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Today the key plugger is a suede-shod salesman with a Windsor-knotted tie who goes by the Tin Pan Alley title of "professional manager." His job is to convince record manufacturers that his publisher's song is headed for the bestseller lists. There is plenty of music for record men to choose from; after a weary week of listening, they are ready to believe that every third person in the U.S. is a would-be tunesmith. But since the only way to be sure of not missing a hit is to listen to everything, most companies assign experts to plow through the plankton-like mass of material. The Tin Pan Alley title for the top picker in each record company is "A & R man" (for Artists and Repertory). The A & R man's job is to be music-hungry seven days a week, while maintaining a gourmet's selectivity.
Listen for the Throb. At Columbia, the A & R man is spade-bearded, sagacious Mitchell William (Mitch) Miller (TIME Aug. 20, 1951), a long-hair (Eastman School) who for the last two years has guided his label to the No. 1 position among pop-record producers. Once a week he throws open the doors of his audition room in the hope of hearing a tune that is "right" for one of his stable of singers—Johnnie Ray (Cry), Jimmy Boyd (I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus), Frankie Lame (High Noon). Jo Stafford (Jambalaya), or Clooney. In four or five hours he receives a parade of professional managers, may sample 50 or more new songs while he sits spooning yoghurt or munching hard-boiled eggs.
Mitch Miller listens for simple tunes and simple ideas—something insistent and fundamental enough to throb its way into the distraught ear of the 14-22 age group, which buys almost all the records worth counting. If Miller were to summarize his prescription for teen-age appeal, it might very well go like this: "Keep it simple, keep it sexy, keep it sad."
The popular American ballad has, in fact, been written to much this prescription for generations—though the degrees of moroseness and suggestiveness vary with presumably deeper tides. People no longer actually perish in the contemporary ballad, as they did in Stephen Foster's day, e.g.—
Nelly was a lady,
Last night she died . . .
In today's sad songs, people merely sob or suffer from wounded pride. Moreover, Nelly is no longer a lady Stephen Foster would have understood. She tells her boy friend: "Come on-a my house," or howls "hold me, thrill me, kiss me."
Clooney's record romances are warm but strictly licit. When she tried Come On-a My House the first few times, she just couldn't make it sound right. Mitch Miller descended from the control room and gave her a bit of advice: "Think of it this way, Rosie. You're asking that boy over to your house because you're going to marry him." That made everything all right.