Mail-Order Melody

For years people have talked back to their television sets -- "Why don't you shut up?" "Give 'em hell, Harry" -- but not until Mitch Miller came along did viewers sling an arm around the old tube and sing along with it. A three-year-old phenomenon of the record industry, Miller's eleven Sing Along with Mitch albums have sold well over 4,000,000 copies. Now appearing fortnightly on NBC with a 28-man chorus of bald basses and potted tenors -- last week's show was the third of the series -- he has set new rating highs with such material as Toot, Toot, Tootsie!, I've Been Working on the Rail road and Beautiful Ohio.

Schmalted Milk. The show uses female soloists but concentrates on the chorus ("These guys look like people at home," says Mitch, "the man in his undershirt, or the banker"). Mitch directs, tossing his own baritone into the ground swell, and when there is some explainin' to do, ol' Mitch is right there droppin' his g's an' spittin' out words like "vittles" and "shucks" through forever ripplin' smiles. But he keeps his comments to less than four minutes in the hour-long show.

The rest is mail-order melody all the way. Juggling metaphors, Showman Miller says: "You've got to hook the audience fast and never let them step off the edge of the curb." Who really sings along on the curb? Evidence is that a great many people do, variously primed by nostalgia, beer, 200-to-1 martinis, or schmalted milk. In their living rooms, viewers may be less inhibited than they once were when the old bouncing ball of the movie shorts went thud-thud-thud into oblivion.

Woofing to Mars. A 49-year-old man with a 20-year-old beard, Mitch Miller is something more than a jolly Shylock demanding his pound of flats. Trained at the Eastman School of Music, he played the oboe with the Syracuse Symphony and with the Rochester Philharmonic, and was well along in a career as a classical musician when Mercury Records asked him to supervise some popular recordings. One munch of that pop coin was all he needed. Becoming an artists-and-repertory man, responsible for selecting songs, singers, bands and arrangements, he soon shifted to Columbia Records, where he became the top operator in the business, "inventing" stars (he never says he has "discovered" them) from Johnny Mathis to Guy Mitchell, Tony Bennett, Frankie Laine and Rosemary Clooney.

Now a leading performer himself, he receives sacks of fan mail, which are duly piled in his office in Manhattan's Columbia Records Building among Picasso lithographs and a stereo system that seemingly could woof its way to Mars. Turning up every working morning at 8 a.m., Miller sits alone in the quiet building and contemplates the bags of mail, while he dutifully practices on his oboe and sends its melancholy notes into the empty halls. He does not regret his departure from serious music ("Classical musicians today," he observes, "are worse off than teachers"). Obviously, Mitch Miller is his own best invention.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.