What a life!

Tony Bennett sure had a good run. He was 96, a couple of weeks short of his 97th birthday.

Still, although he'd had a good run, and although - beyond owning a couple of CD's and always enjoying whatever he was singing, whenever I heard him singing it - I wasn't a huge fan, I felt saddened when I learned of his death late last week. 

What a life he led. 

First - foremost - he was an extraordinary singer. 

His specialty was performing classics from the Great American Songbook. Sometimes he put those classics into the Great American Songbook, as in "I Left My Heart in San Francisco."

Of course I loved that one. Who doesn't?

But my personal faves were "The Way You Look Tonight" and "Fly Me to the Moon," with a slight nod to "Fly Me."

What a voice. It wasn't as grand and glorious as Crosby's or Sinatra's, but what a way to put a song across. Many of the critics say that when Tony Bennett sang, listeners felt that he was singing to them. Yep.

Most simply, perhaps, the composer and critic Alec Wilder said about Mr. Bennett’s voice, “There is a quality about it that lets you in.”

Indeed, what many listeners (including the critics) discovered about Mr. Bennett, and what they responded to, was something intangible: the care with which he treated both the song and the audience. (Source: NY Times obituary)

Music aside - and that's a pretty big aside - what a life the man lived.

He was born Anthony Dominick Benedetto into a working class Italian immigrant family in Queens in 1926. The family was poor, and things got worse when his father died when he was just 10. He sang from the time he was a kid, and got to sing, in 1936, at the opening of the Triborough Bridge.

Anthony Benedetto dropped out of high school and worked, among other less-than-glamorous jobs, as a singing waiter. There was a war on, of course, and, still a kid, he was drafted into the Army, arriving in Europe as the war was winding down. He was a frontline infantry man and helped liberate prisoners from a subcamp of Dachau. (He said later that anyone who romanticized war hadn't gone through one.)

After the war, he started building his career as a singer, lost to Rosemary Clooney on Arthur Godfrey's show Talent Scouts, got on a bill with Pearl Bailey, was sort of discovered by Bob Hope, who got him to change his name to Tony Bennett. 

Tony Bennett's career pretty much took off from their.

In the 1960's, there was a wobbly period. Listeners weren't interested in listening to the likes of Tony Bennett. He started using drugs. Got in trouble with the IRS. There were plenty of personal ups and downs. 

But it wasn't all music, and personal ups and downs.

Bennett, appalled by the way that Black entertainers like Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole were treated - not allowed in restaurants and hotels in the Jim Crow South - participated in the 1965 march from Montgomery to Selma led by Martin Luther King, Jr. 

He was also a pretty fair painter. I wouldn't mind owning a Benedetto.

(His philanthropy was focused on young people and the arts.)

As Bennett got up there in years, he kept himself young and his career going by performing duets with younger singers. Some, like Barbra Streisand and Willie Nelson weren't all that much younger. But he also sang with Elvis Costello, K.D. Lang, Queen Latifah, and Amy Winehouse.

And, most famously, with Lady Gaga. If you ever get a chance to see a rerun their Radio City Music Hall concert from August 3, 2021 - Bennett's 95th birthday - WATCH it. Just brilliant. And so very touching. 

Especially given that, in 2016, Bennett was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. He kept on performing. (For some reason, he could still recall lyrics of songs he'd performed long ago, even as short-term memory faded. This is apparently true for singers. Even with Alzheimer's, Glen Campbell was also able to perform.) Bennett was reportedly still sitting at his piano and singing a few days before he died. The last song he sang? "Because of You", which was his first number 1 hit.

An excellent choice!

Another good one would have been "The Good Life."

Oh, the good life, full of fun seems to be the ideal
Mm, the good life lets you hide all the sadness you feel
You won't really fall in love for you can't take the chance
So please be honest with yourself, don't try to fake romance

It's the good life to be free and explore the unknown
Like the heartaches when you learn you must face them alone
Please remember I still want you, and in case you wonder why
Well, just wake up, kiss the good life goodbye

What a life!