More hits followed, including Rags to Riches and Blue Velvet. Bennett was on the verge of being dropped from the label in 1951 when he had his first No. In 1950, Mitch Miller, the head of Columbia Records' pop singles division, signed Bennett and released the single, The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, a semi-hit. His earliest recording is a 1946 air check from Armed Forces Radio of the blues song St. The teenager got a job as a copy boy for the Associated Press, performed as a singing waiter and competed in amateur shows.Ī combat infantryman during the Second World War, he served as a librarian for the Armed Forces Network after the war and sang with an army big band in occupied Germany. He studied commercial art in high school, but had to drop out to help support his family. "I saw her working and every once in a while she'd take a dress and throw it over her shoulder and she'd say, 'Don't have me work on a bad dress. "We were very impoverished," Bennett said in a 2016 AP interview. Bennett credited his mother, Anna, with teaching him a valuable lesson as he watched her working at home, supporting her three children as a seamstress doing piecework after his father died.īennett celebrates with the crowd after his statue was unveiled outside the Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill in San Francisco on Aug. His father was an Italian immigrant who inspired his love of singing, but he died when Anthony was 10. The school is not far from the birthplace of the man who was once Anthony Dominick Benedetto. The singer chose his old neighbourhood as the site for the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, that he and his third wife, Susan Crow Benedetto, a former teacher, helped found in 2001. Long associated with San Francisco, Bennett would note that his true home was Astoria, the working-class community in the New York City borough of Queens, where he grew up during the Great Depression. "I was gonna tell her to slow down because I had a drug problem when I was younger and I stopped doing it and it changed my life for the better," he told The Hour. He lamented not being able to help Winehouse, whose drug-related death occurred just a few weeks before they were slated to play a London concert in 2011. You get to love the people who treat you well and you love them right back."īennett had periods of struggle, suffering a near-fatal cocaine overdose in the late 1970s. "Since 1960, I've played from Vancouver to Montreal, every city in Canada, through the years. While a quintessential American performer, he spoke glowingly of his long relationship with Canadian audiences while speaking to CBC's The Hour in 2012. (Rich Fury/Getty Images for The Recording Academy) Years earlier, Bennett and lang played a series of tour dates in support of their 2002 album, A Wonderful World.īennett and Diana Krall are shown at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles on Feb. In 2018, he embarked on the Love Is Here To Stay album with Krall of Nanaimo, B.C. Those songs will never die." Canadian collaborators "Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern. "No country has given the world such great music," Bennett said in a 2015 interview with Downbeat Magazine. Three years earlier, he topped the charts with Duets II, featuring such contemporary stars as Gaga, Carrie Underwood and Winehouse, in her last studio recording.įor Bennett, one of the few performers to move easily between pop and jazz, such collaborations were part of his crusade to expose new audiences to what he called the Great American Songbook. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart for Cheek to Cheek, his duets project with Lady Gaga. In 2014, at age 88, Bennett broke his own record as the oldest living performer with a No. Duration 17:42 The man Frank Sinatra called "the best singer in the business" talks about his career with the CBC's Peter Gzowski in 1977.
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