Dartblog

“Every night I pray that nobody steals her heart away.”

An exceptionally toilsome Sunday, this, but I owe you something. I was listening to Frank Sinatra’s trio of “girl songs” — Nancy (With the Smiling Face), Emily, and Sweet Lorraine recently and wanted to feature one of them. Although they were not released until the mid-nineties in the Reprise Collection, none of the songs was foreign to Sinatra. In fact, he’d performed all three, I believe, early on with Tommy Dorsey. Sinatra recorded all three, each invested with a new Nelson Riddle arrangement, mid-career. Of the three, the silky-sweet Sweet Lorraine was, by lengths, the kicker. It is a gem of a song, written by Mitchell Parish and Cliff Burwell, with some lovely phrases which, in right hands, just melt.

As I say, Sinatra hasn’t many recorded versions of Lorraine. There’s nothing wrong with variety, though. Here is Nat King Cole giving an absolutely masterful performance of the song. In many ways, including pacing, he’s ahead of Sinatra in the reading. His near pristine diction in Lorraine, which he first recorded in 1940, was the first time Cole really unleashed his voice, which had been previously restrained as band leaders at the time liked. It worked—Lorraine, by many accounts, launched Nat King Cole.

And the backing? Brilliantly executed. But beyond all that, this is just one of the prettiest songs you’ll ever hear. Have a look.