Here’s the last song from the 1950s in this series. And it’s
to mark the birthday of Francis Albert Sinatra, born this day in 1915. Sinatra,
as I’ve said, was a main musical figure for my parents but, other than a few
tracks I really liked on Frank Sinatra’s
Greatest Hits (1969), released on Reprise, I didn’t pay much attention to
Ol’ Blue Eyes till much later. After the dude was dead, in fact (he died in
1998).
Which may be a way of saying that Sinatra, as a person, was
just a bit too much to get into in the Seventies and Eighties. But it’s also a
way of saying that I had to hit 40 myself before I had ears for his music.
And the stuff of his I gravitated toward were the Capitol albums, including one
of my faves, No One Cares (how could
I resist a title like that?). And on that album, which was released in the year
of my birth, we find a track of Sinatra’s that I actually got to like a lot c.
1982 when it showed up by chance on a tape my Philly friend Harvey laid on me. “Stormy Weather” is classic Sinatra to me—and the song dates originally from 1933, the
childhood of my parents.
Today’s version of “Stormy Weather” graced a playlist of
songs I made after my mom passed away in January of 2011. I needed some Sinatra
on there because he was her favorite, and this song became sort of the mantra
of that time of mourning. “Don’t know why / There’s no sun up in the sky / Stormy weather / Since my gal and I ain’t
together / Keeps raining all the time.”
And even more: “Life is bare / Gloom and misery everywhere /
Stormy weather / Just can’t get my poor old self together / Keeps raining all
the time.” That was the feeling, and this was the song. And Sinatra supposedly
referred to the album as a collection of suicide songs. Fair enough: “Can’t go
on / Everything I had is gone,” but the song, with Gordon Jenkins’ arrangement,
is so darkly beautiful, a little polished nugget of obsidian. And that bit
about “If she stays away / That old rocking chair’s bound to get me.” What can
I say? My mom loved rocking chairs and the chair itself is a figure for a brooding
sojourn, lost to thought, unreachable.
So what is it about a song that it can be both a consolation
and a provocation? And Sinatra’s voice is warm, but also deeper than it often
is, sounding slowed down and leaden. It conveyed loss so well—and with that
big, full voice prayer to “walk in that sun once more” that, for me in 2011,
had nothing to do with recovering some changed love object, but everything to
do with reclaiming one’s sense of possibility. When one’s parents are gone, the
buffer between your generation and the end is gone, and that becomes
surprisingly clear.
There’s almost a tidal sense to the strings in the song at
certain points, feeling like an elemental tug—not just the “eternal note of
sadness” that Matthew Arnold hears on Dover Beach, but a tug of the heartstrings
themselves as they feel the ebbing of the tide. It’s going out and taking
another spirit with it.
When she went away /
The blues walked in and they met me. Recalling that meeting might not be
the most fitting way of paying tribute to Sinatra’s memory, but it is for me.
If I wanted to be truer to Sinatra, the man, and to my mother’s sense of him, I’d
go with “My Way” (1969) which was one of his latter day songs that she loved as
capturing her sense of Sinatra as larger than life and a one of a kind talent.
Yet that seems so overdetermined, so much a part of Sinatra lore. “Stormy
Weather” is delivered in such a ripe and fulsome fashion and makes me
appreciate what the arrangers on the Capitol albums wrought. That was the
height of Sinatra, to me, marking the world I was born into.
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