From Blackwing to Blue Eyes – Happy Birthday Frank Sinatra

From Blackwing to Blue Eyes – Happy Birthday Frank Sinatra

The 1950s were a turbulent decade for legendary singer and actor Frank Sinatra. Early years saw him lose his voice due to vocal chord hemmoraging, he divorced his first wife and entered into a stormy relationship with Ava Gardner, and most damaging of all, his long-time partnership with Columbia Records was not renewed.

While Sinatra made many successful films during this period, the mid-1950s saw his music career at low ebb. Many doubted that the Chairman of the Board’s status as a recording artist could ever regain its former luster.

A singularly talented composer and arranger, armed with a Blackwing pencil, entered Sinatra’s career at this moment and partnered with Sinatra to create some of the singer’s most iconic hits.

Nelson Riddle was an arranger and composer whose first mainstream hit was his arrangement of the Nat King Cole classic, “Mona Lisa.” Riddle had worked with a long list of successful singers, including Cole and Ella Fitzgerald, but his partnership with Sinatra would be the most enduring.

Riddle was responsible for arranging Sinatra hits like “Night and Day,” “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” “You Make Me Feel So Young,” “One for My Baby (And One More For the Road),” and two of Sinatra’s most memorable hits, “Come Fly With Me” and “I’ve Got the World on a String.” Whether it required a solo, pleading trombone or a full orchestra, Riddle instinctively knew which arrangement would best suit the song, as well as the warm timbre of Sinatra’s voice (Riddle likened it to the sound of a cello).

It was these arrangements that gave Sinatra’s flagging recording career an enormous boost, and the Blackwing pencil played a not-insignificant role in the process. Riddle accomplished his arrangements with a Blackwing pencil, specifically name-checking the Blackwing 602 in his definitive book on music arrangement, “Arranged by Nelson Riddle.”

His children, too, remembered Riddle’s affinity for Blackwing pencils, with son Chris Riddle noting, “His pencils, Eberhard-Faber Blackwing #602s, were laid out, and he always had an electric pencil sharpener at hand.  He was very organized  He had stacks of long score paper, which a special place over on Highland would make up for him, with his name printed at the bottom.”

Riddle and Sinatra respected each other and worked closely through the years on compositions that included the scores to some of Sinatra’s classic films, including “Robin and the Seven Hoods” and the original “Ocean’s Eleven.” Riddle retired in 1977, and Sinatra continued to sing the songs that Riddle had helped him craft into hits.

If voices could be placed in the Smithsonian, Sinatra would be the Hope Diamond. Would his career have revived without Riddle and his Blackwing pencil? Almost assuredly; his was a voice that could not be denied. But, as Riddle scrawled his notes in to margins of his compositions for Sinatra, the Blackwing was there, becoming as much a part of Old Blue Eyes’ mystique as the jaunty fedora or solitary lamp-post.

Come fly with us, you swinging Studio 602ers – what Frank Sinatra tune have you been humming on this, the Chairman of the Board’s 96^th birthday? Lift your scotch on the rocks and toast away in the comments!