Compilation Liner Notes ~

For the better part of the 20th century, millions of people the world over have harbored a special affection for Perry Como and his music that transcends the typical enthusiasm most fans reserve for their favorite recording artist. This feeling is something rather different and much more personal. The singer himself has noted that complete strangers often approach him as they would an intimate acquaintance, not realizing until the last minute that they've never actually met. There is a special quality about the man, which is echoed in his beautiful baritone voice, that has served to carve out for Mr. C a unique niche as arguably the most reassuring presence in all of popular music. The hero of Perry's youth, Bing Crosby, began his career exuding Jazz Age insouciance and ended up evolving into a benevolent, almost paternal figure. With Sinatra, a healthy dose of swagger, entwined with the hint of danger, was never far from the surface. Perry Como always came across as the friendly next door neighbor who'd stopped lolling in the backyard hammock long enough to drop by and share some lovely melodies. A fixed point in a changing universe, with a voice that seemed uncannily immune to the passing decades.

Despite his tremendous success, it's surprising how slow the self-appointed experts are to give Como his due when they take to rattling off their lists of the great popular vocalists. Perhaps the almost folkloric stature of the man's relaxed demeanour has worked against him in this respect. He simply makes it all look too easy. "Perry has always been greatly underestimated," confided his long-time associate and choral director Ray Charles during a recent interview. "It's mystifying to me, because when you listen to his records all you hear is gorgeous, beautiful, tasty singing." The languid persona that was etched into the public's consciousness for so many years on television belies the reality of a hard-working, ambitious entertainer who always came prepared for the task at hand. Como was, for example, one of the few pop singers of his era who read music, an ability that served him particularly well in the recording studio (musical director Mitchell Ayres was greatly impressed and a little stunned, when he arrived at his first Como session in 1949 to discover the singer going over the score and conducting the musicians).

Of course, Perry's greatest asset has always been his remarkable vocal instrument, although appraisals of this gift have also been subject to stereotyping. The intimacy with which he imparts softly sung, delicately wrought ballad performances has become so strongly identified with Como over the years that some mistakenly assume this constitutes the full extent of his range. The truth is that he has considerable reserves to draw upon, and when the occasion warrants a big finish, or the sustained intensity of a number like "If," Como can belt with the best of them. His supple voice, which Mr. C has characterized as "somewhere between a tenor and a light baritone," has flourished in a wide variety of settings over the years. Love songs and show tunes are his natural forte, but Perry has also proven unusually adept at breathing new life into the forgotten classics of yesteryear. Variety once hailed him as a "Maker of Songs" for the popularity of such singles as "When You Were Sweet Sixteen," a 1947 revival of a tune written in 1898. Along the way, beloved efforts like "(There's No Place Like) Home for the Holidays" from 1954 helped make Perry one of the essential voices of the holiday season. Then there is the long string of admittedly silly novelty tunes that his public embraced so fervently, much as they later did the adult-contemporary chart-toppers that characterized the latter portion of his career.

The Como Saga, like those of Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and so many other popular male vocalists, has its beginnings in Italy. His parents, Pietro and Lucille Como, left Italy and made their way to Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, shortly after the turn of the century. They eventually raised 13 children, of which their son Pierino, who was born on May 18, 1912, was a middle child. The fact that he was born the seventh son of a seventh son might well have been a harbinger of the charmed life that lay ahead. The youngster expressed an early interest in music and toyed with several instruments, notably a trombone that he played as part of a marching band. He also loved to sing. Como has never been what might be described as "a show business person," so it's understandable that the entertainment world was not his first choice as a ticket away from the hardscrabble life of mill hands and mine workers that consumed so many in the region. He decided to be a barber instead. The ambitious youngster had his own shop while barely a teenager, but his father wisely insisted that Perry withdraw from tonsorial circles until after he'd completed his high school education.

Although accounts vary widely as to whether he auditioned on his own initiative or was goaded into it by friends, Perry came to the attention of a Cleveland bandleader named Freddie Carlone in 1933. Carlone led a Guy Lombardo-styled outfit that had built up a local following, and he was in need of a boy singer. Perry took the two most significant steps in his life that July: he embarked on a new professional career in music and married his childhood sweetheart, Roselle Belline ( a happy union that would endure for sixty-five years until Roselle's death in 1998 ). The style known as "crooning" was still in the embryonic stage at this point, and Perry was a dedicated practitioner of the lost art of singing into a megaphone. One of his main influences was Russ Columbo, whose promising career was cut short by a freak accident in 1934. "We used to work at the New China Restaurant [in the Cleveland area]," Como later explained to music writer George Simon, "and right near us, at the Lotus Gardens, Russ was leading his own band. We became very good friends." This anthology's opening track, "Prisoner of Love," a number-one hit for Perry in 1946, was actually co-written by Columbo and had first been popularized as one of the ill-fated singer's signature songs in 1932.

