Frank Sinatra (1915-1998)

Certainly no American singer other than Bing Crosby has had the multi-faceted impact that “Frankie” had on popular music and American culture at large.

Sinatra’s colorful, often abrasive personality and the constant tabloid attention he attracted often obscured his seriousness as a musical artist. From the beginning he was intent on creating a new sound-adult, sensual, exhilarating, authentic, always himself.

Despite recording thousands of different songs, Sinatra’s recordings rarely achieved “hit” status. Time has shown he was in the more serious, long-range business of producing classics, recorded renditions of songs that indelibly bear his stamp: : “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” “Time After Time,” “Saturday Night,” “Nice ´N Easy,” “In the Wee Small Hours,” “Come Fly With Me,” “All My Tomorrows,” “All the Way,” “It Was a Very Good Year,” “Strangers in the Night.”

Fred Miller’s Lecture on Frank Sinatra is a musical tribute to a unique American entertainer, punctuated by anecdotes and biographical details drawn from an eventful, legendary life.

Moving rapidly from bobby soxer idol to film & recording star and throughout it all ceaselessly a subject of curiosity and controversy, Frank Sinatra attained the rare status of American Icon; and like so many of his amazing show business contemporaries, his star only shines brighter with the passage of time.


If you would like to engage Fred Miller for one of his Lectures-in-Song, please contact him directly at any time. For a full listing of all Lectures, click here.

Fred Miller’s Lectures-In-Song comprise a series of solo programs, each an historical, anecdotal and musical profile of some great personality or important aspect of American Popular Song. These Lectures are delivered by singer/pianist/narrator Miller at the piano, and each reflects his lifetime passion and appreciation for great music. He studied classical piano in his hometown of Albuquerque from ages 7-15 but early on gave up any notion of music as a profession. At that time, Fred assumed a musical career was either one devoted to the rigid discipline of classical music or being a freewheeling rock star, and he accurately decided he had no aptitude for either. However, at age 22, upon hearing Ella Fitzgerald sing Cole Porter, he found his calling and life’s mission.

Through the Seventies and Eighties, Miller studied and absorbed in minute detail the life and times and songs of nearly all the great American composers and lyricists who thrived during Broadway & Hollywood’s Golden Age between the two World Wars. In 1987, he founded Silver Dollar Productions in order to produce operettas, dramas, musicals and small cabarets. Silver Dollar Productions required ensemble casts, props, costumes and, most significantly, the challenges of publicity and selling tickets, and for a dozen busy years, the company presented an unbroken string of varied and highly lauded performances.

In 1999, Miller was simultaneously underwritten by both his local Hunterdon County Library and the Art Alliance of Philadelphia to present a series of six solo Lectures-In-Song, each devoted to one of the premiere Broadway/Hollywood songwriters: George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, and Harold Arlen.

In presenting history, biography and psychology while sitting at a piano singing the superlative songs of his heroes, Miller has found a single performing medium that utilizes most of his intellectual and musical passions.The list of Lectures-In-Song that began with six in 1999 is now more than seventy(and growing!), a joyful tribute to the boundlessly rich field of American Popular Song.