“I countered,” says Mahoney, “and that was it.” An unknown internet buyer upped the offer. “I knew it was something worth bidding on,” Mahoney said. Sinatra’s cigarette lighters, watches, stage passes, photos, press clippings, card decks, matchbooks, mugs and plates 3,000-4,000 hours of Sinatra interviews session charts and studio notes and a meticulously kept five-decade-long calendar of Sinatra’s day-to-day activities. Ten half-inch, studio-grade tapes of session material.

Bootlegs, reel-to-reel tapes filled with motion picture soundtracks, recording sessions, TV and radio appearances, sheet music and interviews. Among the items were thousands of Sinatra releases, domestic and international - “virtually every significant recording made by Sinatra for the RCA, Columbia, Capitol, and Reprise labels,” according to the auction description.

In 2016, as he was relocating into a smaller home, Ross decided to sell his collection. (The Sinatra estate did not reply to requests for comment.) Believing that the collectors market was filled with dubiously sourced, possibly stolen work that was rightfully theirs, they threatened legal action against a number of high-profile collectors, including Ross, who became persona non grata with the tightknit Sinatra clan. and Tina began taking a hard-line stance against use of their father’s trademark. Willie Nelson and Leon Russell had a modest hit with it in 1979.Īround the same time, Sinatra’s children Nancy, Frank Jr. It was a song called “Let the Rest of the World Go By,” written in 1919. “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. 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. When the pandemic hit, he began whiling away the hours at his home in Oakland by sifting through boxes of 78s, the format popular in the 1940s during Sinatra’s earliest professional years. 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. 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.

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