A very good 80 years: Frank Sinatra's birthday.

As of December 12, 1995, Frank Sinatra is eighty. And that may be one of the most poignant lead sentences I've ever written.

The celebrations, the hype, the hagiography are in place: deluxe CD sets from Reprise, Capitol, and Columbia; an ABC special aired December 14 with-well-everybody (Tony Bennett, Springsteen, Patti Labelle, etc.) doing Sinatra's signature songs; three-story billboards of Ol'Blue Eyes have been erected along Fifth Avenue in New York, the city of which Sinatra, at his zenith, was virtually an incarnation. He's already received the Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan; but don't be surprised if Bill and Hillary find some way of crashing the party (it's election year, after all--and publicly honoring Francis Albert can't, you know, hurt).

What strikes me most about it all, though, is, as I said, the poignancy. Frank Sinatra--Frank Sinatra!--is eighty. It's lovely that he's still with us, that he actually carried the ball all the way downfield, and that he did it--the phrase will be repeated nauseatingly in weeks to come--his way. And yet underneath all the octogenarian adulation, you sense a rather unique melancholy. Somehow--I don't know any other way to say this--it shouldn't be. It's okay if you get old or if I get old: we expect that, we even, bitterly, hope to. It's not okay for our icons (and if Sinatra isn't an icon, then it's a null set): their aging, oddly more than our own, underscores the irreversibility of time's arrow, measures how far we've come since we first heard or saw them.

Thinking about Sinatra at eighty, I've been thinking about Hopkins's "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child." Addressing little Margaret, who's sad at the falling of the leaves, the poet concludes, "It is the blight man was born for/It is Margaret you mourn for."

At least three generations of Americans slow-danced and, with luck, made out with this guy's voice in the background. They got all hot and dewyeyed to the skinny, winsome kid in the bow tie who sang with Tommy Dorsey; or to the hip, knowing fellow with the jauntily-tilted fedora in the fifties; or the tux-clad, increasingly portly and raspy Vegas showman. And they saw the movies: from the gawky but affecting performance in On the Town to the genius of From Here to Eternity and The Man with the Golden Arm to the self-indulgent silliness of Von Ryan's Express and Dirty Dingus McGee. Some dummy is bound to call him "larger than life." Wrong: as with Cagney or Ellington or Astaire, we cherish him because his career is part of the topography of our lives. A recovering technophobe, I bought my first CD player only in 1990. And--though I would never have described myself as a Sinatra fan--the first CD I bought was, inevitably, his 1956 masterpiece, Songs for Swingin' Lovers. "Inevitably," because I could think of no other all-but-perfect single anthology of American popular song at its greatest.

Forget the films, even the fine ones. And forget the tantrums, the excesses, the Cosa Nostra connections, the goofy politics--all the stuff that Kitty Kelley detailed in her biography, His Way. Forget it at least for a moment, and remember the singer.

Novelist Ishmael Reed once said, visiting my class, that he would rather have written the lyrics to "Stardust" than any of his own books. The students were shocked (had they, I wondered, heard the damn song?), but Ishmael was being honest. After the explosion that was rock 'n' roll, we're only beginning to realize that American song in the thirties and forties was and is one of the supreme accomplishments of our culture, that the work of Gershwin, Porter, Arlen, Berlin, and Rodgers and Hart shines with as great a brilliance as, say, the sonnets of Wyatt, Surrey, and Sidney. And Sinatra, in his two magnificent decades, the fifties and sixties, was the ideal--I'm tempted to say, predestined--voice of that great tradition.

Not that he ever, really, had the greatest chops. Bing Crosby had a more natural delivery, as did the sadly neglected Perry Como--and Nat Cole had a delivery and a timbre almost preternaturally natural. Joe Williams, especially in his years with Count Basie, had a vibrant, grab-you-by-the-tie baritone and a sense of swing that Blue Eyes could only dream about. Tony Bennett had, and has, cleaner pitch: notice how often, even at his grandest, Frank slides up or down to the note--that's uncertainty manifesting itself as genius. And Mel Torme has everything. The most musicianly of singers, a white male Sarah Vaughan, he has an ease, intelligence, and execution that, if you really listen, can blow you out of your chair.

And yet. In his autobiography, It Wasn't ALL Velvet, Torme says that he learned more about singing from listening to and talking with Sinatra than from anybody else; and Torme is, rather famously, not given to err on the side of humility. Miles Davis, who never erred that way, said once in Downbeat that he learned how to play ballads by listening to the way Sinatra broke up his phrases. And the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia told Musician magazine that his idea of an ideal studio soundmix was the Sinatra/Nelson Riddle collaborations of the fifties.

Garcia was right. By the fifties, Sinatra's voice had deepened, taken on a character it doesn't have in the early records. (In those days he'd smoke a few cigarettes before a performance to slacken the vocal chords.) It was a kindova baritone, a sortova low tenor--a bastard voice, like that bastard horn the tenor saxophone, half-woodwind and half-brass, and just the thing for that bastard genre, American song. And Nelson Riddle, an arranger straight from God, knew just how to place it, like a solitaire diamond on an onyx ring: wickedly clever riffs by the woodwinds above and the brass below the singer's range, and with plenty of space for him to do what he did better than anyone-turn song into exalted, inspired speech. Listen to Songs for Swingin' Lovers, Come Fly With Me, or any of the albums from that period. He was never better. Maybe nobody was. Maybe the American songbook never was.

It's been called belcanto, improvisational singing, and Sprachgesang, literally talking-song. It's both and neither. Like instrumental jazz--the single greatest American achievement--it's music brought to a unique pitch of tenderness, bitterness, and sheer smartass passion. And if this isn't sublime art, then nothing is.

Among later singers, Willie Nelson, Mandy Patinkin, and especially Harry Connick, Jr., have something of the same mojo: something. But the solitaire is still the solitaire. If Torme aligns with Sarah Vaughan, Sinatra aligns with Billie Holiday: less chops, less range, less spirit, but a truckload--no, a freight train--of soul, evident in nearly every note of those best, stunning, albums. As surely as Twain's or Hemingway's or Basie's, it's the American voice.

And Frank Sinatra is eighty. Chops all gone, concentration shot, waiting--let's say it--for what W. C. Fields called "the Fellow in the satin slippers." As are we all. And he was sometimes wrong and sometimes crummy. As are we all.

And he was also, for a very long shining moment, an artist who made us proud of ourselves, just for hearing him. As Auden wrote of W. B. Yeats, "You were silly like us/your gift survived it all."