"Get that!" The story goes. "His name is Sinatra, and he considers himself the greatest vocalist in the business."
This is the bandleader Harry James talking in 1939, when Frank Sinatra, of Hoboken, N.J., had not yet moved the world. "No one's ever heard of him! He's never had a hit record, and he looks like a wet rag, but he says he's the greatest." Said it. Meant it. Proved it.
Harry James must have sensed it too, because he had hired Sinatra, then a scrawny spoiler in his mid-20s, to sing with the band. Present at the creation, James could...
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