Archibald Martin Bleyer (June 12, 1909 – March 20, 1989)
was an American
song arranger,
bandleader
A bandleader is the leader of a music group such as a dance band, rock or pop band or jazz quartet. The term is most commonly used with a group that plays popular music as a small combo or a big band, such as one which plays jazz, blues, rhyth ...
, and record company executive.
Early life
Bleyer was born in the
Corona section of the
New York City
New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...
borough of
Queens
Queens is the largest by area of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City, coextensive with Queens County, in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York. Located near the western end of Long Island, it is bordered by the ...
.
His father was a well-known trumpet player who had played with the
Metropolitan Opera
The Metropolitan Opera is an American opera company based in New York City, currently resident at the Metropolitan Opera House (Lincoln Center), Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, situated on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Referred ...
. The younger Bleyer began playing the piano when he was only seven years old.
In 1927, he attended
Columbia College, intending to become an
electrical engineer
Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...
, but as a sophomore switched to a music major.
Without graduating, he left to become an arranger. In the early 1930s, Bleyer wrote a number of songs that were recorded, all 'hot' novelty numbers, including "Mouthful O'Jam", "Business In F" and "Business In Q".
In 1934, he began to lead his own band at
Earl Carroll
Earl Carroll (September 16, 1893 – June 17, 1948) was an American theatrical producer, director, writer, songwriter and composer.
Early life
Carroll was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1893. He lived as an infant in the Nunnery Hill ( Fin ...
's club in
Hollywood, California
Hollywood, sometimes informally called Tinseltown, is a List of districts and neighborhoods in Los Angeles, neighborhood and district in the Central Los Angeles, central region of Los Angeles County, California, within the city of Los Angeles. ...
. Bleyer's orchestra recorded for
Vocalion Records
Vocalion Records is an American record label, originally founded by the Aeolian Company, a piano and organ manufacturer before being bought out by Brunswick in 1924.
History
The label was founded in 1916 by the Aeolian Company, a maker of pi ...
in 1934 and in 1935 moved to the
ARC group of labels (Melotone, Perfect, Romeo, Oriole). One of the vocalists who worked with this orchestra was
Johnny Mercer
John Herndon Mercer (November 18, 1909 – June 25, 1976) was an American lyricist, songwriter, and singer, as well as a record label executive who co-founded Capitol Records with music industry businessmen Buddy DeSylva and Wallichs Music Cit ...
, who later became known as a songwriter and co-founder of
Capitol Records
Capitol Records, LLC (known legally as Capitol Records, Inc. until 2007), and simply known as Capitol, is an American record label owned by Universal Music Group through its Capitol Music Group imprint. It was founded as the first West Coast-base ...
.
In 1945, Bleyer began a collaboration on the CBS radio network as the orchestra conductor for the popular ''
Gordon MacRae Show''. Included among the instrumentalist who appeared with his orchestra was
John Serry Sr., who emerged in later years as a leading orchestral accordionist.
Godfrey years
Bleyer became
Arthur Godfrey
Arthur Morton Godfrey (August 31, 1903 – March 16, 1983) was an American radio and television broadcaster and entertainer. At the peak of his success, in the early to mid-1950s, Godfrey was heard on radio and seen on television up to six days ...
's musical director in 1946, remaining in this role until 1953.
Many close to Godfrey considered Bleyer's creativity and understanding of music to be pivotal to the success of Godfrey's radio and TV programs. And while Godfrey was known to be short-fused and controlling, he often deferred to Bleyer's judgment in the areas of presentation and production.
Bleyer founded
Cadence Records in 1952.
The label's first artist was
Julius La Rosa, a member of the Godfrey cast, which also included vocalists
Janette Davis,
Frank Parker,
Marion Marlowe, and the racially integrated vocal group
The Mariners. At the time, La Rosa was the show's most popular cast member. Bleyer had several instrumental hit singles of his own, and signed other artists who had performed on Godfrey's programs, including
The Chordettes
The Chordettes were an American female vocal quartet, specializing in traditional pop music. They are best known for their 1950s hit singles " Mr. Sandman" and " Lollipop", both of which sold over a million copies.
