It was Sept. 11, 1945, and the reed-thin young man who stepped in front of the microphone to record a new tune was known as the The Voice, though he would later be nicknamed Ol’ Blue Eyes and the Chairman of the Board.
Whatever name was known by, Frank Sinatra, who had just launched his solo career, was still a supremely popular romantic-voiced crooner who made bobby soxers swoon. World War II was raging overseas, and Sinatra–who had already tackled dozens of patriotic tunes for “V-Discs’ (special records distributed to boost G.I. morale)–was about to lend his pipes to another song about America.
But this one wasn’t about winning the war against the Axis–although it was well timed to the Allied victory in Europe. It was about winning the war against intolerance.
“The House I Live In” was written in 1942 to celebrate freedom as one of the leading American values, yet in three years hadn’t attracted the attention of a hit-making singer like Bing Crosby or Kate Smith. But for 30-year-old Sinatra, an Italian American who had suffered racial slurs in his youth and was leading a high-profile campaign to eradicate prejudice, it was a perfect fit.
Already a master interpreter of a lyric’s emotional intent, the singer precisely captured the song’s sense of racial pride and religious tolerance. With the nation itself being “the house,” Sinatra answered the question posed by the song’s lyrics: “What is America to me?”
The result was inspiring–indeed, A-List Hollywood film director Mervyn LeRoy (Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Mister Roberts) was so taken with Sinatra’s piece that he made a short film out of it.
That 10-minute film, shot in two days in May of 1945, was written by screenwriter Albert Maltz (This Gun For Hire) and appropriately titled The House I Live In. In it, Sinatra–playing himself–comes across a group of street kids casually dishing out derisive ethnic slurs. Appealing to the youths as one who rose from their ranks to the top, he implores them to look at each other as fellow Americans and set prejudice aside. The short ends with a rousing version of the song.
The film might be quaint by today’s standards, but it remains potent thanks to the singer’s sincere performance. The members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences’ Board of Governors were so impressed by its sentiment that in 1946 they rewarded the film–and Sinatra–with a special honorary Oscar. Sinatra would later say that the trophy for The House I Live In meant even more to him than the Supporting Actor Oscar he received in 1954 for his role as Private Maggio in From Here to Eternity.
“I think [the song] was a personal anthem to him,” says the singer’s daughter Tina Sinatra, adding that her father told her that when he was growing up, “He was afraid to walk down the block. If you changed cultural zones, you got the crap beat out of you.” And when World War II erupted, Sinatra “tried to figure out what he could do. The hatred was permeating, and it wasn’t just [limited to] a neighborhood…The little he could do, he did.”
Despite his reputation for the occasionally politically incorrect one-liner on Las Vegas stages, Sinatra would carry the message of “The House I Live In” with him throughout his career, most notably in his support of talented black artists like Sammy Davis Jr., Count Basie and Quincy Jones and his tireless efforts on behalf of the civil rights movement.
“There was a bit of a backlash to it,” Tina says, saying her father endured some political heat for his pro-tolerance views. “We were about to face McCarthyism. Politically we couldn’t scrape any further down than that.”
In the early 1960s, the singer dusted off the song again for his patriotic LP America, I Hear You Singing, released at the height of the Kennedy era. He performed the song again for audiences during the turbulent 1970s, when generations were torn over America’s military involvement in Vietnam. Ol’ Blue Eyes tapped the song twice more, first in 1986 at Ronald Reagan‘s request with a recording celebrating the centennial of the Statue of Liberty, and again in 1994 on the popular Duets II album (with Neil Diamond).
Though he passed away in 1998, Frank Sinatra remains an American icon, not just for his musical talents but also for his decades-long involvement in a variety of political and social causes. “He was for the little guy and he was always for what was right and what was fair,” says Tina.
And nowhere is the man’s spirit better reflected than in his return to the accepting democracy of “The House I Live In.” The Voice may be gone, but–in a time when we may need to listen to the message in the song’s melodies more closely than ever–the music plays on.
