<Archive Obituaries> Guy Mitchell (July 1st 1999)
Bill Schenley
(And Became My Very First Boyhood Hero)
A Personal Tribute To Singer Guy Mitchell, Who Died This Week
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FROM: The (London) Daily Mail (July 7th 1999) ~
By Ray Connolly
You may never have heard of him, though you may know a
couple of the songs he sang.
But in the Fifties, just before the eruption of rock and
roll, he was probably the biggest pop star in the world and
definitely the most popular singer in Britain. He was Guy
Mitchell and he died the other day in Las Vegas, virtually
forgotten.
Nearly everyone knows Singing The Blues but what about She
Wears Red Feathers (And A Hula-Hula Skirt), The Roving Kind,
Pretty Little Black-Eyed Susie and more than a dozen more -
just about one every three months between 1951 and 1956?
Some songs become part of the language, the shared currency
of everyday life in which we all deal, and for a short time
Guy Mitchell, together with Frankie Laine and Doris Day,
defined their period in the British spotlight when they
presented American glamour to a cowed but resilient 60-watt
Britain; a Britain in awe of America; a country taking an
awful long time to get over the war.
Guy Mitchell was American but always more successful in
Britain, where, in the years of Fifties' austerity, no
Sunday edition of the lunchtime BBC Light Programme's Two
Way Family Favourites was complete without a wholesome
breath of Guy Mitchell sunshine.
While the roast simmered in the oven there would be Guy:
'Feet up, pat him on the po-po, let's hear him laugh,
ha-ha!' And you would smile because the laugh in his voice
was so infectious.
At a time of bleakness and rationing, Guy Mitchell brought a
musical optimism in a series of cleverly arranged novelty
songs.
Once heard, who could forget the wedding ceremony from She
Wears Red Feathers: 'An elephant brought her in, placed her
by my side, then six baboons took out bassoons and played
Here Comes The Bride'?
It was a time of innocence, sandwiched between the
'enjoy-yourself, it's-later-than-you-think' ethos of World
War II and the permissiveness of the Sixties.
As such, it was the last time when people in their late
adolescence were young adults, rather than teenagers with
their own separate styles and rebellions.
In those days there was no separate youth culture. The young
didn't have any spending power.
So I've no doubt that when the Queen Mother watched Guy
Mitchell at the London Palladium in the Royal Variety
Performance of 1954 she understood and enjoyed the
performance just as much as Princess Margaret and the rest
of the country.
Obviously young girls were more demonstrative about pop
stars then as now but their keenness didn't exclude their
parents from enjoying the music, too.
Popular music then wasn't anything like as generational.
Guy Mitchell was my first childhood music hero and I suppose
in some ways he helped shape my life.
I was ten when I first became aware of him. There was some
kind of cavalcade on the River Mersey (it may well have been
part of the Festival of Britain celebrations, I don't know)
and a kind man called Mr Lowe from across the road invited
my mother, sister and myself to go with him and his family
in their car to see it.
In those days of petrol rationing, when few people had cars
to put petrol into, this was a major expedition.
I don't remember much about the river cavalcade, just that
the tannoy system seemed to play just two records which
everyone liked all evening.
From then on I eagerly awaited every new record, carefully
writing its number down in a blue-backed notebook.
And when a schoolteacher lodger who lived with us for a
while bought me my first record - Chicka Boom by Guy
Mitchell, of course - for my 12th birthday, I began my (now
vast) collection, carefully ironing the record sleeves when
they got crumpled.
I quickly got to know everything there was to know about
Guy. How he was born Al Cernick in Detroit, Michigan, of
Yugoslav parents in 1927, attracted the attention of Warner
Brothers as a boy, served in the U.S. Navy and became a
singer in New York after winning a talent competition.
I learned, too, how lucky he was to be associated with the
best producer of the time, Mitch Miller (the first modern
producer) and the most successful songwriter, Bob Merrill,
who went on to write Funny Girl for Barbra Streisand.
Once a year Guy would visit Britain and tour the old Empire
theatres, coming on last after a variety show of trapeze
artists, jugglers and comedians. (I first saw Morecambe and
Wise on the same bill as Guy.) Liverpool was far too
dangerous a place for a child to go on his own (we lived
about 15 miles away) so I always dragged my mother and
Auntie Beatrice along, demanding that we stand outside the
Liverpool Empire's stage door with the girl fans to wave at
Guy after the show.
I wasn't the only one. Just about every rock star to emerge
in Liverpool a decade later spent a lot of childhood time in
that gloomy little side street outside the Empire's stage
door, although I was a bit disappointed when, years later,
John Lennon told me that although he'd been there, too, he'd
been waiting for Frankie Laine.
