Jimmy Boyd - Relationship With Mitch Miller

Relationship With Mitch Miller

Boyd said that although he liked the songs that became hits for him, especially the duets with Frankie Laine, Rosemary Clooney, and Gayla Peevey, he never wanted to sing many of the novelty songs that Mitch Miller, the head of Artists and Repertoire of Columbia Records, gave him. As the head of A&R at Columbia, Mitch Miller was in charge of all the recording artists there, including Frank Sinatra. When Mitch Miller signed him to Columbia, Boyd's new roots were in country music. Boyd's first hit at Columbia under Miller, "God's Little Candles", was in the country field. At the time, 250,000 records was the mark of a country hit, but "God's Little Candles" nearly reached the million mark. Years later, Kris Kristofferson introduced himself to Boyd and told him he had borrowed the music from the bridge of "God's Little Candles" to write one of his songs. Boyd was a fan of Kristofferson and so overwhelmed that when he had introduced himself, he forgot to ask Kristofferson which song he used it in. Despite this success, Miller moved Boyd into the pop music genre since country music was an isolated field at the time and very small in the overall record-buying fan base.

Rock and roll was starting to change the industry, and Boyd wanted to sing rock music. Miller passionately hated rock and roll and publicly stated it was a passing fad. He forbade anyone with Columbia Records to record rock music. Although Boyd says he loved Miller like a father, he felt his era was passing; Boyd was later to be proven right.

After a number of novelty songs that Boyd did not like and that did not reach the top ten ("I Wanna Haircut With A Moon On Top", "I'll Stay In The House And Live In My Grandma's Kitchen", "Owl's Lullaby", etc.), Miller called Boyd and told him that he had a new song and would be arriving in Los Angeles to play it for him. Miller set up a meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel with Percy Faith. The hotel provided a room with a piano for Faith to play the song, and Miller gave Boyd the lyrics to read. After reading the first lines of the song, Boyd, without hearing the music, told Miller he did not want to sing these kind of novelty songs anymore, and turned it down. Miller and Faith recorded the song with another Columbia artist named Jo Stafford. The opening lines were "Goodbye Joe, Me gotta go, Me-O My-O. Me gotta go pole the pirogue down the bayou." The song, "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)," went to number three on the Billboard charts. Ironically, the novelty song that Boyd declined to record had been written by country music legend Hank Williams.

Frank Sinatra declared that Miller's choices of songs had ruined his career, and he promptly switched over to Capitol Records, where he chose his own songs and began making hit records again. However, Boyd felt a great deal of loyalty to Miller. He did not follow through with his own wish to go to Memphis and record with Sam Phillips at his Sun Records, where the dawn of rock and roll was beginning with many of the new rock artists of the time. Instead, he concentrated more on movies and television, and finishing his education. In retrospect, Boyd said he wished that he had gone to Sun Records.