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Pop Culture Happy Hour Small Batch: Frank Sinatra At 100

Frank Sinatra would have turned 100 on Saturday, Dec. 12.
Courtesy of the artist
Frank Sinatra would have turned 100 on Saturday, Dec. 12.

Frank Sinatra was born 100 years ago this past Saturday, which at NPR can mean only one thing: an opportunity to talk to the biggest Sinatra superfan we know, business reporter Sonari Glinton, about the singer's formidable legacy.

Of course, we weren't the only ones to think of Sonari in conjunction with Sinatra's 100th: Morning Edition and All Things Considered and Planet Money all beat us to the punch. (Seriously, if you work for an NPR program and you've met Sonari, you're going to think to interview him for a Sinatra story when the time comes.) But we did get a nice batch of reflections on what makes Sinatra stand out from other singers, where beginners can find a foothold in a massive discography, and why "emotional honesty" is so important to Sinatra's legacy.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)