American crooner Tony Bennett credited his mother with teaching him a lesson that stayed with him for the rest of his life.
The legendary artist, whose decades-long career earnt him admirers from Frank Sinatra to Lady Gaga, died on Friday 21 July, aged 96.
Bennett disclosed to the public in 2021 that he was living with Alzheimer’s disease, having been diagnosed in 2016. Despite his illness, he managed to complete a second album with Gaga, Love for Sale, following their 2014 record Cheek to Cheek.
The same year that he revealed his diagnosis, Bennett and Gaga celebrated his 95th birthday with a pair of shows at Radio City Hall in New York. They marked Bennett’s final public performances.
Regarded as the last of the great saloon singers of the mid-20th century, Bennett released more than 70 albums and won 19 Grammys, earning new generations of fans with each passing decade.
In a 2017 interview with The Guardian, he spoke about key moments in his life, including the lesson his mother, a seamstress, taught him.
“My mother taught me the most important lesson of my life: to hold out for quality,” he said. “I sat next to her as she worked, just to be near her, and every now and then she’d pick up a new dress to be sewn, feel the cloth, and set it aside, saying she only worked on quality dresses.
“Our family needed every dime, but she wouldn’t sew a dress that wasn’t up to her standards. Similarly, when a producer or promoter told me I needed to record a song I considered cheap, shoddy or silly, I’d think of my mother and tell them I only worked on quality material.”
He stuck with this ethos throughout his career, covering American standards by some of the greatest songwriters of all time, as well as working with artists from Ray Charles to Diana Krall, Amy Winehouse, Bill Evans and Barbra Streisand.
Tony Bennett recording with Amy Winehouse— (Warner/YouTube)
In the late Sixties and Seventies, Bennett found his popularity on the wane, before a resurgence in the 1990s brought him renewed acclaim. Seventeen of the Grammy awards he won would come after he had already reached his sixties.
Asked about the comeback by The Independent in 2008, Bennett said: “A surprise? It wasn’t a surprise at all. And I’ll tell you why. Good music is good music. I’m not concerned with whether someone who listens to me is old or young. In fact, in many ways, I’m not interested in the young at all.
“I’m interested in age. People learn to live properly when they get of an age, you know? The late [jazz pianist] Duke Ellington once said to me that he was really offended by the word ‘category’.
“Music has no category; it’s either good or it isn’t, and I sing good songs, great songs, written by the best songwriters. It’s that kind of quality that makes them last. Trust me, people will be singing these songs forever.”
