A collector says he discovered two never-before-heard Sinatra recordings. But is it really Frank?
A few years after Jim Mahoney purchased one of the world's most complete collections of Frank Sinatra music and memorabilia at auction, he finally got around to the boxes containing 78-rpm records and 10-inch acetates.
Mahoney, 59, had picked up the 150 containers filled with thousands of recordings and documents in 2017, but since then he'd been focused on the 1,000-plus Sinatra LPs and 450-odd 45-rpm singles. When the pandemic hit, he began whiling away the hours at his home in Oakland, California, by sifting through boxes of 78s, the format popular in the 1940s during Sinatra's earliest professional years.
That's when he first pulled out an acetate record - a disc akin to a proof in photography - with Sinatra's name scribbled on it. It contained four songs. "I put it on my turntable and was really surprised to hear Frank Sinatra singing a cappella," says Mahoney, who has collected Sinatra's work for 40 years. It was a song called "Let the Rest of the World Go By," written in 1919. Willie Nelson and Leon Russell had a modest hit with it in 1979.
After further research, Mahoney was even more stumped. The B-side had another Sinatra a cappella, a rendition of Irish songwriter Jimmy Kennedy's "An Hour Never Passes." Each side also featured scratchy recordings of Sinatra
