Tony Bennett

As anybody who has ever seen VH1 knows, music history is packed with great comeback tales, but few have been more remarkable than Tony Bennett's. Popular throughout the '50s and '60s, the pop and jazz crooner fell upon hard times commercially and personally in the '70s as he struggled to contemporize his sound for rock audiences. Broke and rejected, he nearly died from a cocaine overdose in 1979. But he rehabilitated his image in the '80s, and by the '90s he was widely regarded as a national treasure and praised for reintroducing the American Songbook to younger audiences. He even landed an Album of the Year Grammy for 1994's <i>MTV Unplugged: Tony Bennett</i>. Bennett celebrated his 85th birthday in triumph last year, as his <i>Duets II</i> album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, making him the oldest artist ever to reach that position.