Mitch Miller

Mitchell William Miller (July 4, 1911 – July 31, 2010) was an American choral conductor, record producer, record-industry executive, and professional oboist.

He was involved in almost all aspects of the industry, particularly as a conductor and artists and repertoire (A&R) man.

Mitchell William Miller was born to a Jewish family in Rochester, New York, on July 4, 1911.

His mother was Hinda (Rosenblum) Miller, a former seamstress, and his father, Abram Calmen Miller, a Russian-Jewish immigrant wrought-iron worker.

Mitch had four siblings, two of whom, Leon and Joseph, survived him.

He attended East High School.

Miller took up the oboe at first as a teenager, because it was the only instrument available when he went to audition for his junior high school orchestra.

A graduate of the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester in the early 1930s, Miller began his musical career as a player of the oboe and English horn, making numerous highly regarded classical and popular recordings.

After graduating from Eastman, Miller played with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and then moved to New York City, where he was a member of the Alec Wilder Octet (1938–41 and occasionally later), as well as performing with David Mannes, Andre Kostelanetz, Percy Faith, George Gershwin, and Charlie Parker.

As part of the CBS Symphony, Miller participated in the musical accompaniment on the 1938 radio broadcast of Orson Welles's Mercury Theater on the Air production of The War of the Worlds.

He also performed Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C Minor.

Miller joined Mercury Records as a classical music producer and served as the head of Artists and Repertoire (A&R) at Mercury in the late 1940s, and then joined Columbia Records in the same capacity in 1950.

This was a pivotal position in a recording company, because the A&R executive decided which musicians and songs would be recorded and promoted by that particular record label.

He worked with Frank Sinatra on the 1946 recording of "The Music of Alec Wilder".

Miller played the English horn part in the Largo movement of Dvořák's New World Symphony in a 1947 recording conducted by Leopold Stokowski.

By 1948 he also emerged under the baton of Alfredo Antonini performing Mozart's Oboe Concerto in C Major, K.314 with the CBS Symphony Orchestra in a braodecast for Voice of America.

Miller gave the American premiere of Richard Strauss's Oboe Concerto in a 1948 radio broadcast.

Strauss had originally assigned rights to the premiere to John de Lancie, who gave him the idea for the concerto while stationed near Strauss's villa in Garmisch.

However, since meeting the composer, de Lancie had won a section oboist position with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and as a junior player to the orchestra's principal oboist Marcel Tabuteau was unable to fulfill Strauss's wishes.

De Lancie then gave the rights for the premiere to Miller.

Miller was one of the most influential people in American popular music during the 1950s and early 1960s, both as the head of A&R at Columbia Records and as a best-selling recording artist with an NBC television series, Sing Along with Mitch.

While some of Columbia's performers, including Harry James, Frank Sinatra, and Rosemary Clooney, resented Miller's methods, the label maintained a high release-to-hit ratio during the 1950s.

After graduating from East High School he attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, where he met and became a lifelong friend of Goddard Lieberson, who became President of the CBS music group in 1956.

However, in 1958 he signed Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins, two of Presley's contemporaries at Sun Records.

According to former Newsweek music critic Karen Schoemer, Miller's refusal to record in the genre was also due to his fear that the label, and its corporate parent CBS, would be implicated in the scandal surrounding payola if he did so, remarking: "I knew what was going on—everybody in the business knew what was going on. You had to pay to play."

In defense of his anti-rock stance, he once told NME in January 1958: "Rock 'n' roll is musical baby food: it is the worship of mediocrity, brought about by a passion for conformity."

Despite his distaste for rock 'n' roll, Miller emphasized emotional expression over vocal perfection and often produced records for Columbia artists that were rockish in nature.

Two examples are "A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation)" by Marty Robbins and "Rock-a-Billy" by Guy Mitchell.

As a record producer, Miller gained a reputation for both innovation and gimmickry.

Although he oversaw dozens of chart hits, his relentlessly cheery arrangements and his penchant for novelty material—for example, "Come On-a My House" (Rosemary Clooney), "Mama Will Bark" (Frank Sinatra and Dagmar)—have drawn criticism from some admirers of traditional pop music.

He defined the Columbia style through the early 1960s, signing and producing many important pop standards artists for Columbia, including Johnnie Ray, Percy Faith, Ray Conniff, Jimmy Boyd, Johnny Mathis, Tony Bennett, and Guy Mitchell (whose pseudonym was based on Miller's first name).

After arriving at Columbia, Miller enticed Frankie Laine to join the label after his early successes at Mercury.

Miller helped direct the careers of artists who were already signed to the label, such as Doris Day, Dinah Shore, and Jo Stafford.

Miller also discovered Aretha Franklin, and signed her to the first major recording contract of her career.

She left Columbia after five years, when Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records promised Franklin artistic freedom to create records outside the pop mainstream in a more rhythm-and-blues-driven direction.

Mitch Miller disapproved of rock 'n' roll —one of his contemporaries described his denunciation of it as "The Gettysburg Address of Music"—and passed not only on Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly, who became stars on RCA and Coral, respectively, but on The Beatles as well, creating a fortune in revenue for rival Capitol.

Previously, Miller had offered Presley a contract but balked at the amount Presley's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, was asking.

Music historian Will Friedwald wrote in his book Jazz Singing (Da Capo Press, 1996) that"Miller exemplified the worst in American pop. He first aroused the ire of intelligent listeners by trying to turn—and darn near succeeding in turning—great artists like Sinatra, Clooney, and Tony Bennett into hacks. Miller chose the worst songs and put together the worst backings imaginable—not with the hit-or-miss attitude that bad musicians traditionally used, but with insight, forethought, careful planning, and perverted brilliance."

At the same time, Friedwald acknowledges Miller's great influence on later popular music production:

"Miller established the primacy of the producer, proving that even more than the artist, the accompaniment, or the material, it was the responsibility of the man in the recording booth whether a record flew or flopped. Miller also conceived the idea of the pop record 'sound' per se: not so much an arrangement or a tune, but an aural texture (usually replete with extramusical gimmicks) that could be created in the studio and then replicated in live performance, instead of the other way around. Miller was hardly a rock 'n' roller, yet without these ideas there could never have been rock 'n' roll. 'Mule Train', Miller's first major hit (for Frankie Laine) and the foundation of his career, set the pattern for virtually the entire first decade of rock. The similarities between it and, say, 'Leader of the Pack', need hardly be outlined here."