Andy Williams – Moon River And Other Great Movie Themes

I've been listening to a lot of rock lately, and every so often I'll dip deeper into my collection and clean out my ears a little with some good old-fashioned pop. Going back to 1962 and I wasn't even a tadpole ... but this album has so many songs that I remember as a kid. Considering the heyday of variety television when I was growing up, I probably saw him perform many of these songs.

It's hard to imagine what things were like in the early '60s. I'm scanning through Andy Williams' discography, and from what I can tell, Moon River and Other Great Movie Themes was his ninth studio album, and in 1962 he would release four albums, admittedly some were likely compilations. Still, that's a lot of wax, baby. This album would go gold and stay on the Billboard charts for an astonishing 176 weeks. Take that, Dark Side of the Moon!

I really like this album. The big song here is "Moon River," which was a new song at the time, and over the years the song would become synonymous with Andy Williams. The number of great themes here is kind of astonishing. The songs collected here were drawn from movies past and present ... of course, they're all past now.

Andy Williams was a singer's singer, and the richness of his tenor, his vocal range, and a full falsetto that didn't sound thin and anemic were something to behold. His vibrato was so natural it was almost hypnotic. With the passing of the years, his accomplishments seem to have been relegated to nostalgia, but there was a time when Andy Williams was one of the biggest recording stars in the world.

The songs may tend to sound dated now, but the arrangements and strings provided by Robert Mersey (who was also an integral part of Andy's Christmas album) are perfectly suited to the music. This was still the age of the mono recording, and I got lucky when I found the stereo version.

In 1962, I'm not sure what the studio setup was, but in my mind's eye I can imagine the orchestra in the big room, picked up by an overhead boom, with Andy in an isolation booth, and they're cutting live from the floor. There are a couple of vocal pops that caught me by surprise (particularly on "Moon River") and only added to the perception that what I was listening to was a captured performance.

This was a fun find, and while I knew a few of the songs, "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing" and "Moon River" coming into the album, I was surprised at how many songs I actually knew. This was a trip of sorts down memory lane, but the memories were memories of memories. Before my time, but still songs I remembered.

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