Click here to subscribe today or Login.
To reach his music teacher’s studio, teen-age Johnny Mathis used to take a San Francisco street car to the train station, ride a train across the Bay Bridge and, finally, take a bus.
The trek took close to three hours, and when he reached his destination, he didn’t immediately have a lesson.
“I didn’t have money to pay her, so while she was teaching her students I would clean her apartment,” Mathis reminisced last week in a telephone interview. “I’d be sweeping the floors and doing the dishes or doing whatever she needed.”
In between appointments with her paying students, Connie Cox advised the talented, dedicated young man and told him what to practice. “I must have gotten home a little bit after midnight,” Mathis said, recalling that was not a problem, since he was “young and energetic.”
Close to 70 years later the legendary singer, now 83, still has enough youth and energy to travel and perform.
He expects to sing such hits as “Chances Are,” “It’s Not For Me To Say,” “Misty,” “The Twelfth of Never” and “whatever else comes to mind; sometimes it depends on the orchestra” at 7:30 p.m. July 25 at the F.M. Kirby Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Wilkes-Barre.
“Come to the concert,” Mathis urged potential audience members. “I can’t do it without you.”
During a career that spans more than six decades Mathis, who is often described as the “voice of romance,” has recorded more than 80 albums, including one that spent nearly 10 years at the top of the Billboard charts, and received five Grammy nominations as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.
Before all that happened he was a youngster — fourth of seven born to Clem Mathis and Mildred Boyd — who shared a love of music with his father, whom he describes as “also my best pal.”
“My dad was a good singer. He was the reason I sing. When he sat down and played the piano and started singing, that’s when I blossomed,” Mathis said, recalling how his father bought a piano for $25, sometime in the mid 1940s. Since it couldn’t fit through the door to their home, he spent the night dismantling and then rebuilding it indoors.
“We talked about music and the first thing he said to me was, we need to get a voice teacher for you if you’re going to sing. I was gung ho for him to teach me but he was very adamant,” Mathis said. “We were looking for someone who could physically take me and show me how to sing without harming my voice.”
So, it was his father’s insistence that led Mathis to Connie Cox, and Mathis’ own determination that pushed him to learn all he could — not only in the musical field.
“I had wonderful relationships with all my teachers. They were my big heroes. I loved the fact that I was learning something,” he said, recalling the year and a half he spent at San Francisco State University. “I think I wanted to be a teacher; I didn’t know what I wanted to teach.”
A superb athlete, Mathis set a collegiate high jump record that was only 2 inches short of the Olympic record at the time — and he had a chance to tryout for the 1956 Olympic team that would head to Melbourne, Australia. But he turned that down in favor of keeping an appointment in New York City, where he was scheduled to record some songs.
“It was something I enjoyed thinking about, but it was a fantasy,” he said of his chance at the Olympics. “I would have had to make the grade athletically. The reality was, music overshadowed everything in my life from the time I was 12 or 13. That is the thing that consumes me.”
No doubt millions of fans are glad he chose music. And that Columbia Records executive George Avakian had agreed to come to San Francisco’s 440 Club when Mathis was singing there — despite feeling miserable.
“He told me many years later, he was visiting his wife’s relatives in the area and he had poison oak. Someone had told him about me and, poison oak and all, he was sitting in this hot, sticky bar that I sang in and he was miserable. But he thought I had promise and he wanted to hear more. He signed me for Columbia Records.”
Avakian was head of jazz music for Columbia, and Mathis’ first album for the label was in that genre. Later, another Columbia executive, Mitch Miller, steered him toward romantic ballads and helped him develop a style that would later garner this kind of salute from Barbra Streisand:
“There are a number of good singers, a smaller handful of truly great singers, and then there’s Johnny Mathis.”
