On the Right - The Crooner, R.I.P.(singer Perry Como)(Brief Article)(Column)(Obituary)

NEW YORK, MAY 18

Perry Como died in his sleep, and one comments, How else? He was if not the founder of the casual mode, its preeminent prince, and his reputation was made mostly by that attitude towards music. He treated it, evidently (I am not an expert) as a continuing lullaby, and dug in his heels against the modern movement that decreed that only unmusical music is tolerable. One has the temptation, if caught with such music, to level a shotgun at a booster and require him/her to narrate what his clomping enthusiasm was all about. What was the melody he heard? Could he sing it? Write it out? Hum it? No. The nearest reconstruction he could make would be to find a drum and cymbal and just beat on them, and maybe, if he is studious in the imitation, howling; howling not a little, howling a lot.

Perry Como, we read, was kindly treated by the critics, but not adored. It is judged that he was never, finally, a mega star. He did sell a hundred million records, and one year he beat out-in the dispositive Billboard magazine's annual poll-Dick Haymes and Frank Sinatra. But the keenest ears were looking for something more, which had already come along with Bing Crosby, whom Como aped, and was smashingly there with Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, after he retuned his whole approach to music. In a fine tribute to Como in the Wall Street Journal, Martha Bayles quotes Frank Sinatra on himself, a subject that engrossed him throughout his life. "I decided to experiment a little and come up with something different. What I finally hit on was more the bel canto Italian school of singing, without making a point of it. That meant I had to stay in better shape because I had to sing more."

Como was renowned for his-decency, of which I had a tiny experience. Frank Sinatra, by contrast, was always a Presence, and expected to be treated as such. Although Perry Como sang into his eighties (he died age 88), his big years, in the movies and on television, were behind him by the late Fifties, which is when Elvis Presley materialized, to swamp the scene until the Beatles more or less took over.

Como's voice was rich and mellifluous and melodies flowed out of him as though issuing fresh from his throat's imagination. Presley brought an excitement to singing, in part because rock and roll was greeted as his invention, ...