GOODBYE / GORDON JENKINS BIOGRAPHY

BY BRUCE JENKINS AVAILABLE NOW !!! AUTOGRAPHED BY BRUCE JENKINS - A BLUE-EYES.COM EXCLUSIVE

"Goodbye" combines the biography of a great musician with a son's discovery of his father. Gordon Jenkins-- composer, conductor, arranger and performer--was that rare thing, a quadruple-threat talent. Over the course of a fifty-year career, Jenkins collaborated with the top talents in postwar pop and jazz, among them Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Judy Garland, Nat King Cole, Al Jolson, Isham Jones, Bing Crosby, the McGuire Sisters, Dick Haymes, Jimmy Durante, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Billie Holiday, Harry Nilsson, Johnny Mercer and Benny Goodman. Jenkins’s life reads like a mini-music history of American popular music.

In tracing his father’s life, Bruce Jenkins cast a wide net. He spoke with scores of people, among them Harry Nilsson, with whom Jenkins recorded in 1973, and even the elusive Frank Sinatra, who in his later years almost never granted interviews. He uncovers the tragic story of how his father came to compose “Goodbye,” the mournful song with which Benny Goodman closed all his concerts. He learns that his father was one of the few people who could get Judy Garland on stage during her anxiety-ridden later years. He meets Pete Seeger, who takes him to the Greenwich Village nightclub where Gordon Jenkins “discovered” the Weavers in the early 1950s. And the concluding chapter, which documents Jenkins’s slow, agonizing death from ALS, leaves us with an unforgettable image of a legend’s dying with dignity and unexpected good humor. “Even if I'd never written the book,” said Bruce Jenkins, “I learned more about my father than I ever imagined possible.”

Bruce Jenkins 56, has been a member of the San Francisco Chronicle sports staff since 1973 and a columnist since 1989. He has covered twenty-four World Series, fourteen Wimbledons and many other major events, including the Super Bowl, World Cup soccer, the NBA Finals, the four major golf tournaments and the U.S. Open tennis championships. He has twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize by the Chronicle: in 1992 for his columns on the Barcelona Olympics, and in 2002 for baseball coverage. He has also won national awards for baseball, basketball, football and tennis writing.

PRAISE FOR GORDON JENKINS FROM HIS PEERS

"When Gordon Jenkins walked into a recording session, everything stopped. I never saw it with anybody else. He was the best-equipped musician, orchestrator and conductor that I ever worked with." -- Frank Sinatra, 1990

"In my teenage years, I was obsessed with Gordon Jenkins's music. I was a hopeless romantic, and his was the most romantic I'd ever heard." -- Nora Ephron

"My album with Gordon Jenkins is the best I've ever been associated with. I'll hold it up against anybody's. Show me what you got." -- Harry Nilsson, 1988

"If you spend a lifetime writing songs, and you can point to six that people will know, you've done an incredibly good job. I can give you six of Jenkins's right now." -- Sammy Cahn, 1988

"The thing I remember most fondly about the Weavers, in our early days, was meeting Gordon." -- Pete Seeger

“At last someone has written a definitive book about Gordon Jenkins, one of America’s musical giants. Bruce Jenkins’s cultural history of his father’s fabulous career is a must read…. This narrative covers Gordon’s career from his early days with Isham Jones up to and including his collaboration with Frank Sinatra. It is unputdownable.” --Van Alexander, arranger and composer, co-writer and arranger of Ella Fitzgerald’s “A Tisket, A Tasket," and author of First Chart

“On that sad day I heard of Gordon Jenkins’s passing, my initial feeling was one of regret that I’d never spent enough time with this wonderful and talented man. This biography by his son, Bruce Jenkins, truly does him justice. It is beautifully crafted, objective--no small feat for a son writing about his dad--and captures the wisdom, talent, joy and black sense of humor that was Gordon’s.” --Johnny Mandel, composer, performer, arranger; winner of the 1997 ASCAP Henry Mancini Award; known for dozens of songs, Academy-award-winning film scores, and the "Theme from M*A*S*H”