Andy Williams - Original Album Collection Vol. 1 & 2 (2013) 2 x Japanese Mini LP 8CD Box Set (16 CD)

An engaging crooner, TV personality, and entrepreneur, Andy Williams was one of the most bankable and popular singers of his era. With his laid-back delivery, supple voice, and amiable charm, Williams rode a wave of success that took him from a childhood vocal act with his brothers to worldwide fame as a solo artist, eventually finding latter-day success as a theater impresario in Branson, Missouri. Though he started out as a crooner in the post-Frank Sinatra style, his wide-ranging taste in music (as evidenced by the guests on his '60s variety show) found him embracing artists and songs across generational and stylistic boundaries; and he can be heard on record interpreting songs that range from traditional pop to rock to bossa nova, country, and beyond. From the pre-rock & roll era onward, Williams was one of the most recognizable singers of his day.

Born in Wall Lake, Iowa, Williams sang in his church choir and later formed a quartet with his three brothers. The group performed on radio throughout the Midwest, then moved to Los Angeles to make it in show business. The Williams Brothers Quartet appeared on Bing Crosby's 1944 hit "Swinging on a Star" and appeared with comedienne Kay Thompson during the late '40s.

Andy Williams finally began his solo career in 1952, making several appearances on Steve Allen's The Tonight Show before signing a contract with Archie Bleyer's Cadence Records in 1955. He hit the Top Ten in 1956 with his third single for the label, "Canadian Sunset." One year later, his soft-toned cover of the Charlie Gracie rockabilly nugget "Butterfly" hit number one (it's still his biggest hit). Additional Top Ten entries "Are You Sincere," "Lonely Street," and "The Village of St. Bernadette" followed before Williams moved to Columbia in 1961.

Despite another big hit in 1963, "Can't Get Used to Losing You," Williams failed to generate much action on the singles charts during the 1960s. Instead, his highly rated variety program on NBC-TV spurred interest in the ever-growing LP market for adult and middle-of-the-road audiences. The popular 1962 album Moon River & Other Great Movie Themes featured the song he's most identified with, and the following year's Days of Wine and Roses hit the top of the album charts. Nine more LPs hit the Top Ten for Andy Williams during the '60s, many organized around loose themes – Broadway, ballads, and one album that featured members of his family. Though 1971's Love Story was a platinum success that sparked a Top Ten hit for the title song, his television show was canceled that year.

Andy Williams remained very popular during the '70s, especially for British audiences. His single "Solitaire" hit the Top Ten there in 1973, though it didn't even chart in America. Two of his subsequent albums also performed well, but only in Britain. He released relatively few LPs during the 1980s, but returned to the pop world in the early '90s when he founded his own theater/resort in the home-grown entertainment capital of Branson, Missouri. Williams continued to headline shows there for 20 years, although he announced from its stage during a Christmas 2011 show that he had been diagnosed with cancer. It finally took his life on September 25, 2012.

Biography by John Bush, Allmusic.com

Canadian Sunset is Columbia Records' reissue of the 1962 Cadence Records compilation Andy Williams' Best. In the course of his five-year tenure at Cadence, 1956-1961, Williams moved from lightly rocking tunes to the kind of ballad material he focused on later in his career, meanwhile trying out a variety of styles including Hawaiian and religious music. That diversity was reflected in his singles of the period. After Williams left for Columbia Records in 1961, Cadence assembled this 12-track hits collection, which contains the singer's seven Top Ten singles of 1956-1960 – "Canadian Sunset," "Butterfly," "I Like Your Kind of Love," "Are You Sincere," "The Hawaiian Wedding Song," "Lonely Street," and "The Village of St. Bernadette." The Top 20 singles "Lips of Wine" and "Promise Me, Love" are missing in favor of including Williams' last three, modestly charting, Cadence singles from 1960-1961, Lionel Bart's "Do You Mind," Roger Miller's "(In the Summer Time) You Don't Want Me Love," and the Brecht-Weill song (with English lyrics by Johnny Mercer) "The Bilbao Song," plus the B-sides of the last two singles, "Don't Talk to Strangers" and "How Wonderful to Know." As such, it is not a comprehensive collection of Williams' Cadence chart singles, though it does contain the most successful ones. Cadence head Archie Bleyer carefully developed and expanded Williams' musical posture during the period, but the singles, mixed up as they are here, make that plan seem stylistically scattershot; it's hard to believe that the same singer performed the mild rockabilly of "I Like Your Kind of Love" and the reverent "The Village of St. Bernadette." But at the end of the Cadence years, Williams was a star, and this album spent more than ten months in the charts. When Columbia's repackaging appeared only three years later, it charted briefly again.

