[Dixielandjazz] Mitch Miller (Washington Post)

[Robert Ringwald]

Mitch Miller, Record Executive and 1960s 'Sing Along' Host, Dead at 99
by Matt Schudel
Washington Post, August 3, 2010

Mitch Miller, a musician and record-company executive who became one of the 20th
century's most influential forces in popular music as the producer who launched the
recording careers of singers Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, Johnny Mathis and Patti
Page, died July 31 at a hospital in New York of complications from surgery. He was
99.
Mr. Miller was a talented conductor and oboist who became a recording star in the
1950s and 1960s, with dozens of defiantly backward-looking "sing-along" albums that
sold millions of copies. As the host of a popular television show in the early 1960s,
"Sing Along With Mitch," he has been credited by some with being the inventor of
karaoke.
He made his greatest mark as a behind-the-scenes producer for the Mercury and Columbia
record companies from the late 1940s to the 1960s, helping create the sound of popular
music between World War II and the Beatles-led British Invasion. With a deep antipathy
for rock-and-roll -- he turned down Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly for contracts with
Columbia -- Mr. Miller preferred an older style of pop music based on jazz and the
classics.
For years, it wasn't unusual for half the country's top 10 hits to have come from
Mr. Miller's studio, including Page's "Tennessee Waltz," Frankie Laine's "Mule Train,"
Doris Day's "Secret Love" and Johnnie Ray's "Cry."
He brought country music into the pop mainstream, with new recordings of Hank Williams's
"Cold, Cold Heart" and "Jambalaya" by Bennett and Jo Stafford, respectively. He refashioned
classical music and international folk tunes into pop hits, expanded the studio practice
of overdubbing and helped make so-called novelty tunes, with nonsensical lyrics and
tricky musical effects, a pop-music staple. (His 1952 recording of 13-year-old Jimmy
Boyd singing "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus," for example, sold 2 million copies.)
"You've got to work out a gimmick that'll get people's attention and hold it," Mr.
Miller told Time magazine.
When he became Columbia's head of the popular music in 1950, the label was fourth
in record sales. Sales jumped 60 percent within 18 months, and Mr. Miller's golden
touch made Columbia the most important pop music label of the era.
He supervised recording sessions at Columbia's studios in New York and Hollywood
and coached singers "down to the last breath," as he put it, even though many of
them resented what they considered his overbearing manner.
When he brought Clooney to Columbia in 1951, she was a little-known band singer.
For weeks, she resisted his entreaties to record "Come on-a My House," based on an
Armenian folk song, but when Mr. Miller finally persuaded her, his hitmaking instincts
again proved unerring. While listening to the song being replayed in studio, he leapt
on a chair and declared, "I'll get them to ship 100,000 of these out in three days."
In fact, "Come on-a My House" sold more than 1 million copies and made Clooney an
overnight star.
Similarly, Bennett -- who had already scored No. 1 hits with "Because of You" and
"Cold, Cold Heart" -- was reluctant to record "Rags to Riches" in 1953, but it, too,
soared to No. 1. Finally, they agreed that for every two songs selected by Mr. Miller,
Bennett could pick two of his own. Bennett would later call Mr. Miller "perhaps the
single most influential producer in the history of recording."
Tiff with Sinatra
Not every performer was as forgiving, however. When Frank Sinatra was with Columbia
in the early 1950s, Mr. Miller asked him to record the novelty song "Mama Will Bark"
with buxom actress Dagmar. In the background, someone imitates a howling hound, and
Sinatra says, "Hot dog, woof!"
Even though the flip side contained one of Sinatra's greatest songs ever, "I'm a
Fool to Want You," Sinatra soon left Columbia and never forgot the humiliation of
"Mama Will Bark." Years later, when their paths crossed at a Las Vegas hotel, Mr.
Miller extended his hand to greet Sinatra.
"[Expletive] you!" the singer snarled. "Keep walking."
To this day, Mr. Miller remains a frequent target of music aficionados who maintain
that he lowered the standards of pop music and turned it into a wasteland.
