Songs Frank Sinatra “originated”?

The actual drummer on the film soundtrack was Shelly Manne, I believe.

 

Long before Sgt. Bilko, Phil Silvers was a pal of Sinatra and songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen. The song was originally to be titled “Bessie with the Laughing Face” for the wife of Van Heusen’s lyricist Johnny Burke. Burke was busy that day, so Silvers came up with the lyrics. He then had the idea of giving the song to Sinatra as a gift for his 4-year-old daughter Nancy. “Bessie” became “Nancy,” and the rest is history.

 

Just for fun, I went through the list and picked out a number of what I felt have become the biggest standards, as well as songs particularly associated with Frank. (Your choices may vary, of course.) I was surprised to see that he had introduced some of these.

1. All or Nothing at All – Pop Song, Harry James Orch. (1939)
2. All the Way – Movie: The Joker Is Wild (1957)
3. The Christmas Waltz – Christmas Song (1954)
4. Come Dance with Me – Album: Come Dance with Me! (1959)
5. Come Fly with Me – Album: Come Fly with Me (1958)
6. Day by Day – Pop Song (1946)
7. Daybreak – Pop Song, Tommy Dorsey Orch. (1942)
8. Everybody Loves Somebody – Pop Song (1948)
9. Everything Happens to Me – Pop Song, Tommy Dorsey Orch. (1941)
10. Full Moon and Empty Arms – Pop Song (1945)
11. Hey! Jealous Lover – Pop Song (1956)
12. Homesick—That’s All – Pop Song (1945)
13. (How Little It Matters) How Little We Know – Pop Song (1956)
14. How Old Am I? – Pop Song (1965)
15. I Believe – Movie: It Happened in Brooklyn (1947)
16. I Fall in Love Too Easily – Movie: Anchors Aweigh (1944)
17. I Think of You – Pop Song, Tommy Dorsey Orch. (1941)
18. I’m a Fool to Want You – Pop Song (1951)
19. In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning – Pop Song (1955)
20. It Gets Lonely Early – Pop Song (1965)
21. It’s the Same Old Dream – Movie: It Happened in Brooklyn (1947)
22. Learnin’ the Blues – Pop Song (1955)
23. Let’s Get Away from It All – Pop Song, Tommy Dorsey Orch. (1941)
24. London by Night – Pop Song (1951)
25. A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening – Movie: Higher and Higher (1943)
26. My Kind of Town – Movie: Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964)
27. My One and Only Love – Pop Song (1953)
28. Nancy (with the Laughing Face) – Pop Song (1944)
29. Neiani – Pop Song, Tommy Dorsey Orch. (1941)
30. Nice ‘n’ Easy – Pop Song (1960)
31. The Night We Called It a Day – Pop Song (1942)
32. No One Ever Tells You – Pop Song (1956)
33. Oh! Look at Me Now – Pop Song, Tommy Dorsey Orch. (1941)
34. On a Little Street in Singapore – Pop Song, Harry James Orch. (1939)
35. Only the Lonely – Album: Only the Lonely (1958)
36. Polka Dots and Moonbeams – Pop Song, Tommy Dorsey Orch. (1940)
37. Put Your Dreams Away (for Another Day) – Pop Song (1942)
38. Ring-a-Ding Ding – Album: Ring-a-Ding Ding! (1960)
39. Same Old Saturday Night – Pop Song (1955)
40. Saturday Night (Is the Loneliest Night in the Week) – Pop Song (1944)
41. The September of My Years – Album: September of My Years (1965)
42. Some Other Time – Movie: Step Lively (1944)
43. Something Wonderful Happens in Summer – Pop Song (1957)
44. Take a Chance – Pop Song (1953)
45. Talk to Me – Pop Song (1959)
46. (Love Is) The Tender Trap – Movie: The Tender Trap (1955)
47. There Are Such Things – Pop Song, Tommy Dorsey Orch. (1942)
48. The Things We Did Last Summer – Pop Song (1946)
49. This Love of Mine – Pop Song, Tommy Dorsey Orch. (1941)
50. Three Coins in the Fountain – Movie: Three Coins in the Fountain (1954)
51. Time After Time – Movie: It Happened in Brooklyn (1946)
52. Violets for Your Furs – Pop Song, Tommy Dorsey Orch. (1941)
53. When No One Cares – Album: No One Cares (1959)
54. Where Is the One? – Pop Song (1949)
55. Why Try to Change Me Now? – Pop Song (1952)
56. You’re Sensational – Movie: High Society (1956)
57. Young at Heart – Movie: Young at Heart (1953)

 

Amazing list-

 

Are we referring just to his childhood/adolescence years? ... The stories about receiving an ukulele as a gift from his uncle, and using it once to serenade his date, Nancy, while still in his teens?

