On Sinatra's Singing Style

While coming across the following passage in
Broadway Babies Say Goodnight  , I discovered another reason why I like Sinatra's singing style.

The author mentions the blue-eyed one in his discussion of Broadway's lack of melisma:

Broadway lyricists are not melisma men. They like songs to follow the cadences of speech, a note per syllable and long notes for important syllables. This is a good rule: in Sinatra’s almost 60-year recording career, he’s given melismas the bum’s rush, won’t go near ‘em, thinks they’re cheap and phoney. Today, in pop songs, with Barry White and Mariah Carey and a zillion others, we’re awash in melismas: is ‘love’ a more emotional word for being stretched out to ‘lu-u-u-u-u-u-urve’? This is fake soulfulness.

So that's why I get a little annoyed with the hooting, hollering, bellowing and groaning in some ballads. It totally takes you out of the moment and you're just listening to verbal gymnastics.  Sinatra sings a straight forward rendition of "Blue Skies" with the Dorsey band below. It's my favorite cover of the song. Yes, the band belts out a great deal of virtuosity (which I enjoy), but Sinatra's singing is beautifully unembellished.

As much as he largely avoided stretching a syllable too long, Sinatra was not above making up a lyric now and then, especially as he ... Aged? Became famous? Got bored?

In one version of Irving Berlin's "Cheek to Cheek," Sinatra turns this:

Oh, I'd love to climb a mountain

Or to reach the highest peak

But it doesn't thrill me half as much

As dancing cheek to cheek

into

But it doesn't boot me half as much

as dancing cheek to cheek

It's a little more in the vernacular, a bit more violent, like he just got kicked down by love - which is the opposite of the soaring rhetoric about heights in the previous lyrics. But it's so Sinatra - straight and to the point.

Or what about in "Goody, Goody," a breakup song where the singer is delighted that the ex has gotten the axe from the new lover? Instead of

And I hope you're satisfied

You rascal you

Sinatra sings

And I hope you're satisfied

'Cause you got yours

It's a little coarser, a little meaner, but it works. And it's so Sinatra.