The Mistakes of Yesterday, the Hopes of Tomorrow: The Story of the Prisonaires

Prologue: Poor Old Johnnie Ray

1 PROLOGUE Poor Old Johnnie Ray What music does (all music) is put into play a sense of identity that may or may not fit the way we are placed by other social forces. . . . [Music] can also suggest that our social circumstances are not immutable and that other people—performers, fans—share our dissatisfaction. —Simon Frith, Performing Rites Johnnie Ray needed a hit. His last single, “Johnnie’s Coming Home,” had managed to scrape the bottom of Billboard’s Top 100 singles chart only to vanish within a week. Not helping matters was that America was firmly ensconced in the post-Elvis era, and rock and roll, for anyone still harboring doubts, was for real. A seismic cultural shift that made Ray’s heavily orchestrated middle-of-the-road (MOR) pop as well his overblown, stagey vocal style, which had earned him the sobriquet the Prince of Wails, sound pejoratively old school. To return to chart prominence and make a case for his continued relevance as one of pop music’s most revered pre-rock vocalists were among the challenges facing Ray and his producer, the Columbia Records majordomo and noted hater of rock and roll Mitch Miller (“It’s not music,” he famously quipped, “it’s a disease”), as they entered Radio Recorders Studios in Hollywood on June 29, 1956.1 Born on the Fourth of July 1911 in Rochester, New York, Miller was a graduate of the Eastman School of Music and an accomplished oboist who, after a stint with the Rochester Philharmonic and CBS Symphony , joined the Artist and Repertoire (A&R) Department at Mercury Records in 1948. Within a year he had a chart-topping hit with “That 2 / PROLOGUE Lucky Old Sun,” recorded by Frankie Laine. In 1950 Miller was hired by the chief executive officer of Columbia Records and a fellow Eastman alum Goddard Lieberson as head of A&R and proceeded to oversee hits for Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, Johnny Mathis, and Doris Day. During this run of success Miller “[defined] American popular music in the postwar, pre-rock era, carefully matching singers with songs and choosing often unorthodox but almost always-catchy instrumental accompaniment .”2 Despite his gimmicky, if not downright corny, approach to pop music, Miller initially weathered the changes wrought by rock and roll and became widely known to a generation of baby boomers (and their parents) through his multi-million-selling “Mitch Miller and the Gang” recordings and as the genial, goateed host of the gimmicky, downright corny television program “Sing Along with Mitch,” which aired on NBC from 1961 to 1964. Later in his career Miller shifted his focus to Broadway, producing musicals with limited success, and he spent his later years, almost until his death in 2010 at the age of ninety-nine, as a symphony orchestra guest conductor.3 The idea for Johnnie Ray to record “Just Walkin’ in the Rain” was Miller’s. Convinced this song could resuscitate his flagging career, Miller had been on Ray’s case to record it for nearly two years. In an exhausting daylong session, Ray cut “Look Homeward Angel,” “In the Candlelight,” “Weaker Than Wise” (a perfectly titled summation of his career), and “If I Had You.” He was pleased with the results, but Miller insisted he try “Just Walkin’ in the Rain.” “I was tired and almost refused to record the song,” Ray recalled nearly thirty years later. “I said, ‘Mitch, I’m tired. Let’s skip this piece of crap.’ He said to me, ‘John, this could be the song that’ll do it for you. Try it. Give it your best shot.’ So we did it in two takes, because it was easy, there was nothing to it.”4 The arranger Ray Conniff ran the session. Miller had brought Conniff to Columbia in the early 1950s as a chief engineer to work with the trumpeter and bandleader Harry James. In October 1955 his arrangement of “Band of Gold,” a hit for the professional golfer turned pop singer Don Cherry, defined the Conniff sound: “Meticulous, uptempo pop [with a] regimented beat [and a] chilly innocence.”5 His produc- Poor Old Johnnie Ray / 3 tion work for, among others, Mathis, Laine, and Bennett as well as his solo recordings quickly transformed him into the undisputed king of melodramatic anti-rock pop. Whatever the song or genre, with Conniff in charge the end result would be commercially successful MOR cheese: hokey emotionalism...