William Ruhlmann, Allmusic.com

Hawaiian Wedding Song is a reissue of the Cadence Records album To You Sweetheart, Aloha. In February 1959, Andy Williams hit the Top Ten with "The Hawaiian Wedding Song." On August 21 of the same year, Hawaii became the 50th state of the United States. These were events that clearly called for an album of Hawaiian music from Williams, and this was it. It was becoming clear that Archie Bleyer, head of Cadence Records, saw himself as the equivalent of Decca's Jack Kapp and Williams as the new Bing Crosby, and he adopted the same approach Kapp had taken with Crosby 20 years earlier, pushing his singer to try a variety of types of music, including Hawaiian music. In fact, several of these titles, notably "Blue Hawaii" and "Sweet Leilani," had first been recorded by Crosby. Bleyer eschewed the usual practice of employing traditional Hawaiian instruments and importing the islands' musicians, settling instead for Hawaiian-styled arrangements played by a standard orchestra. But what mattered was Williams' typically warm vocal interpretations, which made the album a romantic touchstone. After Williams decamped for Columbia Records in 1961, he acquired the masters of his Cadence recordings, and in the spring of 1965 Columbia repackaged To You Sweetheart, Aloha as Hawaiian Wedding Song, at which time it belatedly reached the charts, getting into the Top 100 and remaining listed more than four months.

William Ruhlmann, Allmusic.com

The singles chart hit versions of composer Henry Mancini and lyricist Johnny Mercer's "Moon River," the theme song for the film Breakfast at Tiffany's, were by Jerry Butler and by Mancini himself. But Andy Williams made his own claim to the song by using it as the title to this LP of movie themes, which, not coincidentally, was released in the week before Williams was scheduled to sing "Moon River" at the 1962 Academy Awards ceremony. He does a masterful version with the song, and also does well with the rest of the songs, which include some recent fare ("Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing," "A Summer Place," "The Exodus Song," "The Second Time Around"), but also old favorites like "As Time Goes By." "Maria" and "Tonight" are the big ballads from West Side Story, which began life as a Broadway musical before it went on to be the big movie hit of 1961, justifying the use of the music here. Williams has fun with "Never on Sunday," even including the Greek lyrics. The LP, a highlight in the singer's career, makes a case that the early '60s constituted a renaissance period for movie themes. (Spurred on by Williams' 1962 Oscar Night performance of "Moon River" and its victory in the Best Song category, Moon River & Other Great Movie Themes went on to spend 176 weeks in the Billboard LPs chart, peaking at number three and going gold. Notwithstanding the earlier hit single versions by others, "Moon River" became Williams' signature song for the rest of his career.)