Career
The group organized i ...
, one of whose members, Janet Ertel, became his wife in 1954.
In the fall of 1953, Godfrey dismissed La Rosa on the air and later claimed the young singer "lacked humility",
which diminished Godfrey's popularity. La Rosa had hired a personal manager, going against an unofficial Godfrey policy. That same day, Godfrey fired Bleyer, apparently offended when Bleyer recorded spoken recitations by Chicago radio personality
Don McNeill, host of ''
Don McNeill's Breakfast Club''.
This long-running Godfrey-like show was based in Chicago and broadcast nationally, but its popularity was mainly in the Midwest and tailored to that audience. Always insecure, Godfrey felt McNeill, whose show had once been a competitor, was still in competition though Godfrey was the dominant personality of his generation. Godfrey later claimed when he confronted Bleyer and threatened to fire him from at least one of the three shows Godfrey hosted, the conductor shrugged and told him to do what he had to do.''
Radio historian
John Dunning has suggested, in ''On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio'', that Bleyer's relationship with Janet Ertel was also a factor in Godfrey's decision to fire him;
Godfrey tried to enforce a no-dating policy among his cast and fired several who dated each other. Bleyer never made a public comment about his days with Godfrey. The public furor that surrounded LaRosa's firing and, to a lesser extent, Bleyer's, began the slow unraveling of Godfrey's seemingly unstoppable dominance of radio and TV, just as Bleyer's career was beginning to blossom. The loss of Bleyer's expertise in staging and production matters, where he served as an informal mentor to Godfrey despite their age differences, was detrimental to Godfrey's programs.
Cadence Records
While LaRosa was unable to sustain his early successes, later Cadence artists included
Andy Williams
Howard Andrew Williams (December 3, 1927 – September 25, 2012) was an American singer. He recorded 43 albums in his career, of which 15 have been gold certified and three platinum certified. He was also nominated for six Grammy Awards. He hos ...
and the label's biggest act of all,
The Everly Brothers
The Everly Brothers were an American rock duo, known for steel-string acoustic guitar playing and close-harmony singing. Consisting of Isaac Donald "Don" Everly and Phillip "Phil" Everly, the duo combined elements of rock and roll, country, ...
, whose hits such as "
Bye Bye Love" and "
Wake Up Little Susie" were produced by Bleyer in Nashville with country studio musicians led by
Chet Atkins
Chester Burton Atkins (June 20, 1924 – June 30, 2001), also known as "Mister Guitar" and "the Country Gentleman", was an American musician who, along with Owen Bradley and Bob Ferguson (musician), Bob Ferguson, helped create the Nash ...
. Bleyer was also the step father-in-law of Phil Everly. (In 1963, Everly married Jacqueline Alice Ertel, daughter of Bleyer's wife, Janet. They divorced in 1970.)
Don Shirley appeared on the label in 1955 with "Tonal Expressions". It became a Top 15 album in the spring of that year, reportedly selling more than 20,000 copies, a respectable debut for a jazz artist. It was the only chart album Shirley was to enjoy, but his sales remained steady enough that he was with the label until it closed in 1964, recording more than a dozen long-play releases.
Bleyer also had limits to his tolerance for rock and roll. While he clearly, and correctly, viewed the Everlys as a commercially appealing, clean-cut act whose country-influenced harmonies could reach a vast following, he was not as tolerant of pioneer garage-rock guitarist
Link Wray
Fred Lincoln "Link" Wray Jr. (May 2, 1929 – November 5, 2005) was an American guitarist, songwriter, and vocalist who became popular in the late 1950s. His 1958 Instrumental rock, instrumental single "Rumble (instrumental), Rumble", reached the ...
