Guy Mitchell: Singing the Blues (1950’s Columbia recordings)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

This morning I played through a two-CD package by the early-1950’s singer Guy Mitchell (who actually lived until 1999 but I have no idea – and his Wikipedia page doesn’t say – what he did after he passed his commercial peak). Mitchell was born Al Cernik – his parents were immigrants from Croatia – and got the name “Guy Mitchell” from Mitch Miller, who signed him to Columbia Records in 1950 and decided to give him Miller’s own first name as a last name. He got a huge break when Mitch Miller booked a recording session for Frank Sinatra to record a couple of country- and folk-flavored pop songs called “My Heart Cries for You” and “The Roving Kind.” Sinatra showed up for the session, heard the songs he was supposed to record, decided they were shit and walked out. Stuck with a studio, an orchestra – whose members, under union rules, would have to be paid whether they recorded anything or not – and two songs Miller was convinced had hit potential, he called up his newly rechristened Croatian boy and told him to come to the studio. Now. Mitchell did and had two career-launching hits.

I bought the Guy Mitchell collection – which actually turned out to be 30 songs stretched out over two CD’s in one of those annoying tight outer boxes that makes it virtually impossible to extract the discs – and they turned out to be interesting but also annoying because of the song choices and Miller’s production affectations. He had decided that French horns would be the appropriate backing for Mitchell’s country-pop voice, and he gave him folkish novelties. Two of the songs are duets with Rosemary Clooney, including a version of Irving Berlin’s “You’re Just In Love” – unusually for this song, he gave Clooney the straight melody in the first chorus and Mitchell the double-time counterpoint in the second (usually it’s the man who sings first and the woman who comes in with the double-time second chorus, which are then repeated in counterpoint for the rest of the song). For my money, the definitive version of the song is the superb radio broadcast Bing Crosby and Judy Garland did together – Judy had just been fired by MGM and Bing was trying to help her out, giving her exposure on his radio show and trying to get his studio, Paramount, to sign her for a film in which they would co-star (the “suits” at Paramount had heard all the horror stories about what Judy had put their opposite numbers at MGM through and decided that was one headache they didn’t need), but Mitchell and Clooney do O.K. even though they hardly swing it as hard as Bing and Judy did. The first disc in the collection – I decided I could wait to hear the second until later in the day because, while this music isn’t actively unpleasant, a little of it goes a long way – includes an attempt at rock ’n’ roll, reflecting Columbia’s decision not to develop any new rock artists but to answer the demand for it by having their existing contractees, including Mitchell and Marty Robbins, try their hands at it.

While the other majors were signing actual rockers – RCA Victor with Elvis Presley, Capitol with Gene Vincent, and Decca with Bill Haley and (briefly) Buddy Holly – Columbia gave Mitchell a song called “Rock-a-Billy” which was O.K. but only in the nice-try department. Mitchell’s real métier was as a ballad singer in the mold of Bing Crosby and Perry Como, and his cover of Hank Williams’ “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love with You)” turns it into an old-fashioned croon and actually comes off better than another Williams cover Miller tried at the same time, Tony Bennett’s “Cold, Cold Heart: (a neither-fish-nor-fowl record that sold big at the time but today comes off as a mash-up in which Bennett is trying to sound halfway like Williams while keeping his own style – Williams at first hated it but then decided he liked it, no doubt at least partly because of the royalty money he was making on sales of Bennett’s version!). The first disc ended with “My Heart Cries for You,” and surprisingly I found myself wishing that Sinatra had recorded it: it’s really a romantic ballad and Sinatra could have phrased it with an eloquence far surpassing Mitchell’s pleasant but rather bland version – even though by 1950 Sinatra had fallen so far from grace, largely due to public revulsion over his love affair with Ava Gardner, his Left-wing (then) politics and the rumors of his Mafia connections, that Mitch Miller later decided that a Sinatra version of “My Heart Cries for You” would have flopped because so many people hated him for non-musical reasons.