William Ruhlmann, Allmusic.com

Although Andy Williams did not score a hit single with Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer's "Moon River" from the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany's (the hit versions were by Mancini and Jerry Butler), he became identified with the song after he sang it at the Academy Awards show and then rushed out the LP "Moon River" & Other Great Movie Themes, which became his first Top Ten album. Williams was therefore ready for the next Mancini/Mercer movie effort, "Days of Wine and Roses," the title song of a dramatic film that opened in December 1962. Mancini himself put out a single of the song with a vocal chorus, but Williams quickly followed. He placed his version on the B-side of his next single, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman's "Can't Get Used to Losing You," which took off and hit number one, with "Days of Wine and Roses" making the Top 40. The Days of Wine and Roses LP, which followed, included the two hits along with ten songs Williams was featuring on his network TV show, and with all that exposure the album exploded, spending months at number one and marking Williams' commercial apex. Such historical context seems necessary to explain to later listeners why an essentially mediocre Williams effort is remembered as such a landmark in his career. The album breaks down into essentially straight versions of currently popular ballads – "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," "What Kind of Fool Am I?," "My Coloring Book" – and revivals of interwar chestnuts that have been given excessively razzle-dazzle arrangements – "Falling in Love With Love," "You Are My Sunshine," "Exactly Like You." Maybe those orchestrations worked well with dancers as TV production numbers, but on record they sound overdone, and they make the LP an uneven collection despite its commercial success.

William Ruhlmann, Allmusic.com

When he came to record his fifth Columbia album (not including a holiday set) in the fall of 1963, Andy Williams had established himself on the LP charts with discs devoted to film songs, notably the long-running chart-topper Days of Wine and Roses, and on the singles charts with peppier songs like "Can't Get Used to Losing You." The Wonderful World of Andy Williams featured a couple of songs associated with movies and some up-tempo numbers, but it was really neither here nor there as a collection. Williams' bouncy "A Fool Never Learns," which made the pop Top 20 and the easy listening Top Five, was included, and among the other lively tunes was a remake of his first Top Ten hit, "Canadian Sunset," that led off the LP and a startling arrangement of the old Bing Crosby hit "Pennies From Heaven" with Williams buried in a chorus and an abrupt shift from slow ballad to driving rock & roll, complete with screaming electric guitar, halfway through. That, of course, was uncharacteristic for the usually smooth-sailing Williams, but you could easily imagine it making for an amusing production number on his television show. Most of the rest of the album consisted of familiar ballads, dating back to the 1940s for Johnny Mercer's "Dream" (another choral performance not unlike the Pied Pipers' hit version) and coming up to the present for Williams versions of hits like Tony Bennett's "This Is All I Ask" and Jack Jones' "Wives and Lovers." "Softly, As I Leave You" was a good piece of material that had been a British hit for Matt Monro, but it would not gain U.S. recognition until Frank Sinatra cut it. Thus, there were interesting isolated moments on the album, but it was an uneven grab bag.

William Ruhlmann, Allmusic.com

By 1964, Andy Williams was Mr. Movie Theme Song, which may help explain why he performed two of the nominated songs, "Charade" and "Call Me Irresponsible" (from Papa's Delicate Condition) at the Oscar ceremonies on April 13, and why his new album, the full title of which was The Academy Award Winning "Call Me Irresponsible" and Other Hit Songs From the Movies, was in record stores less than two weeks later. Williams had hedged his bet by also recording a third nominated song, "More," from Mondo Cane. (What would have happened if "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" or "So Little Time" had won, we'll never know.) Having established "Moon River" as his theme song in 1962 and topped the charts with Days of Wine and Roses in 1963, it was only logical that Williams would devote this entire album to movie theme songs. His singles (both B-sides) for "Charade" and "Madrigal" (from the just-released film The Chalk Garden) didn't make much noise, but this album still gave him his third consecutive – and fourth out of five – Top Ten LP placing and gold record certification. And it deserved to, since it contains a good selection of the kind of movie themes that had become almost required for films since World War II and which were turned out regularly by such professionals as Sammy Cahn, Livingston and Evans, Henry Mancini, and Johnny Mercer. The songs tended to be evocative of a mood rather than specific, and Williams' warm, yet homogenized approach, backed by sympathetic orchestral arrangements with occasional vocal choruses, brought out their haunting, romantic qualities. Especially impressive here were "Laura," a version of "Gigi" with the introductory verse, and a restrained (well, compared to Mario Lanza) "Be My Love." But the whole album suggested that Williams and movie songs remained perfect partners.

