Guy Mitchell

Guy Mitchell was an American pop singer and actor, one of the biggest record sellers of the 1950s. He was born Albert George Cernik on 22 February 1927 in Detroit, Michigan, to Croatian immigrants, and that Croatian family background is why he is on Muzika-Balkan. He died on 1 July 1999, aged 72, at Desert Springs Hospital in Las Vegas, Nevada, of complications after cancer surgery.

When he was eleven the family moved to Los Angeles, where Warner Brothers signed him as a child star and he sang on KFWB radio. That career did not take off, and the family moved on to San Francisco. After school he worked as a saddlemaker and sang on the side, until Dude Martin hired him for the band of his country music broadcast. He served two years in the United States Navy in the Second World War, then sang with Carmen Cavallaro's big band and, in New York, made records for King Records as Al Grant. In 1949 he won Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts on the radio as a soloist.

In 1950 Mitch Miller of Columbia Records needed a singer for two songs Frank Sinatra had turned down, "My Heart Cries for You" and "The Roving Kind". Cernik came in for the evening session, and Miller, who said he could not pronounce Cernik, gave him his own surname, Mitchell. He added Guy himself, after his habit of answering "Hello" with "Hi, Guy". "My Heart Cries for You" became his first hit and reached number two on the Billboard chart.

Hits followed through the 1950s in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia: "My Truly, Truly Fair", "Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania", "She Wears Red Feathers" and "Rock-a-Billy" among them. His biggest was his version of "Singing the Blues", ten weeks at number one in the United States and also a number one in the UK. "Heartaches by the Number" in 1959 was his last number one. In all he sold 44 million records, including six million-selling singles.

He also acted, in films such as Those Redheads From Seattle (1953) and Red Garters (1954), in his own ABC series The Guy Mitchell Show in 1957 and as George Romack in the western series Whispering Smith in 1961. In 1990 he played the country singer Jim Bob O'May in the BBC drama Your Cheatin' Heart, singing "Singing the Blues" once more. The playlist gathers his recordings, from the early Columbia hits to later sessions.