Through paper we travel with Frank Sinatra to New York!

As today, December 12 in 1915 in Hoboken, New Jersey a star was born. The name was …Frank Sinatra!

Sinatra was the only child of Italian immigrants Natalie Della (Garaventa) and Antonino Martino Sinatra.

During the Great Depression, his mother Dolly provided money to her son for outings with friends and expensive clothes. In 1938, Sinatra was arrested for carrying on with a married woman, a criminal offense at the time. For his livelihood, he worked as a delivery boy, and later as a riveter at a shipyard, but music was Sinatra’s main interest, and he listened carefully to big band jazz. He began singing for tips at the age of eight, standing on top of the bar at a local nightclub in Hoboken. Sinatra began singing professionally as a teenager in the 193’0s, while he learned music by ear and never went to a music school to learn how to read music.

In May 1941, Sinatra was at the top of the male singer polls in the Billboard and Down Beat magazines. On December 30, 1942, Sinatra made a “fabulous opening” at the Paramount Theater in New York. Jack Benny said, “I thought the goddamned building was going to cave in. I never heard such a commotion… All this for a fellow I never heard of.” When Sinatra returned to the Paramount in October 1944, 35,000 fans caused a protest parade outside the theater because they were not permitted to get in.

And a great career started that is going to last about five decades!

Sinatra had three children, Nancy, Frank Jr., and Tina, all with his first wife, Nancy Sinatra. He was married three more times, to actresses Ava Gardner, Mia Farrow, and finally to Barbara Marx.

Sinatra used to love glamorous surroundings and he appreciated to have people always around!  He acknowledged this, telling in an interviewer in the 1950’s: “Being an 18-karat manic-depressive, and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as elation.” In her memoirs My Father’s Daughter, his daughter Tina wrote about the “18-karat” remark: “As flippant as Dad could be about his mental state, I believe that a Zoloft a day might have kept his demons away. But that kind of medicine was decades off.”

Apart of his personal life no one can forget his big hits as an actor or as a singer.

Autumn in New York, Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!, April in Paris, Three Coins in the Fountain, Someone to Watch Over Me, Love and Marriage, Stardust, Strangers in the Night, Somethin’ Stupid” (with Nancy Sinatra), My Way, Something, Theme from New York, New York, Teach Me Tonight, Mack the Knife …we could write forever…

This is Frank Sinatra, our Frankie!

Some paper ideas from the same date from the past!

KO for eCharta

I Want to Hold Your Hand

November 29, 1963 UK single release: ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’/’This Boy’ by the Beatles!

“I Want to Hold Your Hand” is a song by the English rock band The Beatles. Written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and recorded in October 1963, it was the first Beatles record to be made using four-track equipment.

With advance orders exceeding one million copies in the United Kingdom, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” would ordinarily have gone straight to the top of the British record charts on its day of release (29 November 1963).  But had it was blocked by the group’s first million seller “She Loves You”, previous UK single, which was having a resurgent spell in the top position following intense media coverage of the group.

Taking two weeks to dislodge its predecessor, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” stayed at number one for five weeks and remained in the UK top fifty for twenty-one weeks in total.It was also the group’s first American number one, entering the Billboard Hot 100 chart on 18 January 1964 at number forty-five and starting the British invasion of the American music industry.

By 1 February it held the number one spot — for seven weeks — before being replaced by “She Loves You”, a reverse scenario of what had happened in Britain, and remained in the US charts for a total of fifteen weeks. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” became the Beatles’ best-selling single worldwide.

Some paper ideas from the same date from the past!

KO for eCharta

Bolero by Maurice Ravel

Well, as of today in 1963 the President Kennedy assassinated. We were ready to write for it showing a lot of paper items related with the assassination. But then again we thought: macabre news that everyone will mention today, on Thanksgiving day.   

So we decided to write about music! Write about Joseph-Maurice Ravel the French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects and his Boléro.

Ravel was born in the Basque town of Ciboure, France, near Biarritz, close to the border with Spain, in 1875. His mother, Marie Delouart, was of Basque descent and grew up in Madrid, Spain, while his father, Joseph Ravel, was a Swiss inventor and industrialist from French Haute-Savoie.

1928 Ravel made a four-month concert tour in North America, for a promised minimum of $10,000 (approximately $135,349, if we also make inflation adjustments). Ravel conducted most of the leading orchestras in the U.S. from coast to coast and visited twenty-five cities receiving a standing ovation. New Orleans visit caused him to include some jazz elements in a few of his later compositions.

After returning to France, Ravel composed his most famous and controversial orchestral work Boléro, originally called Fandango. Ravel called it “an experiment in a very special and limited direction”.

In 1928 on 22 November in Paris, “Bolero” by Maurice Ravel was first performed publicly.

It’s amazing the quantity and quality of paper items you can find about music! Small sheets or whole orchestra scores, even rare handwritten ones, photographs, stamps, postcards and so on. Music lovers be prepared: a lot of “music” paper comes to eCharta!

Some paper ideas from the same date from the past!

KO for eCharta