Tony Bennett (August 3, 1926 – July 21, 2023), was an American jazz and traditional pop singer. He received many accolades, including 20 Grammy Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award, and two Primetime Emmy Awards. Bennett was named an NEA Jazz Master and a Kennedy Center Honoree and founded the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Astoria, Queens, New York. He sold more than 50 million records worldwide and earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Born Anthony Dominick Benedetto in the Astoria district of Queens, New York, he was the son of John, a grocer from southern Italy, and Anna (nee Suraci), a seamstress. His father died when Bennett was 10 and Anna worked all hours to support her three children. Watching her struggle, Bennett made up his mind to be successful enough for his mother’s trials to end. His Uncle Dick, a tap dancer, provided an early glimpse of showbusiness,. As a teenager he became a singing waiter, earning money for the family before enrolling to study music and painting at New York’s School of Industrial Art in Manhattan.
Bennett was drafted into the US army in 1944 to fight in France and Germany during the final year of the second world war. But he continued to sing while in Germany as part of the occupying force, and in 1949, after returning home, his singing career could begin properly, first under the name Joe Bari and then as Tony Bennett. His breakthrough came in 1951 with his first No 1, Because of You. The hits continued throughout the decade with songs such as Blue Velvet, Rags to Riches and material that looked towards the swinging sound of his childhood hero Frank Sinatra. Bennett became a teen idol, and when he married his first wife, Patricia Beech, in 1952, 2,000 female fans dressed in black to “mourn” the event outside the New York ceremony.
In 1962 he reached superstar status thanks to his version of the 1953 song I Left My Heart in San Francisco. The song won Bennett two Grammy awards and became a 20th-century pop standard.Bennett’s style, however, was already looking outdated as the British invasion swept the US charts, and he struggled for relevance during the 1960s. The following decade saw him face a number of personal problems, including the end of his second marriage and serious drug addiction. Yet two albums recorded with pianist Bill Evans would be key to his later re-emergence as a central figure in US music.
The turning point in his life came when Bennett hired his son Danny to be his manager. Ditching the Las Vegas circuit for New York and reuniting with his early 60s pianist and musical director Ralph Sharon proved to be masterstrokes. His 1986 comeback album, The Art of Excellence, was a hit from which he never looked back. Perfectly Frank (1992) – a tribute to his idol Sinatra – topped the US Billboard’s jazz charts, while 1994’s MTV Unplugged saw Bennett win a Grammy for album of the year. Bennett became a fixture on the late-night TV circuit and collaborated with a host of artists such as kd lang, Amy Winehouse, Queen Latifah and Diana Krall, which helped maintain his relevance with younger artists. His 2006 album, Duets: An American Classic, featured appearances from Paul McCartney, Elton John and George Michael.
His autobiography, published in 1998, was entitled The Good Life – Bennett knew only too well how ambiguous a notion that could be, having narrowly survived a cocaine overdose and fought off bankruptcy during his troubled middle years. He raised millions of dollars for charities and publicly associated himself with liberal causes. In an interview with the singer in 2002, Simon Hattenstone wrote in the Guardian that Bennett had “done all the classic showbiz stuff, snorted coke with the best of ’em, made out with the younger women, broken bread with the mafia – and somehow come out with his innocence, his idealism, intact”.
Singing was not Bennett’s only artistic pursuit. His paintings, produced under his birth name, are on display at the Smithsonian Institution and the Butler Institute of American Art. In 2001, he founded the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Queens, New York which offers qualifications in fine art, dance, vocal and instrumental music, drama and film. A lifelong Democrat, Bennett was also a supporter of the civil rights movement who participated in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches and refused to perform in apartheid-era South Africa.
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The sincerity of his singing melted the hearts of generations: ‘The trick is to survive success,’ he said. ‘Anyone can survive failure’
(Edited from The Guardian & Wikipedia)