70 Years of Frank Sinatra's In the Wee Small Hours

On hearing not just the music, but my particular copy, which is celebrating its 7th decade sitting on various shelves, waiting to be played

If you write about music, you might find yourself thinking occasionally about anniversaries, a marker of passing time to direct readers to an album or artist. It can be a little annoying and arbitrary to pay attention to such things, but it also makes practical sense—record companies and media properties have to organize their output around something.

A few weeks back I touched on Brian Eno’s 1985 CD Thursday Afternoon, and in the past few days I’ve been thinking about Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours, which came out in 1955. I know a fair amount about Eno, having written about his music a number of times and read a few books on his work, but I’ve never studied Sinatra with any depth. I do love this record, though. It’s often mentioned as one of the first “concept albums,” where all the songs are arranged around a particular theme—in this case, solitary rumination over lost love—and are meant to be heard in a single listening session. This extended communion with recorded music was a relatively new idea in 1955 because the 33 1/3 LP format was itself new, having only reached the market a few years earlier. While “albums” of 78s had been manufactured for years, listening to them in one sitting required flipping a record every few minutes. Taking in the 49 minutes of In the Wee Small Hours, however, is an experience.

The cover painting tells us a lot—this is the kind of loneliness where you wander around because you can’t sleep and you feel like the only person in the world. If Sinatra was a high school boy in this photo, he might be the main character in Smog’s “Teenage Spaceship.” Let’s stipulate that this image catches him after he’s had a few drinks, and now the bars are closed. He still has his cigarettes, which, if memory serves from my days as a smoker many years ago, can be a welcome companion at such a moment.

The music is absolutely beautiful. I have a feeling I bought this record roughly 20 years ago, while Julie and I lived in Richmond, Virginia, probably at Plan 9. I already owned a copy of September of My Years, another concept album, this one about growing old, from 10 years later. The arrangements by Gordon Jenkins on September are heavier and more symphonic, and I probably expected a similar palette from this one. But Wee Small Hours, arranged by Nelson Riddle, has a gentler and quieter tone with tinkly sounds including what sounds like a celesta, as if it’s trying to send you off into reverie.

A few of my favorite standards are here, including “Deep in a Dream.” Whenever I hear this song I think of drug-chilled Chet Baker reciting the lyrics in a scene from Bruce Weber’s documentary Let’s Get Lost. I believe he identifies it as his favorite song, or one of them, and as he speaks the words you get a sense, even in his addled state, of how much they mean to him.

Along with the music on the record, which as I said is phenomenal, I also enjoy holding the LP in my hands and thinking about the fact that this slab of cardboard and plastic is 70 years old. It’s one of the older objects of any kind I own—I have a 3xLP recording of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” that was pressed in 1952, though it was recorded in 1938—and it’s remarkable to me how well it continues to serve the function it was designed for in 1955. As you can see from the stamp above, my copy was once part of the library of WTOP, which were then the call letters of a station in Washington, D.C. (now WHUR, owned by Howard University). So a journey from D.C. to Richmond, where I purchased it, probably for $5 or so, wasn’t far.

I love reading Wikipedia pages about radio stations with long histories, though in this case the chronology jumps from 1949, when The Washington Post bought the station, to 1970. So I can’t tell you what the station was up to in 1955 when In the Wee Small Hours came out. WTOP called itself “The Sound of Washington,” and let’s assume that the sound of Washington in the mid-’50s probably included a good dose of Sinatra. And In the Wee Small Hours hit No. 2 on the Billboard album chart, so it was popular. That means the precise copy I’m listening to in my living room now was spinning on an industrial turntable in a radio station seven decades ago, sending a couple hundred thousand people in and around D.C., most of whom are no longer with us on this Earth, deeper into a dream.