William Ruhlmann, Allmusic.com

Andy Williams took the opportunity of the release of the film adaptation of the Broadway musical My Fair Lady to record this album of show tunes, the first side devoted to My Fair Lady and the second to such contemporary songs as "Hello, Dolly" and "People" from Funny Girl. The material was first-class, and so was the singer, but the collection was marred by the overdone arrangements. Following his previous LP, The Academy Award Winning "Call Me Irresponsible" and Other Hit Songs From the Movies, which had featured ballad treatments of movie theme songs, Williams may have been going for a more swinging, up-tempo mood, but the busy charts, full of pizzicato strings, vocal choruses, and competing counter-melodies, distracted attention from the songs. The approach had some justification in an essentially comic song like "Get Me to the Church on Time," and a few of the arrangements did work, notably the bossa nova treatment of "Begin the Beguine" and the big band style of "The Sweetest Sounds." But too many times the singer seemed to be struggling against the orchestrations, such as when he was forced into an awkward falsetto at the end of "Once Upon a Time." What made all this even more annoying was that it was so unnecessary; if there were any songs that did not need to be so souped up, it was these well-written Broadway tunes. Despite the album's questionable musical qualities, it was a hit. "On the Street Where You Live," released as a single, reached the pop Top 40 and the Top Five of the easy listening charts, while the LP became Williams' fourth consecutive Top Ten, gold-selling album.

William Ruhlmann, Allmusic.com

By 1965, a spring Andy Williams ballad album keyed to movie theme songs had become a 1960s tradition, and Dear Heart was the fourth in the series. Like its predecessors, Moon River & Other Great Movie Themes (1962), Days of Wine and Roses (1963), and The Academy Award Winning "Call Me Irresponsible" (1964), it featured the latest Henry Mancini movie song, in this case "Dear Heart," which had already become a Top 40 pop and Top Five easy listening hit for the singer. There were also other movie themes: "Almost There," from I'd Rather Be Rich, another previous chart entry; "I'm All Smiles" from The Yearling; and "Emily" from The Americanization of Emily. Most of the other selections were Williams' covers of songs that had been hits recently for other male pop singers: "Red Roses for a Blue Lady" (Vic Dana); "Who Can I Turn To (When Nobody Needs Me" (Tony Bennett); and "You're Nobody 'Til Somebody Loves You" and "Everybody Loves Somebody" (Dean Martin). The album was filled out by a few choice oldies: "It Had to Be You"; "I Can't Stop Loving You"; "Till." (There was also a performance of an early Kenny Rankin song, "My Carousel.") Williams applied his usual warm, smooth vocal style to all the songs, with string-filled arrangements that emphasized the melodies; not for him was the bluesy approach of Ray Charles on "I Can't Stop Loving You" or the '50s rock & roll rhythm of Dean Martin's "Everybody Loves Somebody." The album was a well-assembled collection of contemporary material in what had become Williams' patented style. It became his fifth consecutive gold-selling Top Ten LP.

William Ruhlmann, Allmusic.com

With a couple of re-titled reissues (Hawaiian Wedding Song, Canadian Sunset) in 1965 and a compilation (Andy Williams' Newest Hits) in early 1966 to keep customers happy, Andy Williams was able to take more than a year to craft a follow-up to Dear Heart. When The Shadow of Your Smile appeared in the spring of 1966, it was, on the surface, a typical Andy Williams album. It was titled after the year's Academy Award-winning Best Song (from The Sandpiper) and otherwise combining songs that, if not brand-new, had recently been hits for other artists, such as "Try to Remember" (Ed Ames), "Somewhere" (P.J. Proby), and "A Taste of Honey" (Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass), with old favorites like "That Old Feeling," "Peg O' My Heart," and "Bye Bye Blues." But there were notable changes in Williams' approach. Two years after the British Invasion and the bossa nova craze, he acknowledged both movements with two covers each. From the Beatles came "Michelle" and "Yesterday"; from Antonio Carlos Jobim came "Meditation" and "How Insensitive." Of course, such material was not entirely foreign to Williams, who had put a bossa nova version of "Begin the Beguine" on The Great Songs from "My Fair Lady" and Other Broadway Hits in 1964 and recorded Under Paris Skies, an album that easily could have included "Michelle," had it been written yet, in 1960. But The Shadow of Your Smile also had a slower, more languorous feel than earlier Williams albums, and it had more vocal risk-taking, particularly on the Jobim numbers and in the long-held note at the end of "Somewhere." The alterations indicated that Williams was not content to simply turn out the same sort of album over and over, and that he was paying attention to the changes in popular music around him.

