Frank Sinatra

Frank Sinatra (1915–1998) is the defining voice of twentieth-century American popular song — 'The Chairman of the Board' and 'Ol' Blue Eyes' — whose recordings for Columbia, Capitol, and his own Reprise Records set the standard for vocal interpretation across six decades. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, Sinatra rose from the big band era to become the first teen idol, then reinvented himself in the 1950s as the supreme architect of the concept album, recording definitive versions of the Great American Songbook with arrangers Nelson Riddle, Billy May, and Gordon Jenkins. He never wrote a single song in his career; every recording, every chart-topping record, and every iconic performance was built on material by professional songwriters including Sammy Cahn, Jimmy Van Heusen, Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers, Johnny Mercer, Harold Arlen, and Irving Berlin. What Sinatra contributed was something harder to quantify than composition: a peerless interpretive intelligence that could inhabit another writer's lyric so completely that the song seemed written for him alone.