While I valued my grandmother's nostalgia, I didn't connect with Bennett's music as a kid. I used to stare at that page, imagining how excited my grandparents must have felt that night and about the rest of their lives together, and how Tony Bennett's music encapsulated their entire mood and optimism in the late '50s. That photo lay inside an album that I open once in a while, next to a flattened matchbook from that evening. The cigarette girl snapped a picture of their table, surrounded by their close friends and family. It was an evening my grandmother would tell and retell countless times over the years. When Elsie and Anthony finally married in 1957 in a nearby church, they used their savings to attend the Copacabana-the hottest nightclub in the city, if not the world-to see Bennett live. Raj Tawney's late grandma, Elsie, pictured with her husband, Anthony, in the 1950s. Tony's big break single became their song and nobody else's. When Bennett's first #1 hit "Because of You", written by Arthur Hammerstein and Dudley Wilkinson, flooded the airwaves in 1951, it aligned directly with the development of their youthful romance. They were broke but happy and the radio served as the soundtrack to their budding relationship. Growing up in New York during the early '90s, my Puerto Rican grandmother, Elsie, regaled me with tales of her young life in the 1950s, when she came-of-age in The Bronx and married the boy next door, Anthony, a first-generation Italian American. Whenever one of Bennett's countless songs blares over a speaker or car stereo, listeners of all ages may find themselves transported back in time, to a yesteryear of evening wear, of jazz and cocktails, of first loves-of more innocent times. With the passing of Tony Bennett-the last, original twentieth-century American crooner-it's impossible to ignore the impact his music had had on countless generations of music lovers who can trace their own history through his voice and professional journey.
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