Jimmy Roselli, Hoboken’s other crooner, dies at 85

Published 5:00 am Tuesday, July 12, 2011

He was a skinny Italian-American kid from Hoboken, N.J., who could croon like an angel. Before long, his singing made women swoon and grown men cry. For decades, he sang standards to adoring crowds worldwide, including, notably, “My Way.”

He had brown eyes.

Jimmy Roselli, a pop singer widely known as the other crooner from Hoboken, spent his life in the long, slim shadow of Francis Albert Sinatra. But in many traditional Italian-American communities in the eastern United States he was as fiercely venerated as Sinatra, if not more so.

Roselli, who continued performing until he was nearly 80, died June 30, at 85. The cause of his death, at his home in Clearwater, Fla., was complications of a longtime heart ailment, his agent, Alan Salomon, said.

Almost entirely self-taught, Roselli had a lush, quasi-operatic tenor and impeccable diction. He belonged to the generation of Italian-American pop singers that, besides Sinatra, included Perry Como, Dean Martin and Tony Bennett.

Though he sang in storied nightclubs like the Copacabana in New York, appeared on television and made dozens of recordings, Roselli was far less well known than they.

This obscurity, he long maintained, was brought about through the combined efforts of Sinatra, with whom he had an enduring feud, and local underworld figures, who, when they weren’t weeping along to his sentimental Italian hits, were, he often said, threatening him with a hit of another kind.

But in the end, the single greatest impediment to Roselli’s career appears to have been Roselli himself. Through a combination of constitutional abrasiveness, Old World suspicion of the entertainment business and a deep-seated fear of success, people who knew him have said, he managed to torpedo nearly every opportunity that came his way.