As much as he liked Columbo, there's no getting around the fact that the musical fountainhead from which Como's career sprang was the singing of his all-time idol, Bing Crosby. Bandleader Bob Crosby, Bing's younger brother, once recalled for this writer an [ incident where ] his path crossed with Perry's in the mid- '30s. "He invited me back to his hotel room," remembered Bob, "where he had a little portable record player and a stack of brother Bing's records. He kept playing them for me one after the other and saying things like, 'This is how it should be done! This is how everyone should sing!' " Perry first encountered the song "Temptation," one of his big hits from 1945, while sitting in a darkened movie theater watching Crosby perform it in the 1933 film Going Hollywood. It was also economically prudent for Como to base his early approach on Crosby's style because, as he later recalled, so pervasive was Bing's influence in those days that singers who didn't sound like Crosby  simply "didn't eat." His respect for the master remained with Perry all his life. Many years later, when asked how he passed the time between shows in Las Vegas, Como replied, "I come down to the dressing room and listen to Crosby records to see if I'm doing it right."

In 1936, Perry made a favourable impression on nationally known bandleader Ted Weems while the Carlone band was playing in a casino in Warren, Ohio. Como would later modestly insist that Weems' success at the roulette table that night was what prompted him to offer the singer a job, but Weems [ who ] had been popular since the early '20s, knew a promising vocalist when he heard one and happened to be in need of a replacement for the departing Art Jarrett, who was leaving to start his own band. Perry joined the Weems outfit with Carlone's blessing and later characterized this band as "a really happy group," although there was one momentary uneasiness early in Como's tenure while the Weems band was broadcasting from the Palmer House in Chicago. The management of the radio station WGN delivered an ultimatum stating that they would discontinue these programs if his new singer didn't improve. Weems had Perry listen to a recording of one of his performances, and they both agreed that the fledgling talent was indulging in forced mannerisms and vocal embellishments at the expense of enunciation and clarity, a problem that was soon remedied. On May 15, 1936, Perry made his recording debut on a Weems band Decca single of "Lazy Weather." Heard today, the slavish earnestness of his Crosby impression is almost touching. Como was fully his own man as a stylist by the end of his six year stay with Weems, however, and had even started scoring minor hits shortly before the band broke up with Weems enlistment in the military in 1942.

Both Como and the popular music scene in general were at a crossroads in 1943. A recording ban ordered by James Petrillo, the formidable president of the American Federation of Musicians, helped set the stage for a gradual shift during which the popularity of singing stars would surpass that of the big bands that had spawned them. Frank Sinatra had left the Tommy Dorsey band to go solo in late 1942, and his successor, Dick Haymes, was poised to follow the same pattern. On a personal level, Perry was a father by this time, and the continuation of life on the road held little appeal. He seemed content to exit the limelight and return to the barbering trade in Canonsburg when the opportune intercession of a powerful agent named Tom Rockwell set him on the road to superstardom instead. Rockwell respected Como's position and insisted that if he would come to New York, the singer could use the city as both a launching pad and a relatively stable base of operations. Rockwell was as good as his word, and the first steps up the ladder for Perry were some club work at key Big Apple nightspots and a sustaining (non-sponsored) afternoon radio broadcast for CBS.

Things began to move very fast. A high-profile nightclub engagement at the Copacabana was extended several times, earning Perry rave reviews. He was hailed by veteran entertainer Rudy Vallee as, "the best in the field of cafe serenaders at present." Prestigious bookings at the Strand and Paramount theatres were similarly successful (during a Paramount engagement, Como offered friendly words of encouragement to a young elevator operator he'd caught singing to himself. The lad took the professional name Vic Damone and was soon one of Perry's Hit Parade rivals). It had all come together by the summer of '43. In June Perry signed a contract with RCA, the label that would serve as his recording home for the next forty-four years. Despite the fact that his initial release, "Goodbye Sue," was an a cappella performance due to the restrictions of the recording ban, it became a modes hit in August. That same year Como signed a seven-year motion picture deal with Twentieth Century-Fox, although film work did not prove to his liking and he asked for a release from the agreement in 1947. He found the mediums of radio, and later television, to be much more congenial. In 1944, Perry began appearing thrice weekly on radio's popular Chesterfield Supper Club program, the show with which he made a seamlessly successful transition to television in 1948.

