What'll I do when you are far away and I am blue?

Continuing my trip back through the 1958 album charts.

09/11/58 : Warm - Johnny Mathis


Our third visit with Mr Mathis and I love his voice, so have pretty high expectations for this.

Yup - nothing wrong with this any of this. None of it exactly sets the world on fire because it's very much in the swoony strings department, but it's well done examples of that sort of thing - he really did have a lovely voice. Apparently it's an album of covers, but I was very unfamiliar with most of them - there were a couple I vaguely recognised but I only really knew "I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face" (unsurprisingly Johnny does not try to replicate Rex Harrison's delivery) and "What'll I Do" (which I know best from Nat King Cole's version, but we recently met Bob Dylan having a go).

We're at #7 on his second week of a two week run with it having peaked at #6 - and that was all it achieved, which seems a bit odd compared to how well some other albums did around this time. The top five this week are - go on, guess! Could it possibly be South Pacific, My Fair Lady, Frank, Elvis and Elvis? Why yes, indeed it could! And we have no new entries in the chart this week, but we do have a re-entry for one of Frank's '56 albums (#9).

Wikipedia tells us this was his third album and, like his previous album, doesn't include any of his hit singles - it's hard to imagine anyone playing that game these days. It was his first charting album over here which feels like quite the achievement because I imagine that the general UK public were not massively receptive to black American artists back then. It did very well in the US though spending 113 weeks in Billboard's 25 Best Selling Pop LPs chart. His entry tells me he's still alive and touring at the ripe old of '88 and last year released his 75th album.

"Customers also listened to" Tony Bennett, Andy Williams and a load of compilation albums from that era - people harking back to the good old days, I suspect. But Johnny Mathis isn't a name that pops up all that often in discussions (except for "When A Child Is Born" obviously) which is a bit of a shame because he had a lovely voice - this may be dated but it's still perfectly listenable. 

And we've got quite the gap coming up now...

28/09/58 - An interesting listen
16/11/58 - A wry musical oddity

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