[Dixielandjazz] Frank Sinatra's first recorded song - To be auctioned in December

[Steve Barbone]

Interesting record, interesting story. Anybody want to bid on this record?
BTW, Saxophonist Frank Mane, with whom Sinatra made his first record, was
well known in music circles around the NYC metro area. He led a band for 50
years doing the kind of gigs working musicians do in order to eat regularly.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

Sinatra¹s First, Freed at Last

NY TIMES - By KEVIN COYNE - October 21, 2006

THE most valuable object the late Frank Mane ever owned spent decades in a
jumbled drawer in the living room of his apartment here ‹ a heavy 78-r.p.m.
disc of ³Our Love² that he recorded in 1939, filed casually among newspaper
clippings, sheet music, letters and other mementos from his long career as a
musician. In the unlikely event that a listener couldn¹t recognize the
unmistakable voice of the singer, Mr. Mane wrote the name on the label in
his spidery black hand: ³by Frank Sinatra.²

The two Franks knew each other from WAAT, a small Jersey City radio station
where they sometimes performed on live broadcasts. Mr. Mane was older, an
alto sax player who had a car and lived in Bayonne. Sinatra was a newlywed,
living on Audubon Avenue in Jersey City, which was on Mr. Mane¹s way home
from the radio station. Both were veterans of the local nightclub circuit,
and both were eager for the brighter lights elsewhere.

In March 1939, Mr. Mane had his eye on a job with Clyde Lucas and his
California Dons, and he booked some studio time across the river in
Manhattan to make an audition record. He assembled a 10-piece band and was
rehearsing at the Sicilian Club in Bayonne when Sinatra showed up. ³He said,
ŒCheech, could I go to New York with you and sing with the band?¹ ² said
Mary Mane, recalling the way her husband always told the story. Mr. Mane
died at 94 in 1998, just a few months after Sinatra. ³So my Frank said,
ŒSure, why not?¹ ² 

The band recorded four songs, including Rimsky-Korsakov¹s breakneck ³Flight
of the Bumblebee,² an ideal showcase, Mr. Mane thought, for his lightning
virtuosity on the saxophone. They still had some time left, so Sinatra
stepped to the microphone and started a song that took its melody from
Tchaikovsky¹s ³Romeo and Juliet² ‹ the first time he had ever sung solo in a
recording studio:

Our love, I feel it everywhere,

Our love is like an evening prayer. ...

³You can tell it¹s him,² Mrs. Mane said as the song played on a portable
tape deck, filling the small kitchen of the rented apartment where she and
her husband moved in 1969. ³His phrasing is the same.²

The record has finally left the living-room drawer and is now at Guernsey¹s,
the New York auction house that has sold items from the estates of John F.
Kennedy, Elvis Presley and Mickey Mantle. It will be auctioned in early
December. 

³Will it go for $20,000, or $200,000, or some multiple of that? God only
knows,² said Arlan Ettinger, Guernsey¹s president. ³What¹s so unique here is
that it¹s the one and only first recording. With most early recordings,
there are multiple copies. Something may have come out on an obscure label
and only 20 have survived and are in collectors¹ hands, but that¹s 19 more
than Mrs. Mane¹s.²

Mr. Mane did get the job with Clyde Lucas and spent the next three years on
the road, but he wearied of the travel and returned home to Bayonne, where
for the next half-century he led his own more modest bands at ballrooms and
nightclubs, weddings and dinner dances. He was still playing when he was 93,
and his foot was too swollen to get a black shoe on it, Mrs. Mane said. He
wore slippers instead, and put black rubbers on them, and went to the job on
a cane.

Just a few months after recording ³Our Love² with Mr. Mane, Frank Sinatra
was singing with Harry James and saying goodbye to Hudson County. The two
Franks didn¹t see each other again until 1979, when Sinatra convened a
reunion in Atlantic City of some of his old musician friends from his days
apprenticing in New Jersey.

³Every casino he played at after that, we were his guests, V.I.P.,² said
Mrs. Mane, pointing to an autographed picture of Sinatra among the dozens of
photos that make the living-room wall a collage of her husband¹s career.

Shortly after the reunion, Mr. Mane made a cassette copy of ³Our Love² and
sent it to Sinatra, who hadn¹t heard it in 40 years. A 1980 thank-you letter
from Sinatra hung for years on Mrs. Mane¹s wall and will be auctioned along
with the record. 

Mr. Mane ³liked to play the recording for his friends,² said Robert
Mandelbaum, a friend of the couple who helped Mrs. Mane arrange for the
auction. ³He understood its significance, but he never tried to capitalize
on it. He wasn¹t like that.²

Mrs. Mane is 84 now, gregarious and quick to laugh. ³There was always music
here,² she said, sweeping her arm across her apartment, where she lives
alone, on Social Security. ³Since he¹s gone, there¹s none.²

But on a gray, soggy afternoon, ³Our Love² was playing one more time.
³That¹s my Frank,² she said, her ear tuning first not to the voice that
everyone else hears, but to the alto sax. ³He had the warmest sound.
Everybody told him that.²

E-mail: jersey at nytimes.com