King of the Swingers: Frank Sinatra's Singing Sounds Perfectly Effortless-But Three Biographies Reveal the Hard Work and Ingenuity Behind His Everyman Image

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Frank Sinatra was the first singer who sounded like you. Bing Crosby can have you kidding yourself you can sing just as well, but that doesn't mean he sounds like you. Whether caroling of "Blue Skies" or of "Blues in the Night", Crosby was an old-fashioned entertainer who thought it his duty to come across as contented--as if singing was of itself sufficient to bring about moral equilibrium. Not so Sinatra. Put on one of his great albums--anything he recorded between 1953 and 1966 will do, as the academics and musicians who've contributed learned but lucid essays to Jeanne Fuchs and Ruth Prigozy's Frank Sinatra: the Man, the Music, the Legend pretty much agree--and it's like listening to your own heart implode.

Whisking a wounded world-weariness into Crosby's emulsive, eggs-over-easy style, Sinatra did for singing what Marlon Brando was simultaneously doing for acting--he showed us how close it was to derangement. While even his most upbeat numbers make love feel like lunacy, his downbeat numbers make lunacy feel like life. "If the song is a lament at the loss of love," Terry O'Neill recalls Sinatra saying in his photographic memoir Sinatra: Frank and Friendly, "I get an ache …