Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ Wasn’t as Big as His ‘Old MacDonald’

Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” has become of of the biggest standards in the history of music. Notably, it didn’t chart as highly as his cover of “Old MacDonald.” Regardless, Sinatra’s “My Way” changed Paul Anka’s career.

Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ was overshadowed by many of his other 1960s songs at 1st

While “My Way” is possibly Sinatra’s most famous song today, it didn’t even hit the top 10 or the top 20! The tune peaked at No. 27 on the Billboard Hot 100, lasting on the chart for eight weeks. It was outperformed by “Somethin’ Stupid,” “That’s Life,” “Strangers in the Night,” and other 1960s Sinatra songs that get less airplay today.

It was even outperformed by Sinatra’s cover of “Old MacDonald,” which he gave the variant title “Ol’ McDonald.” That tune peaked at No. 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed on the chart for nine weeks. It just barely overshadowed “My Way” at the time. It’s incredible how the public’s tastes have changed since then.

Why Frank Sinatra covering ‘Old MacDonald’ was such a mistake

The 1960s saw the release of some of Sinatra’s biggest hits. Despite this, it also included a few missteps. One of those was “Ol’ Mcdonald.” Ol’ Blue Eyes was old-fashioned, but covering a centuries-old nursery rhyme was probably a little too old-fashioned. It also includes a lot of horrid lyrical changes, like making Old MacDonald’s “chick” a foxy lady.

More than that, it’s just embarrassing. “Old MacDonald” is a perfectly fine song for kiddies. However, it shouldn’t be recorded by adults who want to be taken seriously as artists. Sinatra’s version of “Old McDonald,” like Elvis Presley’s, will always remain a low points of his career.

Paul Anka said ‘My Way’ gave him a career ‘after the onslaught of The Beatles’

While “My Way” wasn’t huge, it was a boon for its lyricist: Paul Anka. Part of its success was that it inspired so many renditions. In his 2013 book My Way: An Autobiography, Anka discussed the impact of “My Way.” “I never really had any kind of premonition or design that it was going to be anything other than a song that Frank would want to sing,” he recalled. “I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, if I do this, it’ll become a standard.'”

“My Way” also impacted Anka as a writer. “‘My Way’ changed everything for me, for Frank, for our relationship,” he recalled. “Even though I’d written outside the teen genre in the themes I’d composed for The Longest Day and The Tonight Show, it was with ‘My Way’ that the second stage of my writing career began. And after the onslaught of The Beatles and [Bob] Dylan, I now had the luxury of writing a new kind of lyric. I could stretch out. 

“Everything had opened up,” he said. “After that, I realized that I was going to be mature a whole lot longer than I was a teenager. Whenever Sinatra performed ‘My Way,’ he’d do a minute on how we met and how the song came about and how he felt about my writing, which was really nice.”

“My Way” lost the battle to “Ol’ Macdonald” but it won the war.