I mean: he didn't ever play ukulele in any of his recording sessions, or in concert, right? (Not that I have heard anything of the sort. My mind can't even quite picture it. But, with such a long and well-documented career, there's always stuff out there to discover ...)

Ah. I just came upon a photo of the dangerous weapon. Here it is:





The pic above was taken at the Grammy Museum, on the occasion of Frank's centennial exhibit.

Here we get him next to Shorty Rogers:





Hey, he "played" clarinet, too:





For the record, that fun pic with Benny does not come entirely from the world of an illusion. While The Voice did not truly play clarinet, Benny Goodman did sing (more or less), on record.

Also:

 

Also came across the slide above, right now.

Hmm.

I think that the slide's answer might need some tweaking.

Granted: shots like the next two are from the make-believe world of the movies.




And yes: Frank obviously did not truly play piano in the professional sense of the word. However, I believe that, like other singers of his caliber, he had a rudimentary understanding of the piano, and resorted to it occasionally, to try out a few basic notes and such. No? Yes?

Any corroboration from witness accounts?

 

There's a second category of Frank Sinatra songs which is just as important, if not more important. It needs a thread! Songs Frank Sinatra "Owns"

 

I have a sneaking suspicion he was not the first person to record this. It's one of those tracks that often pops up when people are playing Trivia: "What song was recorded by both Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley and is generally considered to be among the low points of both of their careers?"

 

Frank was the first person to record it with those lyrics, however. It's not a low point in any way...it's a very fine record.

 

Agreed! I love that song. With a wiggle wiggle here...

 

"...little wiggle..."

 

Sorry. It’s 1 A.M. and maybe I was thinking about Dylan...

 

I forgot that was a Dylan song...at first, I thought it was something from that "No Direction Period" spoof.

 

It’s probably best if we all forget “Wiggle Wiggle.”

 

I don't know if I understood this thread correctly, but Frank's version of Somethin' Stupid is a cover.

 

I'm sure he was the last person to record it with those lyrics as well. Thankfully, Elvis was the first and last to record it with these lyrics:

 

Glad that you asked that particular question, Rjp. For a while, I've been curious about Frank's songwriting credits.

Here are his songwriting credits, as given on the Sinatra family forum page to which Bob linked. (I have re-arranged them to reflect a chronological rather than alphabetical order.)

1. "This Love Of Mine" (1941) with Hank Sanicola & Sol Parker
2. "Sheila" (1949) with Robert Staver & Christopher Hayward
3. "Peachtree Street" (1950) with Jimmy Saunders
4. "Take My Love" (1950) with Jack Wolf & Joel Herron
5. "I'm A Fool To Want You" (1951) with Jack Wolf & Joel Herron
6. "Mistletoe And Holly" (1957) with Hank Sanicola & Dok Stanford
7. "Mr. Success" (1958) with Hank Sanicola & Edwin Greines

I did a quick look up of each of these songs, to see what was said (if anything) about Frank writing of them.

I'm coming away with the impression that Frank did not write much of anything.

The list itself is not terribly promising. The first thing I'm noticing is that, in all but one song, there are three people credited. When the number of credited people is just two, you naturally fall into the assumption that there was a close collaborative effort, in which one person might have been responsible for most of the lyrics, the other for most of the melody. With three folk in the mix, your mind starts to wonder who did how much of what.

Another thing that catches the eye is the presence of Hank Sanicola in three of the numbers. Sanicola's close relationship to Sinatra, from the late 1930s to the early 1960s, is well documented. Manager, agent, fixer, business partner .......... Yet another capacity in which Hank served Frank was as a songplugger. The two of them became partners in a music publishing company (Barton Music Corp., which published at least some of these songs). That raises another flag. There are stories out there, from back in the day, pertaining to music publishing companies and bandleaders who forced their names into writing credits, despite having minimal or no involvement at all in the process.





The following excerpt (in italics) is from Tony Consiglio's book Sinatra and Me. A childhood friend, Consiglio served as one of Frank's assistants for many years, too.

In 1940, Frank met Hank Sanicola ... Hank visited him as the Hotel Astor. I was in the room with them. Hank was a hustler "from the world go," and tried to sell Frank on recording a song he wrote called, "This Love of Mine." He told Frank that if he recorded it, he would sell a million records. Frank said he had already sold a million records, and he didn't need Hank to do it, but he read the lyrics and liked the song. Hank had written the song with his partner, Sol Parker.

"Okay. If I record this song, what songwriting credits are going to appear on the record label?"

