Famed Musician Tony Bennett Dies at 96

Even when he enjoyed sold-out tours, Bennett worked to improve his craft. “I still insist that I can get better as I go along,” he told The New York Times in 2016, adding that he had started studying the basics of jazz piano. “It’s the same way with painting,” he said. “I paint every day. And just by doing it every day, you get better.”​

Bennett paintings were exhibited in galleries around the globe, and several of his pieces are in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington and the National Arts Club in New York City. He published two books of his artwork, Tony Bennett: What My Heart Has Seen (1996) and Tony Bennett in the Studio: A Life of Art & Music (2007).​

“Actually, in high school, there was a time that I was thinking about just concentrating on painting,” he said on the 2007 PBS American Masters biography of him, The Music Never Ends. “I asked my music teacher, Mr. Sondberg, for advice, and he encouraged me to stick with the music as well. So all my life, I have been singing and painting.”​

The son of an Italian immigrant who died when Bennett was 9, he rose from poverty, performing for money from age 13 and then working as a singing waiter in Italian restaurants. In World War II, he saw so much fighting and suffering in France and Germany that he later became a pacifist, evolving into that rare entertainer who mixed artistry and activism without alienating a segment of his audience.

Tony Bennett performs on stage as local radio disc jockey Bill Randall (left) applauds and teenage girls scream in the audience at a high school in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1952.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In 1965, two years after winning the first of his 18 Grammys (for record of the year and also best solo vocal performance by a male for “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”), he walked with Martin Luther King Jr. in the march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.​

He got his break in 1949, opening for Pearl Bailey in Greenwich Village. The entertainer Bob Hope was in the audience, invited him on the road and suggested he simplify his last name. The following year, Mitch Miller signed Bennett to Columbia Records and produced his first hit, “Because of You,” which soared to number 1 and stayed on the charts for 10 weeks, selling more than a million copies. His other hits of the era included “Cold, Cold Heart” (a pop rendition of the Hank Williams country song), “Blue Velvet,” “Rags to Riches” and “Stranger in Paradise.”​

Bennett relied on the bel canto singing discipline and studied improvisation with the idea of adapting the human voice to the sounds of musical instruments.

He was married three times and had four children, including the singer Antonia Bennett. Along with his widow, Susan Crow Benedetto — a former teacher 40 years his junior who was president of the Bay Area Tony Bennett Fan Club when they first met in person — he founded Exploring the Arts, a charitable organization dedicated to supporting arts education, as well as the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts High School in Queens, New York.​

​In February 2021, Bennett’s family shared with AARP that the singer had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2016. Still, he continued to rehearse his music twice a week.​

 ​Pre-diagnosis Bennett was often asked about retirement. The question mystified him: “If you are creative, you get busier as you get older,” he once told The New York Times, pointing out that Pablo Picasso, Jack Benny and Fred Astaire worked “right up to the day they died.” ​

“I think if you have a passion for what you do, then there are no limitations on how long or how much you can accomplish,” he said. “When people ask me if I plan to retire, I say, ‘Retire to what? I am doing what I love best right now!’”​