Johnny Mathis

Emerging among the wave of traditional singers prior to the rock era's dominance in the 1960s, Johnny Mathis has focused his efforts on delivering romantic interpretations of jazz and pop standards aimed at adult contemporary listeners. His early years brought a burst of activity on the singles charts, highlighted by the Hot 100 chart-topper "Chances Are" from 1957, yet his true commercial breakthrough arrived through long-playing records, with a dozen reaching gold or platinum certification and more than sixty appearing on the Billboard 200. Initially devoted to concept-driven collections of show tunes and classic standards, Mathis broadened his palette from the 1970s forward to embrace soft rock, R&B, and country material. A perennial favorite for seasonal music as well, he has placed over half a dozen holiday albums on the charts along with nearly that many Christmas singles, among them the enduring favorite "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" that continues to chart since its 1986 release. This wide-ranging approach, paired with his honeyed vocal tone, has sustained Johnny Mathis as a concert draw well into the twenty-first century, capped by the arrival of his seventh Christmas project, Christmas Time Is Here, in 2023.

Given his signature technique of holding long notes with pronounced vibrato, it is fitting that Mathis trained with an opera coach before reaching his teens and nearly pursued that path professionally; his primary influences instead came from the polished crossover jazz singers of the 1940s—Nat "King" Cole, Billy Eckstine, and Lena Horne. An outstanding high-school athlete in San Francisco, he turned down a college track scholarship and the possibility of Olympic competition when the opportunity to perform presented itself. Club owner Helen Noga secured a management contract for the young vocalist and then introduced him to Columbia Records jazz producer George Avakian, who signed Mathis and assembled orchestras led by Teo Macero, Gil Evans, and John Lewis for the self-titled 1957 debut album. Despite the caliber of the musicians and the selection of standards, the record attracted little notice at the time.

Columbia A&R executive Mitch Miller—famous for his unabashedly pop-oriented Sing Along albums and television program—concluded that the solution lay in steering Mathis toward Miller’s style of pop balladry, a shift that proved immediately successful. The album Wonderful Wonderful took its title from a Top 20 single that appeared later that year and was followed in turn by the number-five hit "It's Not for Me to Say" and Mathis’s first number-one record, "Chances Are." Thereafter he devoted himself exclusively to lush ballads crafted for adult contemporary audiences.

Although he maintained steady chart presence, major single successes remained infrequent for Johnny Mathis throughout the late 1950s and 1960s—half of his career Top Ten entries had arrived in 1957 alone—so he turned his attention to the expanding album market in the manner of Frank Sinatra, his chief competitor at the close of the decade for the title of most popular traditional male vocalist. During the 1970s Mathis ventured into soft rock and scored his second number-one single in 1978 with the duet "Too Much, Too Little, Too Late" featuring Deniece Williams. That collaboration encouraged him to record further duets with partners such as Dionne Warwick, Natalie Cole, Gladys Knight, and Nana Mouskouri, although none matched the original’s commercial impact.

Mathis continued issuing and selling albums through the 1990s—his fifth decade with Columbia—and into the new millennium, releasing projects such as 1998’s Because You Loved Me: Songs of Diane Warren and 2000’s Mathis on Broadway. He followed the Broadway tribute with 2002’s The Christmas Album and 2005’s Isn’t It Romantic: The Standards Album, both showcasing the veteran vocalist in peak form. In 2008 he returned with A Night to Remember, the first straight-ahead adult contemporary album he had recorded in more than a decade, produced and arranged by Walter Afanasieff. September 2010 brought Let It Be Me: Mathis in Nashville, his first complete country album, which earned a Grammy Award nomination for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. His sixth holiday collection, Sending You a Little Christmas, appeared in 2013, and 2017 saw the release of Johnny Mathis Sings the Great New American Songbook, featuring contemporary material associated with Adele, Josh Groban, R. Kelly, and others.

Three months after the September appearance of Sings the Great New American Songbook, Legacy issued the expansive The Voice of Romance: The Columbia Original Album Collection, a 68-CD box set encompassing every album Mathis recorded for the label between 1956 and 2017. The collection also included I Love My Lady, an album produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards in 1981 that had remained unreleased until then.

In 2023 Mathis delivered his seventh collection of newly recorded Christmas material, Christmas Time Is Here, which featured a duet with Kristin Chenoweth and marked the final album recorded at Hollywood’s historic Capitol Recording Studio prior to its closure for major renovations.