William Ruhlmann, Allmusic.com

For the sixth year in a row, Andy Williams greeted the spring with a new album keyed to the Academy Award Best Song nominations, and his audience rewarded him yet again with a Top Ten placing and a gold record. For the fifth time in six years, the album was titled after the Oscar winner (the only exception being 1965, when he bet on "Dear Heart" instead of "Chim Chim Cheree") and also featured other movie songs, in this case "Somewhere, My Love" from Dr. Zhivago, "Strangers in the Night" from A Man Could Get Killed, "I Will Wait for You" from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and "Alfie." And, as usual, Williams took for his own songs popularized by his fellow male pop singers, Frank Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night" and Al Martino's "Spanish Eyes." But Born Free marked a notable contemporization of the Williams formula. On his most recent albums, The Shadow of Your Smile and In the Arms of Love, he had leaned toward Brazilian sounds, recording more obscure material and several standards from the interwar period. In the Arms of Love, released only four months before Born Free, had sold disappointingly. Williams reacted by dropping the bossa nova and the oldies and looked more to the recent pop charts for covers like Bobby Hebb's "Sunny." He even recorded "I Want to Be Free" (AKA "I Wanna Be Free") from the Monkees' first album. And he scored a Top 40 hit with a pop/rock arrangement of "Music to Watch Girls By," the tune that originated on a Diet Pepsi commercial and had been an instrumental hit for the Bob Crewe Generation. At a time when non-rock pop singers were beginning to be marginalized, Williams successfully threaded the needle, reassuring his older listeners while proving adaptable to current trends.

William Ruhlmann, Allmusic.com

In the fall of 1967, Andy Williams was gone from the regular prime time television schedule, cutting back to a few specials after five years of hosting his weekly variety show. But Williams fans could console themselves with a new album that delivered the usual musical pleasures. The singer had edged more toward contemporary sounds on his previous release, the previous spring's Born Free, bringing in a rock rhythm section and sticking to current material. Love, Andy edged back a bit, focusing more on string arrangements. As usual, Williams made his song choices from certain categories, particularly movie theme songs and recent pop hits. Among the former were "Watch What Happens" from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, also the source for "I Will Wait for You" from Born Free; "The Look of Love" from Casino Royale; and "When I Look in Your Eyes" from the just-issued soundtrack to the upcoming Christmas release Doctor Doolittle. The latter category included Williams' takes on Nancy and Frank Sinatra's "Somethin' Stupid" and Frankie Valli's "Can't Take My Eyes Off You." Williams' affection for things Gallic was expressed not only in "Watch What Happens," but also in "What Now, My Love." He returned to oldies in the form of two Harry Warren/Mack Gordon movie songs from the 1940s that suggested he'd been paying attention to Chris Montez, who had lately revived "The More I See You" and "There Will Never Be Another You" for hits. He kept current by covering the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows," and even threw in a new song, "Holly," which was released as a single and made the easy listening Top Five. Taken together, the album was a balanced collection, not unlike a variety show on record made by an artist mindful of trying to appeal to the widest audience possible.

