Percy Faith

 Percy Faith (April 7, 1908 – February 9, 1976)

Faith was known for his lush arrangements of pop and Christmas standards. He is often credited with popularizing the "easy listening" or "mood music" format. Faith became a staple of American popular music in the 1950s and continued well into the 1960s. Beginning with stations CKNC and CKCL, Faith 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 program on NBC. From 1948-1949 he also served as the orchestra leader on the CBS radio network program The Coca-Cola Hour. 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". His 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. Though best known for his recording career, Faith also occasionally scored motion pictures, and received an Academy Award nomination for his adaptation of the song score for the Doris Day musical feature, Love Me or Leave Me. His other film scores included romantic comedies and dramatic features such as Tammy Tell Me True (1961), I'd Rather Be Rich (1964), The Third Day (1965) and The Oscar (1966). Faith also composed the theme for the NBC series The Virginian.

With the advent of harder rock sounds in the 1970s, Faith's elegant arrangements fell out of favor with the listening and record-buying public, although he continued to release albums as diverse and contemporary as Jesus Christ Superstar and Black Magic Woman. He released one album of country music and two albums of disco-oriented arrangements toward the end of his forty-year career, his last recording being a disco-style reworking of "Theme from a Summer Place", titled "Summer Place '76". Faith was married from 1928 until his death, and had two children. He died from cancer at age 67 on February 9, 1976. His final resting place is at Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City, California.