"Sanicola and Parker," Hank said.

"No. It's going to be Sanicola, Parker, and Sinatra," Frank said.

If you take a look at the names of the composers of "This Love of Mine," you will see Frank's name. Frank had nothing to do with writing the song, but because Frank's name was included as one of the composers, he got a percentage of the royalties. A few other songs that Frank didn't write but got credit for writing were "Sheila," "Peach Tree Street," Take My Love," and "I'm a Fool to Want You," which he recorded in 1951 while he was fighting to hold onto Ava. Frank learned early that being a good businessman was as important as being talented. After all, Frank had worked for Tommy Dorsey, and they didn't come any smarter than Tommy when it came to controlling the flow of money. Frank knew that any song he recorded would bring in a lot of money, and he wanted a share of the royalties.

Hank agreed to add Frank' name to the writing credits because he knew that with Frank singing "This Love of Mine," the song would become a hit. Without Frank, who knows what would have happened to the song. After they worked out a deal to share the royalties, Frank recorded the song and pushed it so it would be successful.

Consiglio goes on to write about the first night on which Frank performed the number, live. It was broadcast on network radio. Since the Skinny One had not had time to learn and rehearse the song, Sanicola wrote the words on big cards. Consiglio held up the cards in front of Frank, as he was singing.

Thanks to the song's success, Sanicola was able to convince Barton Music to accept him as a partner. Sanicola in turn brought Sinatra to the music publishing company, as a third partner.

Consiglio's account about "This Love of Mine" is not the only one out there. Here's the version on the book Sinatra, by Richard Havers:

'This Love of Mine' is one of the very few songs that Frank had a hand in writing. Sol Parker was 21 in 1941 when he took a song he had written to a friend of his who then took it to Frank and Hank Sanicola. "My friend played it on the piano and I sang it," Parker recalled. "And there was a skinny little Italian kid, stroking his chin and listening. When we were done, he said, 'Let's make it more commercial.' After a little tinkering, it became 'This Love of Mine' and earned Parker, from his third share of the royalties, around $300,000 over the years.

There might have been more than just a little tinkering. An account from Will Friedwald gives us more detail, as recalled by Parker himself:

Around 1940, there was a rumor being bruited about that Hemingway's "For Whom The Bell Tolls" was going to be made into a film (eventually released in 1943). At that time, one Sol Peskin was employed as a song plugger for a music publisher who dreamed of being a successful songwriter. After changing his last name to 'Parker,' he started work on a song titled "For Whom The Bell Tolls" thinking that the name would help the song get published or possibly even noticed by a Hollywood studio. "I wrote a forty-eight-bar melody with lyrics, of which all I can remember is, 'I know it's you / For whom the bell tolls," Parker once told me. "I played it for Hank Sanicola and we went up to the Paramount Theatre. Within minutes, Frank was listening to me sing this song. He's rubbing his chin with his two skinny little fingers, and he immediately said, "Let's make it more commercial" ...... I had written a forty-eight-bar song, whereas the average song is only thirty-two bars. So Hank and Frank condensed the music and, two days later, Hank came to me with sixteen bars of lyrics and he said, "This is what we got so far, Solly.' I looked "at the opening line, "This love of mine ..." I said, "This looks like a good title. I'll wind up the song with 'this love of mine' and that'' be it. Basically, half the music was mine and half the lyric was mine, so I assume that Frank and Hank together wrote the other half ...

A comment made by a YouTube poster should also be made part of this discussion:

What a joke, my father wrote this and entered it into a contest run by Tommy Dorsey and Sinatra. My father originally called it, This Love of Ours. Dorsey and Sinatra changed it around enough so it would be hard to make a legal case ...

Not surprisingly, one of Sol Parker's heirs promptly and relentlessly jumped into the YouTube discussion, and was not exactly pleasant about the matter ("... we have been collecting the royalties for 73 years - sorry your dad was an untalented loser - but I am sure you made up for it by achieving an MBA at Harvard. LOL ....")

Being from a YouTube poster, that claim of authorship might hold less weight/credibility than the others I am posting here, but it should not be dismissed outright. It would be interesting to see how much similarity there is between "This Love of Ours" and the parts of "This Love of Mine" supposedly written by Sanicola & Sinatra, whichever they were. (For what is worth: a song called "This Love of Ours," by Edith Semitzer and Harold Friedman, was copyrighted on January 20, 1942.)

But wait. There's more to add to this mosaic!

Yes, we have more "tinkering," and more folks that might deserve credit for the writing of this song.

