The 50 best songs

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COMING SOON:  In-depth appreciations & details on each track.

These are my personal favorite Sinatra songs -- the ones I've listened to a thousand times and that still fill me with awe for the singer's artistry.   Sometimes it's a case of a favorite song
given a  definitive treatment by my favorite songwriter.  (And remember: Artie Shaw
and Sinatra were the first to build their careers around performing primarily
the best American songs of the 20th century, recognizing that no matter how "old" they
were at the time, they were really timeless.)  In other instances
-- as with, say, "There Used to Be a Ballpark" -- it's not the song itself that's so great, but
some magical combination of the arrangement and the performance,
the feeling and artistry Sinatra invests in the song.  (By the way, you'll notice
that I haven't picked any Columbia sides here -- not even the famous versions of
"Nancy [With the Laughing Face] or "I'm a Fool to Want You."  Much of Sinatra's formative work
with Alex Stordahl on Columbia is quite beautiful, but to me it rarely transcends the merely pretty, and too often succumbs to the overblown melodramatic clichés of the '40s.
  Sinatra was famous as "The Voice" while at Columbia, and sold the most records
of his entire career during the '40s, but he didn't develop his own mature artistic voice
until the '50s, after he started recording for Capitol.)  
-- Jim Emerson

P.S.  For another take on the best Sinatra songs (including Columbia stuff), see Sinatra 101: The 101 Best Recordings and the Stories Behind Them, by Ed O'Brien with Robert Wilson.