Bennett’s vast audience, including new generations who first heard him in the 1990s, demonstrated there was a hunger in the population for music and lyrics of artistry and honesty, in contrast to the “gangster rap,” synthetic show tunes and banal “hits” by celebrity performers pumped out by the entertainment moguls.
The singer Tony Bennett, who died Friday at 96, marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Ala., after he witnessed atrocities while liberating Nazi death camps.