The massive hit record that was required to cement Como's induction to the highest tier of show business came Perry's way in 1945 when an adaptation of Chopin's Polonaise in A-Flat Major entitled "Till The End Of Time" became a Number One record that was estimated to have sold over three million copies. The singer's typically self-effacing reaction was to tell an interviewer, "God bless Chopin." The following year, another pop adaptation of Chopin's music entitled "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" served Como almost as well. Beautifully sung performances like "If I Loved You" and "Surrender" also date from this period. The singer and his associates were picking his material wisely, although Perry was not always the best judge of promising selections (he turned down "Oh! What It Seemed To Be" only to watch it become a huge hit for Sinatra in '46). Novelty tunes and charming fluff had begun selling well for Como as early as 1945, but Perry didn't fully appreciate the enormity of their commercial potential until "Chi-Baba Chi-Baba (My Bambino Go To Sleep)" became the nation's favorite record and quickly turned gold in 1947. A second recording ban in 1948 forestalled the continued exploitation of this sort of thing for a while, but there would be many more such efforts in the coming years. Critics may have sniffed at such releases as "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo (The Magic Song)," "Zing Zing, Zoom Zoom," "Papa Loves Mambo," and "Hot Diggity (Dog Ziggity Boom)," but the undeniable fact remains that record buyers couldn't seem to get enough of such fare, and they remain among Como's best-loved performances.

It was Perry's instinctive grasp of the importance of television that helped set him apart from his competition in the early '50s, a decade that got off to a fine start for Como on the recording front as the polka-flavoured "Hoop-Dee-Doo" began making it's way toward  number one in April of 1950. While fellow heavyweights like Sinatra and Crosby stumbled on their initial forays into the medium, the television camera only served to magnify Perry's inherent likeability and quickly made him a welcome guest in the nation's living rooms. Television also provided an incomparable promotional vehicle for his recording career. "He really had an advantageous position," explained Ray Charles, whose Ray Charles Singers succeeded The Fontane Sisters as Perry's regular backing group in the studio and on his program. "When he had the fifteen-minute show and a new record was coming out, we'd program the song every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for the first two weeks. A tremendous audience got to hear these records three times a week, and I think that helped sales enormously." In 1955, Como left his fifteen-minute CBS broadcasts for a weekly hour-long show on NBC (this was also the year that Perry started turning out long-play albums, with the SO SMOOTH collection becoming the first of more than two dozen charting albums over the next two decades).

From 1955-1959, millions anticipated the opening strains of "Dream Along With Me" which signalled the beginning of "The Perry Como Show" on Saturday nights. In 1959 the program moved to Wednesdays and was re-titled "The Kraft Music Hall." Perry kept up with the gruelling demands of weekly television until 1963, when he scaled back his format to several specials a year (a move that eventually enabled him to return to live concert appearances, which were virtually abandoned while he busied himself with radio and television). The popularity of his broadcasts was a key factor in enabling Como to survive the rock and roll revolution of the mid- '50s, a sea change in popular music that destroyed many lesser careers. Perry acknowledged the new sounds in the air on efforts like "Ko Ko Mo (I Love You So)," "Tina Marie," and "Juke Box Baby," although the results were sometimes unintentionally humorous. In January of '55, RCA bought a two-page advertisement for "Ko Ko Mo" in Billboard. It features a photo of "Perry in Action on a Great Rock-and-Roll Record" and tried to pass off the king of calm as a finger-popping hipster! Como viewed this situation with bemused tolerance. "I sang with him on one of those up-tempo things," recalls Ray Charles, "and when sales levelled off at 750,000 copies, Perry presented me with three-quarters of a gold record!"

Como soon reverted to form, and by decade's end had racked up two more number one songs, both million-sellers, with "Round And Round" in 1957 and "Catch A Falling Star" in 1958. The B-side of the latter recording, "Magic Moments," also became a sizable hit and was one of the earliest triumphs of the song writing team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David. All told, Perry amassed more pop hits in the post-World War II era than any other artist with the exception of his RCA label-mate Elvis Presley. It leads one to wonder if there were any unique aspects to his frequent recording sessions. In New York, these almost always took place in either RCA's Studio A on 24th Street, Manhattan Center, or Webster Hall. Ray Charles shed some light on their inner workings during a recent interview. "They were very laid back," he explained, "Perry knew the band and he always came in knowing the material. The fact that he read music was also a great plus, and he would run through the songs with piano accompaniment before going for a take. I remember that the dates went rather slowly, and we almost never did more than two songs. Perry was a spontaneous performer, but he always insisted on listening to the playback and deciding on what he might want to do differently before trying it again. He generally sang quite softly, but didn't like to work too closer to the microphone, so the engineer had to make allowances. He had great instincts to rely on, although sometimes the off-beat things required extra effort. I remember, for example, that he had a little trouble at first, with the erratic tempo of "Don't Let The Stars Get In Your Eyes," but he was always a pleasure to work with.'" Most of the instrumentalists who played on these sessions would heartily concur with that last statement, because Perry made it a point to look after their interests. "I usually managed to do something that would take us into overtime so the musicians would get something extra," he later recalled. "You know, things like stopping to eat a sandwich . . . blowing my nose a lot . . . or even going to the bathroom."

