Percy Faith

During the 1950s and 1960s, Percy Faith stood among the leading figures in easy listening recordings. Multiple albums and singles issued under his own name achieved strong commercial success, yet he also shaped numerous hits for Tony Bennett, Doris Day, Johnny Mathis, and Burl Ives while serving as musical director at Columbia Records throughout the decade.

Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, Faith revealed remarkable piano ability at an early age, delivering his debut recital at Massey Hall when he turned 15 and later supplying live accompaniment for silent films in several local theaters. An injury to his hands sustained in a fire at age 18 abruptly ended any prospect of a concert career. He therefore turned to arranging, first with small hotel ensembles in the city and soon afterward in radio, where the richly textured pop-instrumental approach that would define his work took shape. For most of the 1930s he remained with the Canadian Broadcast Company, and by the close of the decade his program Music by Faith was also reaching listeners inside the United States.

Displeased by CBC cuts to his show’s budget, Faith moved to Chicago in 1940 and shortly thereafter to New York, where he obtained U.S. citizenship in 1945. At NBC he arranged and conducted for programs and vocalists that included Coca-Cola’s radio series and Buddy Clark; during the late 1940s he also recorded for both Decca and RCA Victor.

Faith joined Columbia Records in 1950 as musical director and as a recording artist in his own right. While supplying arrangements of standard pop songs, show tunes, and folk material for the label’s vocalists, he pioneered the light, orchestrated mood-music albums that became his signature. He was likewise the first to issue entire LPs devoted solely to Broadway scores and among the earliest mainstream arrangers to explore Latin rhythms.

His first number-one single, “Delicado,” arrived in 1952. In the middle of the decade he began scoring films, starting with the Oscar-nominated collaboration with George Stoll on Love Me or Leave Me. His greatest commercial success of the 1960s, however, came from another composer’s screen theme: the late-1959 recording of Max Steiner’s “The Theme from ‘A Summer Place’” reached number one in 1960 and earned Faith his first Grammy. Even after rock and roll reshaped popular music in the early 1960s, his chart standing stayed solid, sustained by his arranging skill and careful choice of material. He gradually reduced his professional commitments in the late 1960s yet continued to record until shortly before his death in 1976.