Cocktail Music: Mid-Century Sophistication
- Music History Hall
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
The Martini Era
There was a time between early rock and roll and the civil rights movement – when glamour, cocktails, and jazz combined to create an aura of sophistication – glossing over a society at the breaking point. It was a time when adults made a comeback. It was the heyday of jazz. Three-martini lunches were the norm. Everyone dressed for dinner parties. It was the in-between era — the tail end of the 1950s as the country rolled into the first few years of the next decade. Before the explosive 1960s took hold of the country, it was the chic cocktail party before the storm.
However, all this sophistication hid an underlying friction in society leading to an era of transition for the country. Stand-up comedians, social critics, and satirists like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl pioneered a style of social satire that poked fun at political and current events using the daily newspaper as a prop. Their style of open, free-wheeling, and critical comedy combined politics, religion, and sex - forging new paths in comedy and calling out society’s ills.
Women were feeling unsettled and restless. During this era, women still had to depend on husbands for financial support. Women could not get credit in their name, companies could and did discriminate and refuse to hire women, and birth control pills were illegal until 1965 – even for married women.
The Rat Pack was a group of Hollywood friends – it was like the cool kids club for celebrities. They were the epitome of cool during the cocktail party era. The group consisted of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Joey Bishop, and Peter Lawford (brother-in-law of President JFK.)
Ol’ Blue Eyes - Frank Sinatra was the leader of the pack, nicknamed the Chairman of the Board during the early 1960’s cocktail era. Having emerged as a teen idol during the war years, he came into his own during the heyday of jazz and martinis in the cocktail party era. Known as the greatest singer of the 20th century – Frank Sinatra held unprecedented power onstage and off.
As America’s cocktail era came to an end, tuxedoed men and chic women in black cocktail dresses and pearls parted as the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 jolted the country into the counterculture of the 1960s.
