RIP, MITCH MILLER.

  Mitch Miller, famed white-guy producer of white popular music throughout the 1950's, and unlikely TV show star in the early 1960's, was a classically-trained oboist who realized that playing the oboe was not really a growth industry. He was the voice of quality schlock in a time when the nation was confronted with the illegitimate musical form known as Rock'nRoll, a black musical uprising in which the beat of the jungle and lascivious dancing manifest itself on the American musical landscape, a music of black african slaves that like a zombie jamboree, claimed the hearts and bodies and feets and minds of the baby-boomer white Americans who knew no better. 

ENTRENCHMENT

  Mitch Miller was all that Rock'n'Roll was not. Highly educated, a musical craftsman, an accomplished oboe and english horn musician, a fine singer... He was also Jewish. So he was chosen to be a corporate musician in a time of musical riot. And he did his job well. He sought the best arrangers, the best musicians, and used one of the best studio systems in the world, Columbia Records, to create popular music based on the past. His was a Maginot LIne of the highest quality and the best sound. Major popular stars were given the most obvious and generic material to do, and the Golden Age of American Popular Song was mined again by Mitch Miller, in arrangements calculated to appeal to an audience wide and old, in a spirit of impersonal professionalism. He became a best selling musical artist and arranger. He is sometimes thought of as the creator of what would become karaoke with his NBC-TV series, Sing Along with Mitch. This series makes Lawrence Welk seem downright adventuresome, with its boldly colored band suits, and various sexual displays of female talent in the form of the Lovely Lennon SIsters, and Honky Tonk piano diva Joanne Castle, whose unstoppably upbeat and assertive physicality smacked of stamina.

INSTEAD

   Mitch produced a bounteous men's chorus, like a closeted gay sultan, with a sound like a barbershop quartet on steroids. This was Mitch Miller and The Gang, which was white corporate America's answer to the juvenile dilenquent gangs that Little Anthony and the Imperials said they were not... But nobody believed them. Those who wanted to, believed Mitch Miller. And believed his music was good music. Now it's true, he introduced Leslie Uggams, a fine singer of decidedly darkened skin, and she was something special on TV in those times, when colored meant "help", and Sammy Davis was kicking up a storm. Of course, history tells us that the network brass weren't too happy about Leslie, either.

BUT ULTIMATELY,

   Mitch is quoted to have said, "Rock 'n' roll is musical baby food: it is the worship of mediocrity, brought about by a passion for conformity." His music was musical Ensure, which worshipped the past and a banality of presentation, brought to the public in a way that encouraged them to "sing along" and join the warmth of a new medium called television – to gather around the electronic hearth, and sing the good old songs that grandmother knew and loved.

   Mitch's grandmother was very happy that her family prospered and raised such a good boy. And Mitch had the American public singing together, not, "We shall overcome," but "When You And I Were Young, Maggie" and "I'm Looking Over A Four-Leaf Clover" and "On Top Of Old Smoky" and "Bidin' My Time". He was a great talent whose time had come, and was gone, both at the same time.

   May he rest in peace. Now, please join us in a chorus of one of Mitch's favorites, "That Old Gang Of Mine".... 

(CUE THE PITCHPIPE)