“FOR THE FIRST YEARS of his solo career, the early 1940s,
Sinatra hadn’t recorded any material. There had been a strike called by the
Musicians Union fighting for residual payments for recordings played on the
radio. The strike lasted two years. Sinatra said, ‘I didn’t want to cross the
lines.’
“The strike settled, he now recorded Saturday Night is the
Loneliest Night of the Week, I’ll be Seeing You, When Your Lover Has Gone,
These Foolish Things…
“The jazz magazine Downbeat wrote, ‘He said for the boys
what they wanted to say. He said for the girls what they wanted to hear.’
“It was in the midst of this success that Sinatra decided
openly to back Roosevelt and the Democrats in the 1944 Presidential election
and to throw himself into the struggle against racism.
“Sinatra joined the Political Action Committee set up by
the left-wing union federation, the Congress of Industrial Organisations, the
CIO. The CIO was in a way the successor to the old Industrial Workers of the
World, the Wobblies, who so influenced the revolutionary Red Federation of NZ
in the early years of the 20th century.
“He gave money to the Roosevelt campaign, spoke at huge
open-air rallies and broadcast pro-Roosevelt messages on the radio.
“The night Roosevelt won a fourth-term presidency, Sinatra
and Orson Welles toured the bars of Manhattan and ended up celebrating at the
headquarters of the clothing workers’ union, which shared the same building as
the Communist Party…”
Today Sinatra is remembered as an
entertainer who sided with Republican politicians like Nixon and Reagan, hung
out with mobsters and swaggered about Las Vegas with his cronies singing, “I
did it my way…”
But there was another side to
Sinatra, an early radical Frank. At the
height of his popularity, in the 1940s, he was branded a Red, a commo—ol’ pinko
eyes.
He was one of the first major
stars of the era to stand shoulder to shoulder with the poor and the oppressed.
Asked by a reporter in 1946 what he considered the biggest problem America
faced in its post-war world he replied, “Poverty… Every kid in the world should
have his quart of milk a day.” The great bandleader Duke Ellington remembered
Sinatra in the 1940s as being the leader of the campaign against race hatred.
All of this, and all Sinatra’s
great songs, will be remembered at Bloomsday Productions’ December show at the
Thirsty Dog on Karangahape Road, Saturday night, December 12—the very day
Sinatra was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, one hundred years ago in 1915.
A century later to the day, Linn
Lorkin, Justin Horn, Hershal Herscher, Dave Powell and Stuart Grimshaw—the Auckland
Frank Sinatra Big Band—will be celebrating Sinatra: “You Make Me Feel So
Young”… “Old Devil Moon” … “One For My Baby, And One More For The Road” … and the Popular Front, the United Auto
Workers’ sit-down strike in Michigan, the Westfield Freezing Workers’ stay-in
strike in south Auckland…
Frank Sinatra, born Dec. 12, 1915,
nine-time Grammy winner, died in 1998 at the age of 82.
Remembered by Linn
Lorkin & Friends
Thirsty Dog, K Rd, Auckland.
TONIGHT, December 12th 2015, 8pm.
This posting is exclusive to Bowalley Road.