The 1960's were an era of transition for everyone, including Perry Como, and his steady stream of hits slowed to a more modest pace. Early in the decade, his musical director Mitchell Ayres left the fold and was capably replaced by Nick Perito. When Perry bowed out of weekly television in favour of several specials a year in 1963, he decided to enliven things by taking his show on the road and broadcasting from various cities across America. In an engaging 1979 memoir entitled Prime Time, Marlo Lewis, his television producer during this period, recalled these events with particular fondness. "Perry's fans, by the tens of thousands, jammed the arenas when he appeared," Lewis wrote. "They were polite, appreciative, orderly, well dressed, and a reassuring sight to us. Accustomed during the turbulent 1960s to the news about riots in the streets, violence on the campuses, and the takeover of acid rock, it was good to find America still there." Como took his activities even farther afield in the mid- '60s when he brought television cameras into the Vatican for the first time as part of an unforgettable Christmas special and traveled to Rome to record the beautiful, string-laden Perry Como In Italy album in 1966. Back on the home front, in an inspired move prompted by the urging of A&R executive Steve Sholes, Perry had started recording in Nashville in 1965. While down South, Como forged comfortable working relationships with legendary producer Chet Atkins and backing vocalists The Anita Kerr Singers, resulting in a potent combination of talents responsible for a number of memorable recordings throughout the remainder of the decade.

The 1970's dawned full of promise as Perry's lilting rendition of "It's Impossible," an adaptation of a Spanish composition entitled Somos Novios, became his biggest hit in years. It earned him yet another gold record, rose to #10 on the pop charts (his first Top Ten success since "Kewpie Doll" in 1958), and topped the Adult Contemporary rankings for a solid month. In 1973, Chet Atkins persuaded Perry to record the tender Don McLean ballad "And I Love You So," which resulted in another Adult Contemporary #1, as well as a #29 pop success. The single peaked at #3 in Great Britain, where Como has cultivated an enthusiastic following ever since his recording of "Don't Let The Stars Get In Your Eyes," became a chart-topper on both sides of the Atlantic in 1953. His devoted overseas public made Perry's recording of "For The Good Times," a selection from the AND I LOVE YOU SO album that served as the follow-up single in Britain, another Top Ten success in 1973. Two years later, while pop acts like The Bay City Rollers and Abba were dominating the British charts, these same fans unexpectedly pushed a double album retrospective entitled PERRY COMO'S 40 GREATEST HITS to million-seller status.

In this age of limited attention spans, and overnight sensations who fizzle just as quickly, it is difficult to imagine a musical newcomer enjoying a prominent career with a fraction of the staying power Perry Como's has exhibited. In 1983, RCA hosted a party in New York's Rockefeller Center celebrating the singer's fortieth anniversary with the label, and four years later Perry capped off his RCA years with the release of the album "Perry Como Today", which featured his inimitable take on such contemporary favourites as "That's What Friends Are For" and "The Wind Beneath My Wings." By this point he'd long since forsaken the hustle and bustle of the entertainment world's power centres for a tranquil existence in Florida, where he once joked, "Down here, I don't see anybody but an occasional fish." His last major professional undertaking to date was a rapturously-received Christmas concert at the Point Theatre in Dublin, Ireland, that was preserved on both CD and videotape in 1993. It was yet one more masterstroke in a lifetime of magic moments that has brought happiness and joy to several generations. The street where the singer grew up in Canonsburg is known as Perry Como Avenue today, but the most indelible tribute this legendary performer will ever receive comes in the form of the smiles that break out everyday as people continue to delight in his rich recorded legacy. It is a genuine treasure-trove, saturated with some of the finest singing in all of popular music. To borrow a line from the great man himself, this is how it should be done.

~ JOSEPH F. LAREDO