlike Elvis, unlike Hendrix, unlike Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain, Sinatra was not young when he died: he was 82 years old. But, even so, this is 1999, a good year after his death. To be sure, Sinatra was a prolific and commercially successful musician who had hit records in each of seven consecutive decades, beginning with the 1930’s. Web sites are a bit more eclectic, but even so it’s a bit startling to enter “frank sinatra” into the “Search” box at, say, and learn that 256 musical items are available for purchase, along with 117 books and 144 videos. Music stores are not museums-they stock what sells. The obvious surprise is how many bins of Sinatra compact discs and audiocassettes you will find. Enter any music store and ask for the Frank Sinatra section and you can expect two surprises, one obvious, the other less so.
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