RIP Frankie Laine

Full life, 93 years old, far worse ways to go. And the obit's worth reading in full, from Mel Brooks (mock?-)confessing that Laine thought "Blazing Saddles" was a serious song to all sorts of stuff about Laine's youth:

The son of Sicilian-born parents, Francesco Paolo LoVecchio was born in Chicago on March 30, 1913. During the Depression, he began working and scrapping to support his family. He became a marathon dancer and claimed once to have danced for 145 days straight in Atlantic City when he was 17. He and his partner split the $1,000 prize.

His first professional singing date came unexpectedly during a marathon dance, when he launched into a highly emotional song called "Beside an Open Fireplace."

"They had called me up to entertain because there were only three couples left in this particular marathon, and none of them could sing or dance or tell jokes," he told the Chicago Tribune in 1990. When the audience reacted well, he was encouraged to try to earn money as a singer.

At one point, he took over Perry Como's singing spot with a Cleveland band, and he appeared on New York radio for $5 a week. He also was a machinist, a car salesman and a bar bouncer from Chicago to Baltimore.

To distinguish himself from the creamy-voiced crooners of the early 1940s, he developed a rhythmically charged performance style. This caused further problems. He said he was discriminated against because his voice "sounded black." He told the Tribune "there really was no market for a white kid who sounded black and didn't sing dreamy ballads."

In 1946, pop composer Hoagy Carmichael saw Mr. Laine one night at Billy Berg's Vine Street Club in Hollywood and heard his bluesy rendition of Carmichael's "Rockin' Chair." Carmichael reportedly refused to leave until Berg agreed to retain Mr. Laine at a much higher salary -- $75 a week.