William Ruhlmann, Allmusic.com

In the late '60s, record company executives like Clive Davis of Columbia were encouraging their middle-of-the-road pop singers to cover the songs of contemporary pop/rock performers as a way of staying current. Andy Williams, who was a bit younger than his peers, needed no such encouragement, as he had been drawing on the recent hit parade for some of his material for years. But Honey marked his complete crossover to such an approach. Where earlier Williams albums had been a canny mix of movie songs, standards, pop hits, and foreign – especially French – material, ten of Honey's 11 tracks were songs that had been Top 40 hits in the last two years. (The only exception was "Our Last Goodbye," co-written by Williams favorite Nick De Caro, which musically was a retread of another recent Top 40 hit, "A Whiter Shade of Pale.") True, there were a couple of movie songs ("This Is My Song" from The Countess From Hong Kong and "Theme From 'Valley of the Dolls,'" plus "Scarborough Fair/Canticle," not written for, but heavily featured in, The Graduate) and even one show tune ("The Impossible Dream [The Quest]" from Man of La Mancha), and "Love Is Blue" was French. But the songs were for the most part closely associated with hit recordings by the likes of the Association, the 5th Dimension, and Glen Campbell. The arrangements closely resembled those of the hit recordings, so the appeal of the album seemed to be exclusively to Williams fans who wanted to hear their hero, rather than Bobby Goldsboro, sing the maudlin hit "Honey." Columbia didn't even put Williams' current single, "Sweet Memories," on the LP. The singer did his best and was rewarded with yet another Top Ten gold-record seller, but the album lacked the balance of earlier efforts.

William Ruhlmann, Allmusic.com

In the spring of 1969, Andy Williams scored his biggest pop hit in four and a half years with the German import "Happy Heart," getting well into the Top 40. (The single probably would have done even better if there hadn't been a competing version by Petula Clark.) This was reason enough to slap together an album of the same name, filled out with the singer's interpretations of current pop hits. But the Happy Heart LP didn't really differ much in its approach from Williams' previous album, Honey, which also contained nearly all pop covers. The only real difference was that this time Williams was not waiting so long. "My Way" was just peaking in the charts for Frank Sinatra, for example, as was Elvis Presley's "Memories," and Glen Campbell's "Where's the Playground Susie" had only just come out. It was as if Williams was picking the tracks by listening to the radio on the way to the studio. Campbell and his favorite songwriter, Jimmy Webb, were particular favorites: Williams also covered "Wichita Lineman" (written by Webb and recorded by Campbell), "Gentle on My Mind" (recorded by Campbell), and "Didn't We" (written by Webb), as well as "Where's the Playground Susie" (written by Webb). The arrangements were close approximations of those on the hit versions by Stevie Wonder ("For Once in My Life"), O.C. Smith ("Little Green Apples"), and the rest, so that the main appeal of the album seemed to be that Williams' voice replaced that of the familiar one. In the case of Dion's "Abraham, Martin and John," the tribute to Robert F. Kennedy and other slain leaders, Williams, a friend of Kennedy's, certainly had a claim on the song, and he sang it with conviction. Elsewhere, he seemed to be turning in a professional but uninspired job.

William Ruhlmann, Allmusic.com

This is a precious feast to enjoy of delightful '70s love songs, sung and performed with sincerity by beloved pop singer talent Andy Williams. Though not as special or charming as the original performances, Williams gives all of his soul and heart to pull off some stirring renditions of the amiable type to the kind listener. Favorites of the '70s feature the Beatles' "Something," James Taylor's "Fire and Rain," and Elton John's "Your Song." Invigorating at times, the songs seem to achieve the purpose of easing the listener's stress-filled day. Dick Glasser gives much of his time as producer in finding Andy Williams' unique sound, with Artie Butler and Dick Hazard playing a splendid role in the arrangements. A wistful breath of fresh air away from the takeover of entertainers Frank Sinatra and Neil Diamond, the record is a pleasant listening experience for those who appreciate romantic ballads and melancholy orchestra background music. This collection shows just how easy it came to cover love ballads and pop hits in the '70s, giving Williams and his dazzling entertainer style voice the right time to shine during his days of stardom. So turn your lights down low and get with the one you share dreams with, and be prepared to feel the love.

Shawn M. Haney, Allmusic.com