Excuse me, Bee-Dubya-El... I was thinking about Bruce, reading your posting. My synapse was napping.

Frank Sinatra: This one's for Kendall.

The thing that Frankie boy gave me earlier in his career before he became a charicature of himself, was his phrasing and playfulness with words. Words are to be savored, not merely sung. Frank could find wonderful rhythms in the way that he phrased that could take an old famliar line and make it sound brand new. While I don't sing like him, and reached a point where I couldn't listen to him anymore, his love of the rhythm of words became part of me as a singer. And as a songwriter. Say the line "And over by the cotton mill the catfish bite." There is a rhythm in that line that wouldn't be there if it was "you can catch catfish over by the cotton mill." Now, even that second line has a naturral rhythm to it, but it is a different rhythm and wouldn't fit the song.

The other thing that Frankie had was an impeccable pronunciation, while still sounding reasonably natural and unaffected. It's important to me to be able to hear and understands the words to a song when I'm listening to it. Even when a singer is playful with the words, I still want to understand them.

Unless of course it's Sam The Sham singing Woolie Bully.

Jerry