. In 1957, Bleyer reluctantly agreed to release Wray's no-frills, roaring instrumental "
Rumble," in part due to his daughter's fascination with the song. Wray had a contract with Cadence, but in 1958 after he submitted a newly recorded album of similarly raw material recorded in Nashville, Bleyer was convinced the instrumental music was morally and musically inappropriate. He shelved the album and canceled Wray's contract. The material would not be released for decades until it was acquired by the British Rollercoaster label.
Cadence had a short-lived jazz subsidiary,
Candid, which lasted for about a year from 1960 (it was reactivated under new owners several decades later).
Cadence had another major hit in 1962 with comic
Vaughn Meader's album ''
The First Family'', which featured Meader's comedic sketches and his peerless impersonations of President
John F. Kennedy. The album was an enormous seller, as was a follow-up, until Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.
Cadence always maintained a small roster of artists. Other Cadence hits included 14 chart hits by
Johnny Tillotson
Johnny Tillotson (April 20, 1938 – April 1, 2025) was an American singer-songwriter. He enjoyed his greatest success in the early 1960s, when he scored nine top-ten hits on the pop, country, and adult contemporary ''Billboard'' charts, incl ...
, ten by
The Chordettes
The Chordettes were an American female vocal quartet, specializing in traditional pop music. They are best known for their 1950s hit singles " Mr. Sandman" and " Lollipop", both of which sold over a million copies.
Career
The group organized i ...
, four by
Lenny Welch, and two by
Don Shirley. In 1964, Bleyer, who was unable to accept the changing pop music market at the dawn of the
British Invasion
The British Invasion was a cultural phenomenon of the mid-1960s, when Rock music, rock and pop music acts from the United Kingdom and other aspects of Culture of the United Kingdom, British culture became popular in the United States with sign ...
, sold the Cadence label and all its recordings (except for certain material which he kept to himself, like the Link Wray album). The buyer was Cadence artist Andy Williams, who formed
Barnaby Records to manage the Cadence catalog.
Bleyer moved with his wife Janet to her hometown of
Sheboygan, Wisconsin
Sheboygan () is a city in Sheboygan County, Wisconsin, United States, and its county seat. The population was 49,929 at the 2020 census. It is the principal city of the Sheboygan Metropolitan statistical area, metropolitan area, which has a pop ...
, where he died in 1989 of the effects of
Parkinson's disease
Parkinson's disease (PD), or simply Parkinson's, is a neurodegenerative disease primarily of the central nervous system, affecting both motor system, motor and non-motor systems. Symptoms typically develop gradually and non-motor issues become ...
, less than a year after his wife.
Bleyer was a
freemason
Freemasonry (sometimes spelled Free-Masonry) consists of fraternal groups that trace their origins to the medieval guilds of stonemasons. Freemasonry is the oldest secular fraternity in the world and among the oldest still-existing organizati ...
, and a member of St. Cecile Lodge No. 568, New York City.
Selected records
*"Amber", first instrumental (1954)
["I'm surprised that Archie Bleyer cut his first instrumental release and had the one side, 'Amber,' run over three minutes — that is sure death. As packed with commercials as we are, the trend is toward shorter sides." ''Billboard,'' "Vox Jox," by Charlotte Summers, February 6, 1954, p. 37,]
*"
Hernando's Hideaway" (1954)
*"
The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane" (1954)
References
External links
*Archie Bleyer bio on th
SOLID!site
*Archie Bleyer bio on th
IMDbsite
*Archie Bleyer bio on th
site
*
Allmusic
AllMusic (previously known as All-Music Guide and AMG) is an American online database, online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on Musical artist, musicians and Mus ...
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bleyer, Archie
1909 births
1989 deaths
American bandleaders
Apex Records artists
American music industry executives
People from Corona, Queens
People from Sheboygan, Wisconsin
Cadence Records artists
20th-century American musicians
20th-century American businesspeople
Musicians from New York (state)
American conductors (music)
American male conductors (music)
Record producers from New York (state)
American music arrangers
Deaths from Parkinson's disease in the United States
Neurological disease deaths in Wisconsin
20th-century American male musicians
Columbia College (New York) alumni