Swing it, Frank!

I’m not exactly sure how all this happened. I began like everyone else my age, listening to the Beatles, and like every other Beatle-crazed kid in the sixties, worshipped them as the demi-gods they seemed to be. That may be hard for some of you to understand, but, well…you had to be there.

But there was a time before the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, a time when I still wore my jeans turned up at the cuffs and Ked’s high-topped white sneakers, when I listened to a different type of music.

My mother had been a disk jockey, and some of my earliest memories are of her singing along with the crooners of the day – Tony Bennett (her life-long favorite), Dean Martin, Englebert Humperdinck (yup, that was his real name; you can look it up), Sammy Davis Jr. and Louie Armstrong. And then there was Frank Sinatra.

Sinatra wasn’t a headliner in our house, but I certainly knew who he was; not knowing Sinatra was like not knowing the name of the president. Enter the Beatles; this would be around 1964. I was nine. And from that point forward I wouldn’t listen to Sinatra or any other of my mother’s favorite singers for 45 years. Not a song.

Then, in a twist that even I think is pure serendipity, I fell in love with ballroom dancing. Swing music – the wonderful, heavy on the back beat, lilting American-songbook tunes that make it almost impossible not to tap your feet, are a big part of my favorite ballroom dance, the foxtrot. 

So I started listening to Sinatra again. It wasn’t like I had much choice; that’s half of what they played at the dances I was attending. And soon, much sooner than I would have anticipated, I came full circle, back to where I’d been when some of us kids listened to the World Series on transistor radios. When my mother loved Tony Bennett.

She knew good music when she heard it. That’s a talent I like to think I inherited from her. So I listen to Sinatra, in thrall to his voice, and sometimes I dance. But mostly, I just listen.