Columbia
1958
Sing Along with Mitch
About This Album
This is the kind of album that Howard and Marion Cunningham (Tom Bosley and Marion Ross) and their neighbors would have been listening to together on Happy Days, if the latter had been a CBS series rather than an ABC series. Seriously, starting with "That Old Gang of Mine," Mitch Miller and the Gang go through 16 songs (some as medleys) that, even in 1958, felt like they were 100 years old. In fairness, they don't feel quite like they're 150 years old when heard on the CD in 2007 -- to that degree, they've sort of become "timeless" -- but they were definitely intended to appeal to parents and grandparents at the time of the album's release. The performances on such tunes as "Down by the Old Mill Stream," "You Are My Sunshine," and "By the Light of the Silvery Moon," are bold and robust, with little touches of subtlety in the dynamics and the spare accompaniment -- often not much more than a harmonica or an accordion, with a ukulele -- and the tempos, that make them somewhat more interesting to hear as a body than they are as individual tracks. Actually, Miller and company seem to have planned this album as a total, cohesive listening experience rather than a series of separate, isolated songs, as the numbers come almost right up against each other, with virtually no pause between.
Track List

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