Frank Sinatra as mother?

I've been going through a a bunch of passages I cut from my book, Beethovens's Anvil, for one reason or another. This one is about Frank Sinatra's singing style. I'm not quite sure where this dyadic analysis comes from; that is, I don't know what line of thought I was following. It's interesting. If I were to open this up for further thought, would I retain it, or abandon it? I do not know.

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Here I'm going to pull a rabbit out of the hat. Obviously the relationship between Sinatra and his back-up is dyadic and so is his relationship to the audience -- in general, we've got a dyadic situation where the audience listens passively. But I think he's exploiting a very special dyadic relationship, that between mother and infant. He's the mother and the audience is the infant. His almost compulsive hypermasculinity is a defense the female nature of his role.

Now, why you might ask, would I suggest such a crazy thing? Sinatra's fans are forever talking about the intimacy of his singing, of how he is singing just to them. That's what I'm after.

I know about his careful diction, I know about his breath control and what that means for his phrasing. I also know about the informal, almost conversational style, of his delivery. And I know and understand about his microphone technique. But none of this quite seems to fix it.

Now, I don't know whether his magic includes something entirely of his own invention, or whether he's just perfecting something he learned from Bing Crosby, Mabel Mercer, Louis Armstrong, and others – I simply don't know that music well enough to make a judgment. But if Sinatra really did invent something, I'd say it was figuring out how to package all this within the maternal half of the mother/child dyad.

Why that particular dyad? Mostly just a guess. The obvious alternative would be the mating dyad, given that so much of his repertoire is about love. But that's just the stance he assumes within the performance situation. What I'm claiming is that the performance situation itself is governed by the mother/child dyad. Within that dyad Sinatra can assume whatever pose is needed to project the lyric – just as mothers do when singing to/with their children.

And note, in particular, that Sinatra's speciality, his beloved saloon songs, is lost love, grief. He's a mother easing his child to sleep, to a complete loss of the world.

If this take on Sinatra is more or less correct, then I've got a sort of poetic closure. For the book opens with Bette Midler singing one of Sinatra's beloved saloon songs to Johnny Carson on his penultime night on TV.