But, at the same time, Callahan doesn’t abandon the appreciation that a metaphor can encourage, borrowing an irresistible one from clarinettist Tony Scott to further underscore Ella and Billie’s different approaches to a lyric. “With a singer like Ella, when she sings ‘my man has left me’, you think the guy’s going down the street for a loaf of bread,” Scott told pianist Bobby Tucker, Billie’s accompanist during the 1940s. “But when Lady sings it, man, you see the bags are packed, the car’s going down the street and you know he ain’t never coming back.”

Callahan’s considered admiration for his chosen six doesn’t always extend to their lives away from music. While acknowledging that there were cracks in Bing’s easygoing facade, he’s still concerned to rescue the singer from the barbs contained in his son Gary’s 1983 memoir, Going My Own Way, about growing up with an alcoholic mother and an abusive father.

But there’s no such attempt to rehabilitate sinful Frank Sinatra’s reputation, and Callahan’s distaste drips from the page as he recounts various tales about Ol’ Blue Eyes’ “bad behaviour” and his gangster connections.

In their self-destructiveness, he writes, Billie and Judy Garland would turn their fury on themselves, whereas Frank took it out on others … or got a wiseguy from his entourage to do it for him. And Callahan has little time for My Way, contemptuously dismissing the song as “beloved of self-pitying men everywhere, the guys at the end of the bar that no one wants to talk to”. Sinatra’s dislike for Paul Anka’s lyrics is acknowledged, but the strong suggestion is that they make a neat fit with Frank’s personality.

The book also examines the various ways in which the Fates have conspired to make these performers’ lives difficult. Not the least of these is the way in which the ugly racism that has blighted American history left its mark on their lives.

Frequently to the chagrin of their white peers, Ella and Billie suffered indignities wherever they went: Billie having to travel in hotel freight elevators because management didn’t want her seen in the lobby; Ella missing a concert date in Australia when, during a Honolulu stopover, Pan Am excluded her from a first-class flight to make room for white passengers; Ella, Sammy Davis Jr, Lena Horne and other black musicians being denied permission to eat in the Las Vegas clubs where they were performing.

Then there were the troubled childhoods: the pep pills and sleeping tablets that Judy’s bossy stage mother introduced her to when she was nine; Ella’s homelessness as a teenager; Frank’s bully of a mother; Barbra Streisand’s cruel stepfather. And they all had to find a way of negotiating the against-the-odds stresses involved in building a career that makes out of the ordinary demands on those who choose it, or are chosen by it.

Callahan takes us close to the music, but also moves back and forth between the singers’ lives and the cultural shifts in the society that spawned them. The author of a two-part volume entitled The Art of American Screen Acting, he perceptively links the undercurrents that gave shape to Billie, Judy and Barbra as performers, as “drama queens”, to the development of the method style of acting that came to the fore in the US during the 1940s and ’50s. He also looks at the ways in which the singers’ work on radio, in film and on TV became inseparable from the personas projected through their performances.

By the end of his story, it’s become evident that their careers have long been waiting to be wound together like this. One mightn’t always share Callahan’s assessments of the songs, performances and films he discusses, but his gaze is comprehensive, his research thorough and his enthusiasm for his subject infectious.

Best of all, his empathy for his subjects’ circumstances is tangible, recognising that, even after their voices have begun to fade and mortality beckons, there’s still a spark that yearns to shine bright, just once more for the road.

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