Columbia 1351
Producers: Mitch Miller, Al Ham
Track listing: Heavenly / Hello, Young Lovers /A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening / A Ride on a Rainbow / More Than You Know / Something I Dream Last Night / Misty / Stranger in Paradise / Moonlight Becomes You / They Say It’s Wonderful / I’ll Be Easy to Find / That’s All
November 9, 1959
5 weeks mono
With the incredible success of Johnny’s Greatest Hits, Johnny Mathis became one of the premier recording artists in the country. His follow-up albums, Swing Softly, Open Fire, Two Guitars, and More Johnny’s Greatest Hits, all made the top 10, but it would take Heavenly to put Mathis back on top.
For this album — Mathis’s first recordings with arranger Glenn Osser — the crooner turned to a mix of show tunes, standards, and contemporary ballads. Many of the song selections were chosen because they had been performed by Mathis’s heroes. “I was influenced by Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and Nat King Cole,” he says. “I would listen to their recordings and then go in and sing the same songs.” Such was the case with “A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening,” a tune performed by Fitzgerald and included in the film Higher and Higher, featuring a young Frank Sinatra.
“A Ride on a Rainbow” was from the NBC-TV show Ruggles of Red Gap. “I heard Judy Holiday, who performed it in the Broadway production, sing it. And that was it for me,” says Mathis. “I fell in love with her. She was just a fabulous actress. I was a kid and I was very impressionable. Any time I heard anyone sing anything really well, I was influenced by the performance. Then I found out there was a beautiful song there. That’s one of my favorite songs of all time.”
“Misty,” Heavenly‘s best-known number, almost didn’t make it on the album. “We always had two or three extra songs,” Mathis says. “‘Misty’ was sort of relegated to that second or third spot. I was adamant that we record the song, because I had known Erroll Garner, the composer who wrote it, since I was 13 years old, and I had promised him that I was going to record the song. It would have been very embarrassing if we didn’t record it.”
Yet Columbia executives had other ideas. They wanted Mathis to record “Love Look Away” from Flower Drum Song. In the end, Mathis won out — “Misty” made it on Heavenly. He still remembers recording the track: “For the high note after the instrumental break, I had to walk across the room, because the engineers didn’t know how to make a crescendo. So I walked across the room and sang and then walked straight into the microphone, because I wanted it to sound like my voice was coming out of the oboe solo.”
Mathis would later appease the Columbia executives by recording “Love Look Away” in February 1961. The track appeared on the album I’ll Buy You a Star, which stalled at number 38.
Heavenly hit the summit in its eighth week on the chart. It was one of three Mathis titles in the top 10 at the time — More Johnny’s Greatest Hits held at number nine, while Johnny’s Greatest Hits dropped to number 10.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of November 9, 1959
1. Heavenly, Johnny Mathis
2. The Kingston Trio at Large, The Kingston Trio
3. Inside Sheley Berman, Sheley Berman
4. South Pacific, Soundtrack
5. From the Hungry I, The Kingston Trio