Andy Williams discography

Label X and the Cadence years

Williams's first recordings as a solo artist were done in two sessions for the RCA Victor subsidiary Label X in the mid-1950s. Two songs were recorded at the first session, "Groundhog" and "There Is a Time", but according to Williams, "Nothing came of this date.... The numbers are still on the shelf." The four songs from the other session produced two singles: "Why Should I Cry Over You?"/"You Can't Buy Happiness" and "Now I Know"/"Here Comes That Dream Again". In 1967 Williams described something he learned in moving from RCA to Cadence Records in 1955: "I realized that what I had done for Label X wasn't the right kind of product -- in fact, the proof of this is that even years later, when I was selling big on Columbia, those sides were never reissued on RCA."

When Williams arrived at Cadence on December 1, 1955, label founder Archie Bleyer immediately had him record two holiday songs, "The Wind, the Sand and the Star" and "Christmas Is a Feeling in Your Heart". But Williams explains in his autobiography that his new boss "didn't get the record released until a few days before Christmas" and that "it sold only 10,000 copies." His next single, however, included his first song to reach the Billboard Hot 100, "Walk Hand in Hand", and it became the first of half a dozen hits to be packaged together with their corresponding B-sides on his first compilation album, which was simply entitled Andy Williams.

For his first studio album Williams decided to pay tribute to the songwriting talent of his Tonight Show colleague Steve Allen because, he explains, "I thought that if I recorded an album of Steve's own compositions, he might let me sing one or two on the show." Allen, in fact, had Williams eventually perform the entire album on the show by having him sing a different song each night. Williams turned to the popular duo of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for his second Cadence LP, which included songs from their Broadway musicals Carousel, The King and I, Oklahoma!, and South Pacific. Indeed each of the long players he made for the label had its own specific focus, such as songs from Hawaii or France, and it was during this phase that he recorded Lonely Street, his first release to reach the pop albums chart in Billboard magazine.

The singles that Williams recorded for Cadence charted much more frequently. Of his 16 A-sides that made the Billboard Hot 100 and its predecessors during this period, 11 of them made it into the top forty positions on the chart, and six of those reached the top ten. Some of these hits fit in nicely with the ballads or what is now called the traditional pop format of many of his LPs at the time. In fact three of the more successful songs from this era ("The Hawaiian Wedding Song", "Lonely Street", and "The Village of St. Bernadette") inspired the themes of the albums on which they later appeared. But several singles, including "Butterfly", "I Like Your Kind of Love", and "Lips of Wine", followed the burgeoning rock and roll trend. "Archie wasn't trying to turn me into a poor man's Elvis; he was just trying to find hit songs. If they were rock and roll, then he wanted them sung that way."

The Columbia years

Williams's move to Columbia Records in 1961 heralded the start of a highly successful series of albums produced by Robert Mersey that focused on standards, including many from stage and screen, with some Easy Listening hits of the day eventually becoming part of the formula. One of these projects, 1962's Moon River and Other Great Movie Themes, became his first album to reach the top 10 on Billboard's Top LP's chart and his earliest recording to receive Gold certification from the Recording Industry Association of America. His chart-topping Days of Wine and Roses and Other TV Requests (which included his number two pop hit "Can't Get Used to Losing You") also reached the half million mark in sales, as did the next five consecutive top 10 albums and two number one Christmas LPs on which Mersey also did much of the arranging and conducting. His top 10 release from 1966, The Shadow of your Smile, featured covers of the Beatles songs "Michelle" and "Yesterday" and foreshadowed the shift that Williams would be making over the next few years toward contemporary material. His next LP, In the Arms of Love, peaked only as high as number 21, making it his lowest charting studio album with Columbia to date and helping to explain why it didn't sell enough to receive Gold certification. After 12 projects with Mersey at the helm, Williams moved on to work with producers that could accommodate his more modern aspirations.

He began his next string of Gold records in 1967 with Born Free, which relied exclusively on recent hits from the pop and Easy Listening charts and became the first of five more top 10 albums he would release. When Clive Davis became President of Columbia Records that same year, he paid close attention to the label's Easy Listening artists since most of them were experiencing a decline in sales. "Only Williams was really keeping current. He was open to the new, younger writers that were emerging." One of the musical directors of The Andy Williams Show, Jack Elliott, had made note of the singer's musical taste in 1967 as well: "Andy constantly wants to do new material. If anything, the only professional criticism I would have is that I think he reaches too hard for today's stuff." But in retrospect Davis takes on part of the responsibility for trying to appeal to young record buyers. "I urged Andy to include only the most well-known of contemporary songs in his albums. I had carefully studied the sales of his albums, and it was a matter of mathematics: sales increased in proportion to the number of identifiable titles on the album cover. It became almost a formula."

The formula also worked well in England, where his next LP, Love, Andy, reached number one, and even as Williams was not charting and selling in the US in the 1970s as he had been, the numbers across the Atlantic remained impressive. The 1970 Andy Williams' Greatest Hits compilation reached number 42 during its 20 weeks on Billboard's list of the 200 Top LP's in America, but in the UK the album spent its first three weeks on their much smaller album chart at number two before eventually spending five of its 116 weeks there at number one. His final top 10 LP in America, 1971's Love Story, went under the title Home Lovin' Man in the UK, where it reached number one, and four more top 10 albums followed it onto the UK chart, including 1974's The Way We Were, which was the first of his 25 studio albums released by Columbia thus far that did not reach the Billboard charts. His popularity in England wasn't enough to sustain his relationship with Columbia much longer, and he recorded a few more albums that didn't receive wide attention before moving on.

The post-Columbia years

In 1984, British record producers Tony Hiller and Nicky Graham enticed Williams back into the studio after a four-year hiatus to record Greatest Love Classics, a project in which the duo had written lyrics for selections of classical music. His next three albums revisited concepts with which he'd had varying degrees of success: movie songs on Close Enough for Love, Christmas music on I Still Believe in Santa Claus, and Country music on Nashville. In 1994 he released audio and video recordings of two concerts that were filmed at his Moon River Theater in Branson, Missouri. The CD Greatest Hits and corresponding video Andy Williams in Concert at Branson featured live performances of "Moon River", "Can't Get Used to Losing You", "Canadian Sunset", and many others, and The New Andy Williams Christmas Album and its video companion, The Andy Williams Christmas Show, offered many favorites from his holiday albums, including "White Christmas", on which he is joined by Lorrie Morgan and The Osmond Brothers. The following year he released an album of new holiday recordings entitled We Need a Little Christmas, but his next return to the studio wasn't until 2006, when he recorded I Don't Remember Ever Growing Up, which was released in the UK the following year.

Album reissues

Many of the albums that Williams recorded were originally available in the vinyl LP, 8-track tape, Reel-to-reel, and audio cassette formats but were later reissued on compact disc. With close to 80 minutes of space available on each disc, it was possible to combine two albums on one CD, and most Williams albums have been paired up and reissued in this format, as shown in the collapsed table below:

Compilation albums

Several Williams compilations are noteworthy for either their chart success, as noted by 19 of them listed below, or the material included. For example, Williams himself selected the songs included on Moon River: The Very Best of Andy Williams.

Live albums

Two Williams concerts in 1993 became his first domestic releases of live material:

Additional compilations

Album collaboration

Album narration

Box sets

Radio broadcasts

Soundtrack compilations

These releases are composed of performances taken from The Andy Williams Show: