Dreaming of Gloria Gaynor: Sammy Davis Jr.'s "I've Gotta Be Me" vs. Frank Sinatra's "My Way"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qkiSKpssHc

(The Mad Men scene--only watchable on YouTube.)

I have somewhere a "Pop Commentary" column from a late '69 Life magazine denouncing the trend of MOR Pop singers popularizing what they called the "Self-Love Song"--as in odes to the singer's own greatness, not onanism--with these two cited as main offenders alongside the Dean Martin version of "I Take A Lot Of Pride In Who I Am" (which might be my favorite of the three).

I meant to check if Martin had a comparable song--don't know that one.

It's a Merle Haggard cover, from when Dino was mostly covering Country songs.

Here he is duetting it with Ann-Margret

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdvT2tAGRrk

Found the Life review: https://books.google.com/books?rview=1&lr=&id=21AEAAAAMBAJ&q=sinatra#v=snippet&q=sinatra&f=false

I'll always associate "I've Gotta Be Me" with the Far Side cartoon of the penguin belting it out

Also off the car radio yesterday, I heard the new-wave young-guy version of self-pity circa 1978: "But you'll be sorry when I'm dead/And all this guilt will be on your head."

I think there's a good book waiting to be written by the right person--maybe it already has been--about all the '50s sub-Sinatras hanging on by their fingernails through the latter half of the '60s. They're all over the lower reaches of the weekly Billboard Top 100 charts (my recollection from making birthday-related CDs for friends): Jack Jones, Vic Damone, Andy Williams, etc. You could include Sinatra himself or omit him, as his 1960s have obviously been chronicled already.

Yeah I’ve been watching old episodes of Hollywood Palace (1964-1970) on YouTube and that type of singer pops up all the time. You could still have a big hit in that style in ‘67 but by ‘73 it was hard to even place an album in the Top 200.

Engelbert Humperdinck was huge from '67-69; he almost functioned as the "new" continuation of this tradition.

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I love Frank

I respect Sammy

I don’t like either of these songs

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