Then, I didn't realise that the early Fifties were a dark
period of almost relentless bad news: the Korean War, the
spies Burgess and Maclean, the hanging of Derek Bentley,
Churchill in his dotage.
And I can see, too, that the bright, happy-go-lucky songs of
Guy Mitchell, so new and exciting to me, were actually the
end of a musical line.
He may have been one of the first modern, international pop
stars, huge in Australia, South Africa and Holland, too,
certainly the 'world's top selling disker' as his publicity
described him, but musically he was always heading in the
wrong direction.
In l956 Elvis and rock and roll came, and with him the
emphasis on the 12-bar blues song. People didn't want to
know about baboons playing bassoons any more. The shape of
the new songs wouldn't carry lyrics like that.
Novelty and romanticism went out: directness came in. And
although, ironically, Guy had his biggest hit ever in that
year with Singing The Blues, a multimillion worldwide seller
and a change of style for him, his career soon began to
languish.
And when zealots like me transferred our affections to the
new sounds of electric guitars, poor Guy began his long
retreat into the entertainment twilight. By the age of 30 he
was quickly being forgotten, along with that whole era of
British life.
No one ever talks about life in black-and-white, early
Fifties Britain: it's something we'd all rather forget - as
Guy Mitchell has been forgotten.
I don't think Guy took the fact that his best days were
behind him too well at first.
For a while he had a career as a country singer but there
were alcohol and marriage problems, with at least three
wives, one an ex-Miss America. But he was always,
apparently, generous and, without children himself, some of
his money went into giving delinquent boys the chance to
work with horses on a ranch he bought.
I met him a couple of times, long after his great days, when
he was touring bingo halls, singing to middle-aged ladies
who sang along with him.
He was friendly enough but stultifyingly loquacious and
couldn't answer the questions I'd wondered about all those
years earlier when I'd filled in my Guy Mitchell blue
exercise book.
His records still sell in small numbers, now out on CD in
greatest hit collections. Listening to them again it's
possible to see why, with that pleasant light tenor, he
caught the moment so well, how he cheered us all in the dark
days but also how the songs and arrangements were probably
just as important as he was in the mixture that produced the
hits.
Guy was 72 when he died after failing to recover from an
operation.
I'd like to think that I'm not the only one who felt the
book finally close on his childhood memories when Guy went -
because I can't tell you how good his records were.
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Guy Mitchell, 72, Affable Crooner Of Novelties And
Country Songs
FROM: The New York Times (July 5th 1999) ~
By Stephen Holden
Guy Mitchell, the jocular pop crooner of lightweight songs
who epitomized the clean-cut boy next door in the early
1950's, died on Thursday at Desert Springs Hospital in Las
Vegas, Nev. He was 72 and lived in Las Vegas.
The cause was complications following surgery, said his
wife, Betty Mitchell.
Between 1950 and 1960 Mr. Mitchell had nearly 40 hit
records, most of them novelties, folk tunes and country
songs, all under the aegis of the Columbia Records producer
Mitch Miller. In 1956 Mr. Mitchell's cover version of Marty
Robbins's country hit "Singing the Blues" was the No. 1 pop
single for a near record-breaking 10 weeks.
The son of immigrants from Yugoslavia, Mr. Mitchell was born
Al Cernick in Detroit. When he was 11, his family moved to
Los Angeles where he auditioned for Warner Brothers; the
company groomed him to be a child star. But his film career
was delayed when the family moved to San Francisco, where
Mitchell appeared regularly on the radio shows of Dude
Martin, a country singer.
In 1947 he became a vocalist with Carmen Cavallero's
orchestra with which he made his first recordings for Decca.
In 1949 he won "Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts" as a
soloist. When Frank Sinatra refused to record two songs for
Columbia Records while the band was waiting in the studio,
Mr. Miller, who had heard Mitchell sing on demonstration
records, called him in as a last-minute substitute. Those
two songs, "My Heart Cries for You" (a soupy adaptation of
an 18-century French ballad, "Chanson de Marie-Antoinette")
and "The Roving Kind" (an adaptation of an English folk
song, "The Pirate Ship," that had previously been recorded
by the Weavers) became back-to-back Top 5 hits.
He went on to enjoy a succession of jaunty hits, including
"Sparrow in the Treetop," "My Truly, Truly Fair," "Belle,
Belle, My Liberty Belle," "Pittsburgh, Pa.," and "Feet Up
(Pat Him on the Po-Po"), clever pseudo-folk novelties by Bob
Merrill, who had invented the sub-genre with the Patti Page
hit "(How Much Is That) Doggie in the Window?"
