Doing my homework, it seems that Laine had quite an impact on White Pop as the transition began into a more rhythmically emphatic and more emotionally infected style. And the thing about the "race records" and people assuming he was Black seems absurd until you hear the Atlas records (and where are they today anyway?).
This would have been lost on me, since I only knew Laine as a big-lunged belter of Rawhide type stuff. But the history is there, in print and on record. History has kind of faded, it seems. It's not a narrative at all these days, much less a popular narrative
Listening again to the record with Clayton, Laine swings just fine in a pre-bop kind of way. And Frankie Laine was swinging, genuinely swinging, comfortably swinging, some years before Sinatra got it going like that.
So I'm like, who knew? Not me. But there it is, hidden by time and narrative though it may be. Narrative is not history.