Frank Sinatra (December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998) was an American singer, actor, director, and producer. After considerable recording success, Sinatra founded his own record label, Reprise Records in 1961, toured internationally, was a founding member of the Rat Pack, and fraternized with celebrities and statesmen, including John F. Kennedy. Sinatra also forged a highly successful career as a film actor, winning Best Supporting Actor in 1953 and garnering a nomination for Best Actor for The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). Sinatra is one of the best-selling artists of all time, having sold more than 150 million records worldwide. He was honored at the Kennedy Center Honors in 1983 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan in 1985 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1997. (More from Wikipedia)
The impact of this one Elvis recording can hardly be overstated. “Heartbreak Hotel” was one of the biggest influences on John Lennon that inexorably led to the formation of the Beatles. In a quote given in Wikipedia, John Lennon speaks of his feelings about the song: “When I first heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, I could hardly make out what was being said. It was just the experience of hearing it and having my hair stand on end. We’d never heard American voices singing like that. They always sung like [Frank] Sinatra or enunciate very well. Suddenly, there’s this hillbilly hiccuping on tape echo and all this bluesy stuff going on. And we didn’t know what Elvis was singing about. . . . It took us a long time to work out what was going on. To us, it just sounded like a noise that was great.”
(June 2013/1)
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Bill Cosby – who, due to having the same name as the famous comedian Bill Cosby, began to go by the name Casey Cosby – was fortunate to have acquired an accordion complete with eight weeks of lessons from a traveling salesman. He jumped at the chance to become a musician and eventually became one of the leading accordionists in the nation, recording four albums of classical accordion music. He won the U.S. accordion championship five years in a row and also was judged best at his instrument in a 1967 competition at UCLA that was sponsored by Frank Sinatra.
(October 2013)
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Glen Campbell quickly became highly sought after as a guitarist and played for a wide variety of artists in the 1960’s; Wikipedia lists recordings by Bobby Darin, Rick Nelson, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, the Monkees, Nancy Sinatra, Merle Haggard, Jan & Dean, Elvis Presley, and Frank Sinatra.
(February 2015)
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