I grew up in an era when there was no such thing as planned obsolescence; instead, everything was made with quality. Like so many people my age who came out of the Great Depression, I grew up with a strong sense of appreciation for what little we had. My grandfather owned a grocery store, and my mom was a seamstress working under sweatshop conditions. But despite the harsh circumstances, they always took time to make the children in the family feel special. I never took for granted the importance of the love of my family and friends to pull me through hard times. They taught me humility, and instilled in me a work ethic that remains to this day.
I was drilled not to be the best, but to always strive to do my best—and that if I did, the rewards would follow. I was told that everything I do should be done with care. Even now, I feel strongly that if you buy a suit or a dress, it should be well made, and it should last for years—instead of a con job where you buy something only to have to replace it after it falls apart six months later. You can go broke that way. It makes better sense to save up your money to buy one well-made suit than ten cheap suits.
There should be a law against planned obsolescence, and everyone should follow this lead. In other words, an artist or a company, or an individual, should not put out a work of art, or a song, or any product that he knows won’t endure.
When I was ten, my father passed away. After he died, my mother had to support the three of us kids all by herself. She did what they called “piecework,” earning a penny per dress, sewing all day long in the factory. She’d bring work home with her every night. Once or twice in an evening, she’d come across a bad dress—one of such poor quality that she’d refuse to work on it. We were desperate for money, but she couldn’t bring herself to do something she felt was beneath her. “I only do quality dresses,” she would say. “I’m not going to work on a bad one.” Many years later, I realized that this was the attitude I held toward my job, too. She became my inspiration for insisting on singing only quality songs.
Years later, another experience that reinforced this idea was my training at the American Theatre Wing on Forty-Fourth Street, which I attended after returning home from Germany after my service in World War II. The government had set up the GI Bill so that soldiers could receive an education. The bill paid tuition for either trade school or college and gave a lot of fellows like myself the chance to keep going with the education that the war had interrupted, and to attend a school we couldn’t have afforded without it. People like Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Paul Newman, Shelley Winters, and Sidney Poitier took classes there.
The Theatre Wing was a fantastic school, and my teacher had trained with Stanislavsky, who founded Method acting. I’ve applied the techniques I learned in that school to my singing ever since. I think of the lyrics in an autobiographical way, as if they were written about something I’ve lived through. Not every song allows for this; only the well-crafted ones do. So I make it a point to seek out quality songs that provide that kind of powerful emotion, and as a result, the public can experience them the way that I do. As they listen to me sing, they get an honest sense of how I’m feeling while I perform. This connection between singer and audience would be impossible if I added a cheap song to my repertoire, which is why I never have.
The Theatre Wing not only taught me the importance of doing quality work; my teachers there also told me not to listen to anyone who tried to tell us otherwise. I never really appreciated how valuable that attitude was until the producer Mitch Miller signed me to my first recording contract in 1950.
Mitch was the head of A&R—Artist & Repertoire—at Columbia, and his job was to sign new talent for the label. He was a great classical oboist who saw how much money novelty music was making, and he became the first producer to make a fortune doing commercial songs for the masses. From the moment they signed me, everyone at the company tried to change the way I sang. They couldn’t get over the fact that I loved jazz. Jazz wouldn’t sell as well as pop, and they wanted to try to stop me from singing what I wanted to. All they thought about was how many albums they could sell to the public. When the record companies saw how much money they could make doing pop tunes, they started telling their artists what to do. They always thought they knew best, and they refused to trust the artists’ own instincts. In the early years of the music business, things were different. Producers would just say, “Record a song for us,” and the singer did what came naturally. But the times were changing.
I constantly went up against Mitch. Personally I liked him, but he preferred gimmicky music and very accessible songs, as opposed to tunes from the American Songbook. He came up with this concept for Sing Along with Mitch—a weekly TV show featuring a chorus of singers. The home audience sang along to the words shown on the screen, complete with a bouncing ball. It was a huge hit and made a lot of money for the company. In addition, he didn’t have to deal with “temperamental artists” when he was doing that show.
Mitch really didn’t like jazz. He didn’t care for Duke or Count Basie—and when I came to the label, I was a jazz singer. He tried to have me sing sweet music that would be immediately forgotten, and novelty stuff that was silly, stupid, and ignorant. I would buck him and say, “No, I just want to sing quality songs.”
I never did (and never will) do anything just to pick up the money and run, but sticking to my guns became quite a battle for me during the early years.
So I fought with Mitch over these ridiculous tunes that he wanted me to sing. To his credit, I did get a lot of hit records—“Because of You,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” “Blue Velvet”—although I was really careful about which of those songs I chose to do. But without fail, he would then insist that I record something trite while I was hot, instead of doing a classic song or a jazz number. I had to fight for every single one.
After a few years, when we both realized this back-and-forth would never end, Mitch and I finally worked out a compromise: for every two pop pieces I’d do for him, I would get to do two jazz songs. That worked for a while. Then, in what would become a big turning point in my creative career, for the first time in the history of the music industry, a lawyer named Clive Davis became the president of Columbia Records. This came as a shock to many of us, as we were used to artists such as songwriter Johnny Mercer, who founded Capitol Records, and Frank Sinatra, who started Reprise Records, running the business.
