John Gary was almost 31 years old when
RCA Victor records released his major-label debut,
Catch a Rising Star, its Top Ten success and year-plus in the charts making him an "overnight sensation." But though he might have seemed a little long in the tooth, he had actually been a child prodigy who had been knocking around the entertainment business since he played a singing newsboy in the
James Cagney film
The Time of Your Life in 1948. But by the time he was ready to make his mark as a
pop singer in the mid-'50s, all the record companies wanted to sign was
rock & roll acts, and he was only able to attract the attention of small independents until
RCA finally decided the
rock & roll fad was over -- just before the start of the
British Invasion.
Catch a Rising Star seemed designed to showcase
Gary's multi-octave voice, with its soaring tenor that crossed over into falsetto without any break, rather than to give him a hit record, since the songs were mostly familiar. He covered material associated with
Tony Bennett and
Nat "King" Cole, presented his own versions of some '50s and '60s hits, and displayed considerable versatility going from
country tunes like
Hank Williams'
"Your Cheatin' Heart" to the Caribbean-style
"Yellow Bird," which sounded like the sort of thing his labelmate
Harry Belafonte was known for. In some respects, he resembled
Johnny Ray, but without the hysterical overstatement. His individual approach was best appreciated on
"Unchained Melody," which he began with only an acoustic guitar for accompaniment and deliberately undersang, in contrast to the many over-the-top versions of the well-known song. Such performances set
Gary apart from his competitors on the supper club circuit and seemed to bode an important new figure in sophisticated
pop singing. ~ William Ruhlmann
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