At some point in the process, Matt Dennis was asked by Frank to check if he could improve on the song. During the early 1940s, the pianist and songwriter (composer of "Angel Eyes, "Violets for Your Furs," "The Night We Called It a Day," etc.) worked for Tommy Dorsey, too, and was thus well acquainted with Frank. Many of Dennis' songs were co-written with Tom Adair.

As reported by Will Friedwald:

"Frank asked me if I wouldn't mind checking out the melody and lyrics," Matt Dennis remembered. "So I got hold of Tom and we sat down and in a couple of hours, we made some minor, minor changes. I remember changing the melody in one strain for two or three measures, and Tom did make some minor alterations to the lyric. Anyhow, Frank liked what we did, and that's how they recorded it ......... I've had people say to me, 'This Love of Mine' sounds like you might have written it.' And all I did was change a little bit of it, as a favor to Tommy and Frank."

Dennis seems to have gone out of his way to describe what he and Tom did as "minor" and "little" ... yet he cant' resist pointing out that people have kept on sensing his (indelible?) mark on the song. Seems like, as he was talking to Friedwald, an angel was whispering in one of Matt's ears, a devil on the other! ...





I also checked (or tried to check) into the history of Frank's other six songwriting credits. Since "This Love of Mine" has taken up far more of my time than planned, I won't go into the other numbers. Suffice it to say that none of what I found suggested to me a man who actively set out to write these songs. At best, he comes off as an incidental contributor. (Moreover, the exact nature of each contribution remains, for the most part, vague.)

I too wanted to thank you for posting this extensive list, and also for giving the author the respect he deserves, by quoting his "caveat." It could very well be that a few of the songs he lists were not introduced by Frank, after all. That won't make much of a difference, though. I think that we can all agree that the bulk of the list is likely to be accurate.

 

outstanding research, outstanding

thank you

 

I imagine that most of us are aware that this is an old nursery rhyme. Some of us probably remember it from our childhood. (Variations of this rhyme seem to have been around since the 1900s. Particular turns of phrase might be a lot older than that.) In the world of popular music, those who have recorded it as a nursery tune include Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole



and Ella Fitzgerald:

Those are the same songwriters who co-wrote "Nice 'n' Easy." The Bergmans also wrote "The Way We Were," "What Are You Doing the Rest of your Life," etc.

Frank's recording was a top 20 Billboard hit, by the way.

All of this as a way of saying that the number has pedigree.

Sorry to disappoint: those lyrics have been performed by Seth MacFarlane and by other modern-day singers who idolize Sinatra. (Okay, okay: those guys didn't record the song. But they have kept on performing the number, and their audiences have continued to cheer.)

I am thankful, too. Had never heard it before, and would rather not ever hear it again.

Count me in. I too think that it is a fine, hip and catchy record.

The Bergman couple poured a lot of playfulness and double entendre into the lyrics.

For their part, the team of Riddle and Sinatra injected the song with plenty of verve and swing.

I'd give the highest honors to Nelson, for bringing class into the equation.

The lyrics could be justifiably criticized on the grounds of sexism. This is very much a song of the Rat-Pack, Mad-Men era ... Lewd, but charmingly so.

We are listening to the story of a traveling salesman who has been spending his trips picking up one chick here and one chick there. But the hustler can't go nowhere any longer. He's about to settle in a country town where he is going gaga over a chick filled with "promenades" and curves everywhere. She's just irresistible. Even the local gentry pop their eyes at she wiggles her way across barn and county. Goodbye world.

 

Very hard to believe...if Frank were one to do something like this, as has been documented with various people in the music business over the years - essentially nothing for a song's writing/composition but push his way onto it - why does Frank have just a handful of writing credits then? If true, he could have done this with a lot more songs, but obviously did not. Perhaps Frank's contribution on this was minimal, and real evidence re exactly what he added on this is possibly lost to passage of time, but it's highly doubtful to me Frank would have not made a change, addition, etc. that was legitimately worth putting his name on it to its main songwriter(s).

 

C. Carson Parks wrote the song and recorded it first with wife Gaile Foote in 1966, but if I’m not mistaken, Frank and Nancy’s 1967 Reprise single was released BEFORE Carson & Gaile’s Kapp album San Antonio Rose. (There are claims to the contrary on the web, but the album was first reviewed in the April 15, 1967 issue of Billboard; the Sinatra single dropped first, in March.)

 

The Kingston Trio - Love’s Been Good To Me



The Kingston Trio (Nick Bob John) - Wikipedia

 

Good catch, and Sinatra’s was certainly not the first, but actually, the song was first released by McKuen himself.



Cover versions of Love's Been Good to Me written by Rod McKuen | SecondHandSongs

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My mistake, sorry. Nice trivia.