A voice worth returning to

Dean Martin was born Dino Paul Crocetti on 7 June 1917 in Steubenville, Ohio, to Italian immigrant parents. He left school early, boxed under the name Kid Crochet, worked in a steel mill and dealt cards in speakeasies before his singing — a warm, unforced baritone with a natural swing — carried him out. In 1946 he teamed with the comedian Jerry Lewis, and Martin & Lewis became the biggest comedy act in America. When the partnership split in 1956, the conventional wisdom said the singer was the expendable half. The conventional wisdom was wrong.

Martin’s solo career had already produced “That’s Amore” (1953) and “Memories Are Made of This,” which spent five weeks at No. 1 in 1956. In 1962 he signed with Frank Sinatra’s Reprise label, and the 1960s became his imperial decade: “Everybody Loves Somebody” knocked the Beatles off the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in August 1964, became his theme song, and opened a run in which he released eleven gold albums between 1964 and 1969. The Dean Martin Show ran on NBC from 1965 to 1974, turning his effortless persona — the tuxedo, the grin, the apparently casual mastery — into a weekly national ritual.

The ease was the art. Martin sang as if nothing cost him anything, and that insouciance let him move between Italian ballads, swing standards, country songs and novelties without ever sounding like he was trying. He died on Christmas Day, 1995. What remains is one of the most immediately recognisable voices in popular music — and a catalogue that rewards close listening far more than its relaxed surface suggests.

This collection follows him from the secretly commissioned “That’s Amore” to the country crossover “Little Ole Wine Drinker, Me,” pausing at the Beatles-toppling triumph of 1964, the Rat Pack swagger of “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head,” and the Italian songs that were his birthright. Listen past the ease. Underneath it is one of the shrewdest musical minds of his generation — a singer who always knew exactly what he was doing, and made sure you never noticed.

What made Martin extraordinary, beyond the voice itself, was the intelligence he hid inside the ease. Watch any performance closely and you’ll see a master technician: the breath control, the rhythmic precision, the comic timing sharpened by a decade with Jerry Lewis. He made it all look accidental, which was the hardest trick of all. Sinatra — who knew a thing or two about singing — reportedly admired Martin’s natural phrasing enormously, and the admiration was mutual: the two men defined, between them, what the great American male voice could be.

His legacy is everywhere once you listen for it: in every lounge singer, in every wedding “Sway,” in the very idea of cool as a musical quality. He recorded for Capitol and Reprise, starred in films, hosted one of television’s great variety shows, and did it all with a grin that suggested none of it was work. It was, of course — the hardest kind of work, the kind that disappears into pleasure. Start anywhere in this collection. Within four bars, you’ll be smiling too.

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