Male singers, their microphones, and their gender.

The New Yorker is featuring an old article from 1997: "Sinatra’s Song/What is it about Frank Sinatra that no one else can touch? He could swing, break hearts, and behave badly, and he made his voice an instrument that kept reinventing American music" (by John Lahr). I found this quite interesting:

Sinatra’s phenomenal impact... had to do not just with musical timing but with the timing of the technology that saturated the nation with his sound. As Henry Pleasants notes in “The Great American Popular Singers,” in 1930, only a decade before Sinatra made his name, the reigning crooner, Rudy Vallee, threw away the megaphone that had broadcast his sound and, by linking a borrowed NBC carbon microphone to amplifiers and several radios onstage, created a crude kind of concert amplification. (“I sing with dick in my voice” is how the notoriously foulmouthed Vallee explained his appeal.)...

Sinatra himself began by singing with a megaphone, but the microphone soon became his totem.... Sinatra said, “Many singers never learned to use one. They never understood, and still don’t, that a microphone is their instrument.” Gripping the stationary mike with both hands and only occasionally moving it back and forth, he used it as a prop in a kind of foreplay. “You don’t crowd it, you must never jar an audience with it. . . . You must know when to move away from the mike and when to move back into it,” he wrote in Life. He added, “It’s like a geisha girl uses her fan.”