As rock-and-roll stampeded onto the charts in the
mid-1950's, Mr. Mitchell's moment seemed to be over. But by
shifting the emphasis from novelties to country songs, Mr.
Mitchell enjoyed a second wind with "Singing the Blues,"
"Rock-a-Billy" (a stiff tribute to the Memphis country-rock
sound), and a second and final No. 1 hit, "Heartaches by the
Number," a cover version of Ray Price's country hit.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sons, Joseph
Stanzak of Twin Falls, Idaho, and David Stanzak of Spokane,
Wash., and five grandchildren.
Mr. Mitchell also worked as a movie actor. He starred with
Rhonda Fleming, Gene Barry, Agnes Moorehead and Teresa
Brewer in "Those Redheads From Seattle" (1953), a comedy
about the Gold Rush, and with Rosemary Clooney and Jack
Carson in "Red Garters" (1954), a musical western spoof, and
appeared in "The Wild Westerners" (1962). For three months
in 1957 he was the host of a variety series, "The Guy
Mitchell Show" on ABC. In the early 1960's he played a
detective, George Romack, in a short-lived NBC series,
"Whispering Smith," starring Audie Murphy.
After being dropped from Columbia Records in 1962, Mitchell
recorded sporadically for several labels and was a regular
performer on the nostalgia circuit.
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FROM: The London Times (July 13th 1999) ~
Guy Mitchell, singer, died in Las Vegas on July 1 aged 72.
He was born in Detroit on February 22, 1927.
During the 1950s Guy Mitchell carved out a niche for himself
as a popular crooner. A high-voiced, clean-cut character,
Mitchell was famous for his novelty records - mostly of the
folk and country variety - which notched up 24 entries in
the US Billboard Charts, and 14 in the UK Top 20 singles
charts.
Born Albert Cernick, the son of Yugoslav immigrants, he
moved with his family when he was 11 to Los Angeles, where
Warner Brothers began grooming him as a child actor.
However, his film career was stunted when his family moved
again, to San Francisco, where Mitchell performed on the
radio with the country singer Dude Martin.
After a brief period entertaining for the US Navy, Mitchell
joined Carmen Cavallero's orchestra in 1947 and made his
first recording with Decca. Two years later he won Arthur
Godfrey's talent show as soloist. Convinced that his destiny
now lay as a singer, he had a lucky break when Frank Sinatra
pulled out of two-song deal with Columbia. The producer
Mitch Miller called him in as a last-minute replacement, but
was not keen on the name Al Cernick. "My name is Mitchell
and you seem like a nice guy," he said "so we'll call you
Guy Mitchell".
The two songs, My Heart Cries for You (adapted from an
18th-century French ballad, Chanson de Marie Antoinette) and
The Roving Kind (a version of an old English folk song, The
Pirate Ship), were Top Five hits in America.
Miller was keen to cultivate Mitchell's quirky, folksy
sound, and an enormous hit followed in 1956-57, with a cover
version of the Marty Robbins country tune Singing the Blues.
Number One in America for an unpredecented ten weeks and
Mitchell's third Number One in Britain, it sold more than
ten million copies worldwide.
There were other sprightly chart successes, including
Sparrow in the Treetop; My Truly, Truly Fair; Belle, Belle,
My Liberty Belle; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Feet Up (Pat
Him on the Po-Po).
Towards the end of the decade, as rock 'n' roll threatened
to wipe out everything in its path, Mitchell shifted
increasingly from novelty recordings towards country music.
After Singing the Blues, there was a cover of Ray Price's
Rock-a-Billy, and his last American hit and British Top Five
entry was 1959's Heartaches by the Number.
As an actor, Mitchell appeared in the comedy Those Redheads
from Seattle (1953), the western spoof Red Garters (1954)
and The Wild Westerners (1962). In 1957 he hosted the
television variety series The Guy Mitchell Show for three
months, and in the 1960s he played the television detective
George Romack in a short-lived NBC series, Whispering Smith.
Dropped by Columbia in 1962, Mitchell enjoyed modest success
with two country albums for the Starday label. He continued
to perform on the live circuit, though there were periods of
absence through alcoholism. He was always more popular in
Britain than in America, and in the 1980s a Guy Mitchell
Appreciation Society was formed. In 1985 he recorded Garden
in the Rain, an anthology of British songs including Paul
McCartney's Yesterday and Noel Coward's I'll See You Again.
In total, his records sales worldwide exceed 44 million.
Guy Mitchell was married three times: first in 1952 to Jacki
Loughley (a former Miss USA), and secondly in 1956 to Elsa
Soronson (a former Miss Denmark). He is survived by his
third wife of 25 years, Betty, and by two sons.
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