[Dixielandjazz] Mitch Miller (Washington Post)

[Harry Callaghan]

A thorough and rather interesting article, indeed.

Of course, we must take into account the fact that Mr. Schudel was really
stretching it refering to Dagmar as an actress.  She was merely a fixture on
one of the first late night TV programs, "Broadway Open House" hosted by
comedian Jerry Lester. and was particularly noted for her larger than
average bust measurement.

I was quite young when the program aired but when first seeing Dagmar, I
remembver my iniitial reaction being 'Now here's someone who makes Marie
Wilson look smart"

If she was still around today, she could very well  be the one who asks, "Do
you want to buy a vowel?"

With regard to Tony Bennett's recording of "Cold, Cold Heart" Tony, on an
interview with Elvis Costello on his Sundance program "Spectacle" said (and
he swears it's true) that sjhortly after the record's release, he received a
phone call from Hank Williams, who not only popularized it but had written
it as well.

Tony said, "When I picked up the phone, from the other end came. "What'd ya
wanta go and ruin my song like that for?'"

As Tony related the incident to Elvis, he didn't sound like he thought
Williams was kidding.but I guess we'll never really know.

Tides,
HC



On 8/3/10, Robert Ringwald <rsr at ringwald.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
> "We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like
> a man standing
> in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle"
> -- Winston Churchill
>
>
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