In Memoriam: Tony Bennett, Treasured Vocalist with 7-Decade Career

All of us at ASCAP mourn the death of Tony Bennett, who passed away July 21 at the age of 96.

 

By any measure, Bennett had a spectacular career. Beginning with his #1 single “Because of You,” he was a regular presence on the pop charts in the ‘50s and ‘60s. He sold an estimated 60 million records, earned 20 Grammys (including a lifetime achievement award in 2001), and continued to record blockbuster albums with superstar collaborators into his nineties, most recently Love for Sale with Lady Gaga.

 

Bennett became a legend for his ability to inhabit a song. Whether he was singing pop material or jazz classics, he could cut to a song’s essence, with a charismatic tone equal parts grace and grit, and effortless phrasing that helped tell the story of every song he sang. Frank Sinatra told Life magazine in 1965 “For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business…He’s the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.”

 

In a professional career spanning seven decades, from his early New York club gigs in the late ‘40s through his final concert with Lady Gaga in 2021, Bennett held the torch high for the Great American Songbook – that canon of timeless songs written by ASCAP greats like Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Johnny Mercer. He stayed true to the classics even as popular tastes shifted, and they continued to stay true to him.

 

While Bennett was known primarily as a singer, he dabbled in songwriting, too. He wrote the lyric to a Duke Ellington tune called “Be Cool and Groovy to Me,” released in 1999 as an outtake from Bennett Sings Ellington: Hot and Cool. Bennett joined ASCAP that same year.

 

Of course no reminiscence of Tony Bennett would be complete without a mention of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” recorded and released in 1962. It earned him his first two Grammys and became his signature song, the one that endeared him to the world. In his autobiography The Good Life, Bennett revealed what he would say whenever he was asked if he ever got tired of performing the song. “I answer, ‘Do you ever get tired of making love?’” Watch below for a clip of Bennett talking about “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” at the ASCAP offices in New York, shot in 2018 to commemorate the original recording’s induction into the National Recording Registry.

 

Rest in peace, Tony. Thank you for dedicating your life to exceptional singing and exceptional songs.