I grew up listening to my parents’ records and none still have their original power as those of Francis Albert Sinatra

Before Michael Jackson, before Bob Dylan, before Elvis Presley, there was Sinatra, the first modern pop superstar. In the floodtide of centennial tributes (he was born on Dec. 12, 1915), we celebrate the cool, ring-a-ding-ding Sinatra, a man with the world on a string — but his most far-reaching accomplishment was infusing popular song with intimate personal emotion. […]

Before 1955, most popular music was dismissed as kitsch by the reigning culturati, and distinctions between “high” and popular art were rigidly demarcated. By treating popular standards as secular art songs dressed up in elegant semiclassical and pop-jazz trappings by his most brilliant arranger, Nelson Riddle, Sinatra began blurring the distinctions.

Almost single-handedly, he canonized the American songbook, a body of work created mostly for Broadway and the movies that looms much larger than it might have had he not given it his passionate, sustained attention. It became a platform for philosophical ruminations on the meaning of it all. […]

No matter what he’s singing, you listen to the words and how he phrases them and often have the sense that they’re coming spontaneously out of his mind and not from the pen of the song’s lyricist, although in his concerts he was scrupulous to give writing and arranging credits.

With each re-recording they expressed Sinatra’s changing point of view over time and became the story of his life. Other singers followed his lead, and the interpretation of popular songs took on an entirely new significance.

Evolving technology conveniently and happily coincided with his ascendancy. Until the invention of the microphone, the pop crooner adopting a relaxed conversational tone couldn’t have existed. The sound of Bing Crosby, Sinatra’s most influential forerunner and role model, evoked congeniality, nostalgia and the comforts of hearth and home — but not the joys and pains of love.

Sinatra used the microphone to convey an astounding intimacy, infused with a tender eroticism that turned increasingly bitter as the years went by. Crosby was your likable, easygoing next-door neighbor; Sinatra was your personal confidant, or in the case of women who adored him, a surrogate lover.