Unlike Bennett, he persevered despite very limited commercial impact as a record seller. And like Bennett and only a few others, he succeeded largely through persistence, bending to the extent he had to, but weathering many lean years until the '80s, when he found a sympathetic record company and renewed popular interest in the kind of music he wanted to perform.

That 1925 birth date, despite his precocity, meant that, like such contemporaries as Tony Bennett, he grew up with a love for swing music and jazz in general, only to find that, as he became an adult, that music was pushed to the margins commercially and that as a performer he was faced with a choice between singing what he liked to a limited audience or compromising to appeal to a wider one, a choice that became even starker with the onset of the 'rock era' in the mid-'50s. Nevertheless, Tormé remains best-known as a singer, and as a singer his career was one of considerable artistic achievement and frequent commercial frustration, particularly on records. Amazingly, this is still only a partial list of his accomplishments, which also included acting in more than a dozen feature films and on radio and television hosting radio and TV shows and writing television dramas, numerous articles for periodicals including Down Beat and The New York Times, and six published books of fiction, biography, and music criticism. In fact, given the breadth of his talents, he might have been a bandleader, since in addition to singing, he was also a drummer good enough to have gotten offers to go on the road as early as his teens, a songwriter responsible for one of the perennial Christmas standards, and an arranger who wrote the charts for much of the music he performed. If he had had his wish, Tormé would have been an exact contemporary of Frank Sinatra, and like Sinatra, he might have had a full-fledged career as a big-band singer. In his 1988 autobiography, It Wasn't All Velvet (its title a reference to his nickname, 'The Velvet Fog,' bestowed upon him by a disc jockey in the '40s to describe his husky, wide-ranging voice), he mentioned a wish that he had been born ten years earlier, that is, in 1915 rather than 1925. Mel Tormé was a jazz-oriented pop singer who worked at his craft steadily from the '40s to the '90s, primarily in nightclubs and concert halls.

September song words and music