La Voz

At the gates of the 25th anniversary of the death of Frank Sinatra, for the first time in Spain is published the heartfelt memory that, by way of portrait, Pete Hamill composed when the news of the death of "La Voz" surprised him in the theater boarding from an airport. In this rare tribute to perhaps the most idolized crooner in American song, the journalist and award-winning author offers a thoughtful evocation of Sinatra's essence, examining his craft and his legend from the point of view of a confidant and a fan. Drawing on intimate conversations held over many years, Hamill reveals how Francis Albert Sinatra was shaped by the xenophobia with which the Italian-American community was treated during his childhood, but also by Prohibition, the Depression, but also for the war, his fight against racism, with which he earned the fury of the right-wing and the sensationalist media that associated him with the mafia to make him ugly in his support for the progressive causes that he bravely embraced since his youth, and how he ended up becoming the troubadour of urban solitude. Both spawning from the same urban landscape, both Hamill and Sinatra can be credited with giving a voice to the city and its people. With his songs, Sinatra enabled millions of people to sing their own stories, instilling an entire generation with a sense of musical tradition while bequeathing the soundtrack to a time when he was privileged to be nurtured, in the company of great interpreters and arrangers, of the great works of the American Songbook. With him, a younger America was making its way into a time, for the greater height and glory, more inhospitable, during which Sinatra would be the living embodiment of loyalty, humility, remorse, strength, collapse and success of the fallen angel and reborn