Clive’s becoming president was the first step on the road to a corporate mentality in music making. In the sixties, when rock music became so prevalent, Clive tortured me to do an album covering contemporary songs. After a while, when I felt I had no choice, I actually got physically sick while recording that album; it never made any sense at all to me.
It seemed like the world was turning upside down. Everyone was turning on and tuning out; it reached a point of absolute insanity. My favorite story of all time was the one about Duke Ellington, when he got let go from Columbia. Clive Davis asked Duke into his office one day. “Mr. Ellington, I have some bad news for you,” he said. “We are going to have to drop you from the label.”
“How come?” Duke asked. “Well, you’re not selling enough records,” Davis replied. Then Duke said, “I think you have it turned around. I thought I was supposed to make the records, and you were supposed to sell them.”
The funny thing was that I was giving it my all for those guys; 100 percent of my creative effort. They just didn’t seem to appreciate it. That’s what happens when the bean counters take control—things go down the tubes. It’s still happening today, but if everyone who holds the reins in this business would put their faith in the artists that they sign, things would be in a much better place. Movies and books need powerful stories, and great records need the best songs. If I really adore a song, I’m able to get into the creative zone and deliver the definitive version—one that conveys what the composer originally had in mind. That way, the public will know they’re hearing the real thing, instead of some put-on. It’s obvious when a record producer thinks that the public is stupid, because they’ll try to dumb things down. But that type of work never endures.
I’m not saying I was the only one that this kind of thing happened to. Every artist has to deal with producers who know it all, and who just want to try to make a quick buck. Even the greats like Fats Waller, Nat King Cole, and Billie Holiday had to deal with it. I’ll tell you another classic: Fats Waller was having a jam session up in Harlem, and he wrote “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” on the back of a paper bag. The record company paid him two bottles of gin for that song. Every artist who performed popular music sang it, and it became a huge Broadway smash that eventually toured the world. The label made millions and millions of dollars from that one song, and he got paid two bottles of gin. That’s just a sin.
By bucking the advice of Mitch Miller and Clive Davis, and sticking with the good songs, I’ve been able to have top-selling records with every generation from the fifties until now. I have been privileged not only to contribute many hit songs to the American Songbook but to have a catalog that I can be proud of. There isn’t one record from 1950 until now that is dated. They’re all done with the best composers, great musicians, and top engineers, and there isn’t one that I’m embarrassed by.
Honing my performance and refusing to compromise have paid off for me, and now I’ve been discovered all over again by yet another generation. I recently released my complete collection boxed set that contains everything I’ve recorded. There are sixty-three albums, and there isn’t one song where I thought, I wish hadn’t put that in there.
Duke Ellington used to quote Toscanini, who said, “Music is either good, or it isn’t. It’s not someone’s opinion.” What he was saying is that there shouldn’t be any categories in music; that’s not what it’s supposed to be about. Quality music will still be heard a hundred years from now, and still be relevant. The cream will rise to the top, and history will reveal those that endure. And that’s where it’s at.
I believe Toscanini’s statement with all my heart, which is why I love to sing from the vast catalog of American music. In fact, in the sixties, Alec Wilder, renowned New Yorker music critic Whitney Balliett, and I did a radio show in which we were the first to articulate the importance of and coin the phrase “the Great American Songbook.” I travel all over the world, and wherever I go, people know all those songs by heart. There isn’t an instance that they don’t start singing along with me. These tunes are so well known that they are our best ambassadors.
I compare this songwriting period that began in the 1920s to the time of the post-Impressionist painters, when a true renaissance in art was taking place in France. Those changes were happening not only in art but in music, too, with Debussy, Tchaikovsky, and Ravel. I regret that we don’t have that kind of emphasis on quality nowadays. Instead, greed rules most of the industry. Often the music is intentionally disposable; it’s forgotten two minutes after it comes out—whereas the songs that became the Great American Songbook will continue to endure.
During the recording of my last duets record, Willie Nelson and I discussed the fact that although he and I come from different places in the country, musically we are cut from the same cloth. Artists like Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles were on his radio or record player when he was growing up, because his parents and grandparents were musicians, and they listened to good music. Willie would sit at the piano stool with his guitar in hand while his sister played “Stardust” or “Moonlight in Vermont,” and he’d learn them along with her. He says he got a fantastic education just listening to her play those tunes.
Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and Ella Fitzgerald were ten years older than I was. They were the ones who inspired me to say, “Someday I’d like to be like that.” Today you can listen to a Sinatra or Nat King Cole album, and it sounds like they recorded it yesterday. Nat singing “Lush Life” is just gorgeous, and the same holds true for Sinatra’s “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.” Their music will be appreciated until the end of time.
The public might get the impression that singers only want number-one hits, but that has never been my premise. Instead of being number one, I only wanted to be one of the best. I just keep being myself, and I never compromise. I never strived for a hit song, some novelty tune that would hit it big but be forgotten in two weeks; I wanted a hit catalog. If I do something, I want it to be top quality.
The Zen of Bennett
There should be no planned obsolescence; don’t just pick up the money and run. Instead, create something of lasting quality and you will reap the rewards.
Despite what others say, refuse to compromise your high standards.
People will reward you if you consistently produce high-quality work.
Instead of focusing on being number one, attempt to be one of the best.
