On the death of 96-year-old Tony Bennett on July 21, the media was filled with stories of a remarkable guy who was still a regular guy. Born Anthony Dominick Benedetto in Queens, this Calabrese son of a grocer and a seamstress led an authentically American life, with all its ups and downs, triumphs and stumbles.

Public lives are a mixed bag, and the reviews are usually mixed, too, when public figures die. Not so with Bennett. Everyone agrees with Frank Sinatra, dean of the Italian bel canto crooners, who once told Life Magazine, “For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He’s a singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.”

Elton John called him “the classiest singer, man and performer you will ever see.” Billy Joel told Rolling Stone that Bennett was “one of the most important interpreters of American popular song.” Gene Simmons of KISS called Bennett “the best singer of them all.”

Bennett won 20 Grammy Awards, and he recorded songs with musicians from every genre and generation, including Barbra Streisand, Stevie Wonder, Willie Nelson, Elvis Costello, k.d. lang, Amy Winehouse and Lady Gaga, who joined him for his last public appearance.

But his art was also shown in how he lived his life. Bennett saw combat in Germany in World War II, where he was nearly killed. He helped liberate the Landsberg concentration camp at the end of the war, and he later wrote, “I saw things no human being should ever have to see.” He became a pacifist.

Back in New York after the war, he sang in nightclubs and appeared on early television shows, looking for a path to steady work. Through the early ’50s and mid-’60s, he recorded a string of hits, including “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” in 1962.

When rock ’n’ roll came to dominate the scene, his luck turned. It was tough getting gigs, his mother died, the IRS was closing in on him and his second marriage was shot. At his bottom in the late 1970s, he turned to cocaine and pills. That was when he remembered what his former manager had told him about the comedian Lenny Bruce, who died of an overdose. “He sinned against his talent,” the manager had said. Bennett realized that’s what he was doing, and he stopped the drugs.

In the 1960s and beyond, Bennett fought for civil rights in important ways. He pressed recording executives to promote Black artists and boycotted apartheid South Africa. And he marched with Martin Luther King in Selma.

“I’m enormously proud that I was able to take part in such a historic event, but I’m saddened to think that it was ever necessary and that any person should suffer simply because of the color of his skin,” he wrote in his autobiography.

From the beginning, Bennett connected with us.

Early in his career, Sinatra told Bennett it was OK to be nervous when performing. He said, “If you’re nervous, they’re going to see that you care. So they’re going to root for you. And the more they root for you, the more you’ll give back to them.” And that’s exactly how it worked out.

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