John Royce Mathis is an American singer-songwriter of popular music. His discography includes traditional pop, Brazilian and Spanish music, soul, rhythm and blues, show tunes, Tin Pan Alley, soft rock, blues, country music, and even a few disco songs. Mathis has received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and has been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for three separate recordings.
About Johnny Mathis in brief
John Royce Mathis is an American singer-songwriter of popular music. His discography includes traditional pop, Brazilian and Spanish music, soul, rhythm and blues, show tunes, Tin Pan Alley, soft rock, blues, country music, and even a few disco songs for his album Mathis Magic in 1979. Mathis has received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and has been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for three separate recordings. In a 1968 interview, Mathis cited Lena Horne, Nat King Cole, and Bing Crosby among his musical influences. His first song was \”My Blue Heaven”; his first band he sang with was formed by his high school friend Merl Saunders. He is of African-American and Native American heritage; his father worked in vaudeville and his mother was a domestic cook. He was a high jumper and hurdler at George Washington High School in San Francisco. In 1954, he enrolled at San Francisco State College on an athletic scholarship, intending to become an English teacher and a physical education teacher. In 1956, he was asked to try out for the U.S. Olympic Team that would travel to Melbourne, Australia, that year. On his father’s advice, he opted to embark on a professional singing career instead of waiting until the first quarter of the year to release his first record, A New Sound In Popular Song. His second album was produced by Columbia Records vice-president and record producer Mitch Miller, who helped to define the sound of Mathis’s music.
He stayed in New York City to sing in nightclubs until the late late 1950s, when he moved to Los Angeles to start a new career as a nightclub singer. His third album was released in 1956, but Mathis stayed in Los Angeles until the early 1960s to sing at nightclubs. His fourth album was a slow-selling jazz album, but he later moved to New York for a nightclub career. He has recorded six albums of Christmas music, including a collection of romantic ballads called “The Christmas Song” He has been married three times, and has three children. He and his wife have a son and a daughter, both of whom were born in the 1970s and early 1980s. He currently lives in San Diego, California, with his wife and two sons, and they have a daughter and a son-in-law, who live in the Los Angeles area. His son and daughter have two children, who have been married for more than 30 years and have two grandchildren. He also has a stepson and a stepdaughter, who are both singers and have had several children of their own. He had a son with the singer/songwriter/producer/ arranger Glenn Conniff, Ray Conniff and Ray Ellis, and a grandson with the composer and arranger Ray Ellis. He recorded his first album in 1957, but didn’t make it to the top of the Billboard charts until the second quarter of that year, when his album was called “A New Sound in Popular Song”
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