Percy Faith

Percy Faith (April 7, 1908 – February 9, 1976) was a Canadian-American bandleader, orchestrator, composer and conductor, known for his lush arrangements of instrumental ballads and Christmas standards. He is often credited with popularizing the "easy listening" or "mood music" format. He became a staple of American popular music in the 1950s and continued well into the 1960s. Although his professional orchestra-leading career began at the height of the swing era, he refined and rethought orchestration techniques, including use of large string sections, to soften and fill out the brass-dominated popular music of the 1940s.

Faith was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the oldest of eight children. His parents, Abraham and Minnie Faith (née Rottenberg), were Jewish. He played violin and piano as a child, and performed in theatres and at Massey Hall.

After his hands were badly burned in a fire, Faith turned to conducting, and his live orchestras used the new medium of radio broadcasting. Beginning with stations CKNC and CKCL, he was a staple of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's live-music broadcasting from 1933 to 1940, when he resettled in Chicago, Illinois. In the early 1940s, Faith was orchestra leader for The Carnation Contented Hour on NBC. From 1938 to 1940 on the MBS radio network, and from 1948 to 1949 on the CBS radio network, he also served as the orchestra leader on The Coca-Cola Hour (also called The Pause That Refreshes). The orchestral accordionist John Serry Sr. collaborated with Faith in some of these broadcasts. Faith also led the orchestra on The Woolworth Hour on CBS radio (1955–1957).

He moved from Canada to Great Neck, New York, and became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1945. He made many recordings for Voice of America. After working briefly for Decca Records, he worked for Mitch Miller at Columbia Records, where he turned out dozens of albums and provided arrangements for many of the pop singers of the 1950s, including Tony Bennett, Doris Day, Johnny Mathis for Mathis's 1958 Christmas album titled Merry Christmas, and Guy Mitchell, for whom Faith co-wrote with Carl Sigman Mitchell's number-one single, "My Heart Cries for You".

Faith's most famous and remembered recordings are "Delicado" (1952), "The Song from Moulin Rouge" (1953) and "Theme from A Summer Place" (1959), which won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in 1961. Faith remains the only artist to have the best selling single of the year during both the pop singer era ("Song from Moulin Rouge") and the rock era ("Theme from A Summer Place"); and he is one of only three artists, along with Elvis Presley and The Beatles, to have the best selling single of the year twice. The B-side of "Song from the Moulin Rouge" was "Swedish Rhapsody" by Hugo Alfvén. In 1961 his fame in Sweden grew quickly as his work Mucho Gusto became the theme music for the sports broadcasts of Sveriges Radio.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.