Word: dorsey
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Bandleader Harry James heard Frank sing, and took him on as a featured vocalist. Six months later the great Tommy Dorsey himself bought Frank away from Harry at the princely price of $110 a week. Two years with the Dorsey band smoothed a lot of rough edges off the kid from Hoboken, and raised at the same time some alarmingly sensual yet sensationally effective bumps on his singing style...
Whatever the sound was, it was most consciously contrived. From Bing, of course, Frank borrowed the intense care for the lyrics, and a few of those bathtub sonorities the microphone takes so well. From Tommy Dorsey's trombone he learned to bend and smear his notes a little, and to slush-pump his rhythms in the long dull level places. From Billie Holliday he caught the trick of scooping his attacks, braking the orchestra, and of working the "hot acciaccatura"-the "N'awlins" grace note that most white singers flub...
...them, and suddenly large numbers of young girls began to believe Sinatra. They began to make little ecstatic moans when Frankie sang. The boys in the band laughed, and moaned right back, but Frankie took it all in ferocious earnest. He knew his hour had struck, and he asked Dorsey for a release of contract. Tommy refused, but in the end, in return for a fat piece of Frankie's future, let him go, and Frank was booked into the Paramount...
Married. Elizabeth Bradley Beukema. 30, only daughter of General of the Army Omar Bradley; and Benjamin Henry Dorsey Jr., 31, Washington lawyer; she for the second time (her first: Air Force Major Henry Shaw Beukema, who was killed in a jet crash last year), he for the first; in Washington...
Stage Show (Sat. 8 p.m., CBS). Dorsey brothers, Johnny Ray, Jackie Miles...