Johnny’s Greatest Hits — Johnny Mathis, June 9, 1958

Columbia 8634

Producer: Mitch Miller

Track listing: Chances Are /All the Time / The Twelfth of Never / When Sunny Gets Blue / When I Am with You / Wonderful! Wonderful! It’s Not for Me to Say/Come to Me Wild Is the Wind / Warm and Tender / No Love/
I Look at You

June 9, 1958
3 weeks, nonconsecutive

By the spring of 1958, young Johnny Mathis had already scored eight hit singles and three top 10 albums. Wonderful Wonderful, his debut album, climbed to number four in the fall of 1957. The follow-up, Warm, reached number two later that same year, while Good Night, Dear Lord stalled at number 10 in the spring of 1958. It would take a combination of Mathis’s greatest recordings to put him on top.

The son of a vaudeville singer, Mathis was born in San Francisco on September 30, 1935. As a youth, he divided his time between singing in the church choir and competing in a number of track and field events and basketball. It was only after Columbia Records flew him to New York for an audition that Mathis decided to skip the 1956 Olympic trials and focus on singing.

After Mathis had scored a number of hits, Columbia A&R executive Mitch Miller had plans to bring the singer’s popularity to new heights. “I was in England at the time and I was supposed to go in the studio and record a new album,” recalls Mathis. “Mitch Miller decided to release all the early singles that I had made as a compilation. That was the beginning of all the greatest-hits stuff. It was just another marketing ploy, but no one had really started doing that until that album. I was glad, because it gave people an opportunity to have all of my most popular stuff on one album.”

Many of Mathis’s early sides, such as “When Sunny Gets Blue,” “It’s Not for Me to Say,” and “Wonderful! Wonderful!” were recorded with Ray Conniff serving as arranger. “Columbia found Ray and paid $25 or $30 to do the singles. He was a genius. He did all of those songs with only eight to 10 musicians,” says Mathis. The early tracks were recorded quickly at the Columbia Records 30th Street Studio, an old renovated church on 30th Street and Third Avenue in New York City. “Each song only took about 30 minutes or so,” he adds. “It was get it or don’t get it. Whatever was on the record was what went out.”

The singer shared a songwriting credit on “I Look at You” with J.M. Robinson, but Mathis downplays his role. “All I did was change the middle part and the bridge around and she gave me writing credit,” he says. “But I a very minimal amount of work on that. I don’t know how to write music.”

Johnny’s Greatest Hits hit the top of the Best Selling Pop LP’s chart in its ninth week on the chart and spent three weeks in the Number One position. In November 1959, Mathis would hit the summit again, but Johnny’s Greatest Hits was his greatest chart accomplishment. It remained on the album chart for 490 weeks, a record that would remain in tact until it was eclipsed by Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon 15 years later.

THE TOP FIVE
Week of June 9, 1958

1. Johnny’s Greatest Hits, Johnny Mathis
2. South Pacific, Soundtrack
3. The Music Man, Original Cast
4. South Pacific, Original Cast
5. Elvis’ Golden Records, Elvis Presley