In November 1968, Frank Sinatra told his friend and collaborator Paul Anka that he was tired and ready to give up show business. Sinatra had asked Anka several times to write a song for him, but Anka had been intimidated. He saw himself writing teen songs. During dinner Sinatra said, "You never wrote me that song."
Still reeling over the news at 1 a.m. in his apartment, he found himself toying with lyrics to a melody he had heard in France. “I thought, ‘What would Frank do with this melody, if he were a writer?’” Anka says. “And all of a sudden, it just came to me: ‘And now the end is near. I face the final curtain.’”
Anka knew the melody for these words. A few months before, Anka was in the south of France and heard a song called Comme d'habitude which can be translated "as per usual." More loosely "same old shit." The melody was written by Jaques Revaux with lyrics by Claude Francois and Gilles Thibault. The sad song was about a man in his mid 30s who was left (dumped) by his much younger (teenage) lover. Anka wrote a completely different lyruc on the same melody.
Anka gave the song to Sinatra who recorded it before the end of the year. In 1969, I Did It My Way was an instant hit around the world and became a signature song for Sinatra for the rest of his life.
Sinatra did not quit show business.
In the 1960s most pop music traveled from from the United States and England to the rest of the world. I was fascinated to learn the story of a hit song in France that became a very different song in America.