"Miller exemplified the worst in American pop," critic Will Friedwald wrote in the
book "Jazz Singing: America's Great Voices from Bessie Smith to Bebop and Beyond."
"He first aroused the ire of intelligent listeners by trying to turn... great artists
like Sinatra, Clooney, and Tony Bennett into hacks. Miller chose the worst songs
and put together the worst backings imaginable... with insight, forethought, careful
planning, and perverted brilliance."
Although he made a fortune for Columbia, Mr. Miller never hid his contempt for the
records he made.
"I wouldn't buy that stuff for myself," he said in 1951. "There's no real artistic
satisfaction in this job. I satisfy my musical ego elsewhere."
While producing hits for others, he began making music under his own name. In the
1950s, Mr. Miller had top-selling records with rousing choral-orchestral versions
of the Israeli folk song "Tzena, Tzena, Tzena," "The Yellow Rose of Texas" and "Colonel
Bogey March," the whistled theme of the 1957 David Lean film "The Bridge on the River
Kwai."
Beginning in 1958, he made a series of albums with a male chorus ("Mitch Miller and
the Gang") that featured familiar songs from decades past. The old-fashioned approach
was surprisingly popular, and Mr. Miller registered 19 Top 40 hits in four years.
In 1961, NBC made him a television star with "Sing Along With Mitch." The musical
variety show received humbling reviews -- "the Miller ensemble is made to sound as
if it were working in an empty warehouse and had to sing to keep warm," a New York
Times critic wrote -- but it had good ratings as Middle America happily joined the
chorus.
Mitchell William Miller was born July 4, 1911, in Rochester, N.Y. His parents were
immigrants from Russia, and throughout his life Mr. Miller called himself a scrappy
"street kid" whose father was an ironworker.
When he was about 11, he began playing the oboe because it was the only unclaimed
instrument in his school's music program, and he quickly showed a talent for music.
By 15, he was performing in a professional orchestra.
He graduated cum laude from Rochester's Eastman School of Music in 1932, joined the
CBS Orchestra in New York in 1935, and was one of the finest oboists of his time,
with solo recordings of works by Bach and Mozart. He played in jazz settings and
appeared in some of Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre productions, including the "War
of the Worlds" broadcast in 1938. In 1949, he produced and played oboe on "Charlie
Parker With Strings," one of the most renowned recordings of the jazz saxophonist.
His wife of 65 years, Frances Alexander Miller, died in 2000. Survivors include three
children, Andrea Miller of New York City, Margaret Miller Reuther of Willsboro, N.Y.,
and Mitchell "Mike" Miller of Boston; two brothers; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
As rock-and-roll came to dominate the recording industry, Mr. Miller was increasingly
out of step with the times. He left his executive position at Columbia Records in
1965. Still, many of the performers he signed to the label, including Vic Damone,
Jerry Vale, Mahalia Jackson, the Ray Conniff Singers and the New Christy Minstrels,
had substantial careers.
He recorded his final "Sing Along With Mitch" episode in 1964 but continued to make
his feel-good recordings for years, selling more than 20 million copies altogether.
He led sing-along concerts and conducted orchestras around the world. His 1987 recording
with the London Symphony of several classical works by Gershwin are now considered
some of the finest in the Gershwin repertoire.
At a peace rally protesting the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, Mr. Miller led a
group of thousands in singing Peter, Paul and Mary's "Where Have All the Flowers
Gone?"
For many years, Mr. Miller, who was known as "The Beard" during an era when it was
unusual for men to have facial hair, lived in an early 19th-century house in Stony
Point, N.Y., that inspired Alec Wilder to write the classic song "It's So Peaceful
in the Country."
"When the opportunity came to do something, I took it," he said in 1995, looking
back at his life in music. "I never had a career plan. It was serendipity. Good luck
comes to those who are prepared to receive it."


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
916/806-9551
Amateur (Ham) Radio K6YBV

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