DB's Song of the Day (day 345): "STORMY WEATHER" (1959) Frank Sinatra

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.

DB's Song of the Day (day 218): "SUMMER WIND" (1966) Frank Sinatra

Today is me mum’s birthday. She would’ve been 86. In thinking what song to pay tribute with, I felt it could only be Frankie. That may be a very obvious choice, like picking The Beatles for someone born in the Forties, since it’s almost a given that the person would know and like something by such popular artists. In my mom’s case, though, I’m referencing her knowledge and opinions of all the singers who sang with Tommy Dorsey, probably her favorite Big Band leader. And Sinatra was the one who got his start there and went on to household name status. She was always aware of him and his career as it developed.

In picking which song by Sinatra, I had to go by my own lights. I’m not sure which song of his she liked best. I know she preferred the Sinatra of those early years on Columbia, and even earlier when he was performing on the radio with Dorsey. Sinatra became Dorsey’s main singer in 1939, when my mom turned 11, and so she was prime age to be a bobby-soxer, or teenage fan of Sinatra, through the Forties. When I finally got around to taking an interest in Sinatra, it was the Capitol albums, in the Fifties and early Sixties that I wanted to hear. But for Sinatra purists like my mom, he’d already “lost” his voice by then. Frankly, the stuff from the Forties is the best sleeping potion I know. Don’t put any of it on while driving or operating heavy machinery.

My song for today, though, dates from the Sixties, when my mom was in her 30s, but we had the song on Frank Sinatra’s Greatest Hits (1969)—by then he was on Reprise and had just made a big comeback with Strangers in the Night (1966)—and she was in her early 40s by then.  I suppose that’s the age of one’s parents that most of us remember best—well, at least kids who date from the time when parents didn’t wait until 30 to have kids. So the first Sinatra I knew was this album—because whatever Columbia stuff was around the house was on 78s and they were stored away as too easily broken in a house full of kids.

For me, “Summer Wind” is a song from that magical era when you can be entirely obtuse about “sex appeal” while at the same time having to admit that “girls are different” in an interesting way. So I was about the same age—11—my mom was when Sinatra joined Dorsey. In the interests of how time changes things, the Sinatra I was hearing was nothing like the Sinatra she heard in the Forties, so in her mind there was all that water under the bridge. From being on the cusp of teens to—starting her 40s—playing the album while busy in the kitchen and me sitting in the living room and realizing I really liked this song. I think she was pleased I liked it, but it just couldn’t compare with her version of Sinatra (“he strains too much now”). Fair enough. I liked better this aging, gruffer guy. Mainly, though, I loved Nelson Riddle’s arrangement—the intro is so seductive—and the way Sinatra, the master of phrasing, rides along and works those lyrics.

It was one of those days of spring hedging toward summer—school wasn’t out yet, but almost. Windows open, bare feet, breezes. All summer long [bmmdmm] we sang a song [bmmdmm] and then we strolled that golden sand [fun fill] / Two sweethearts and / The summer wind. Johnny Mercer, whose work will be showing up here a few more times before we’re done, wrote the lyrics. I liked the way the summer wind was personified. It’s a song about a summer romance that fades, but the speaker’s feelings find their “objective correlative” (thanks, TSE) in the summer wind. So that the big finish really makes you feel that the guy is bedeviled by that goddamned wind: The autumn wind / And the winter winds / They have come and gone / And still the days / Those lonely days / They go on and on [and I love the way Frankie hits “on and on”] / And guess who sighs / His lullabies / On nights that ne-ver end [hear how Frankie treats “sighs HIS lullaBIES”] / My [-] fickle friend / The summer wind–and the way he drops down on “mmmm the summer winnnnd” at the close kills me. Consummate.

But let’s not forget the part that precedes the loss, the real “pinnacle of summer” bit: Like painted kites / Those days and nights / They went FLYing by [nice rhymes and rhythms but nothing unusual] / The world was new / Beneath a blue / Umbrella sky [the way he holds “blue-eh-UM-brel-la-sky” and makes each syllable count is the whole deal, is the best of it, drawing out the peak, before “I lost you, I lost you to the summer wind.”

Again, that devilish wind, and not some other love, is the culprit. It’s a song about being made sport of by elemental pressures, by the seasons themselves. Of course I loved it.

One day, it called to you