Born Dino Paul Crocetti in Steubenville, Ohio, in 1917, Dean Martin was the son of an Italian barber who had come to America four years earlier and married a local Italian-American girl. Music had captured Dino’s attention from an early age, but when he dropped out of school at age ten, claiming he knew more than his teachers, pursuing a musical career seemed to be the last thing on his mind.
As a teenager, he held a series of unsatisfying jobs, from a soda fountain bartender to a gas pump attendant. He also bootlegged liquor and made a few bucks as an amateur welterweight boxer under the alias “Kid Crochet.”
Martin’s career path turned to music when he worked as a blackjack dealer at a local casino. While relaxing after work at Walker’s Cafe, he was heard singing by bandleader Ernie McKay, who was impressed by Martin’s deep, Bing Crosby-influenced baritone and offered him $50 a week to sing with his band.
Cowboy Dino
As a child, Dean Martin loved watching cowboy movies and, according to his daughter Deana, listening to country music. “He talked about country music all the time,” she recalled. “Country songs really appealed to him. He’d say, ‘They sound so good, like you’re singing from your soul.'”
In 1956, Martin fulfilled his childhood dream by starring in his first Western, Pardners, with Jerry Lewis, but his first serious cowboy role was in 1959’s Rio Bravo, opposite John Wayne. Martin crooned the film’s mournful theme song, but it was his evocative rendition of “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me”—accompanied by a lonely harmonica, a male chorus, and soft guitar chords—that captured most people’s attention. The Western Writers Association of America voted the tune one of the 100 greatest Westerns of all time.
After joining Reprise in 1963, he donned a Stetson, transformed into Dean “Tex” Martin, and recorded Country Style, the first of many full-length country albums. One of his most famous country tunes was 1967’s “Little Ole Wine Drinker, Me,” performed in what became known as a “countrypolitan” style, a fusion of big-city pop and Hollywood Nashville music.
Dean Martin’s Italian Songs
With his sumptuous velvet lining, Dean Martin possessed a voice that could bring the most hardened Mafia to tears. Especially when he sang sentimental Italian ballads. Some of his early singles – including his playful 1955 take on Rosemary Clooney’s “Mambo Italiana” – emphasized his Italian roots, but in 1962 he devoted an album to songs from the “old country.”
Christmas Classics
Dean Martin’s vocal idol Bing Crosby pioneered the now-ubiquitous Christmas album, an innovation that blossomed with the advent of the 33-rpm LP in 1948. One of the highlights of Martin’s first Christmas album, 1959’s A Winter Romance, was his unique take on the evergreen Christmas song, “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow.” His version became a signature recording. Also on the album: Dino happily grooving his way through Frank Loesser’s “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” In 1966, the singer released Holiday’s second full-length album, The Dean Martin Christmas Album , which featured a sparkling interpretation of “Silver Bells” enlivened by candy strings and sparkling choral harmonies.