This Day in History: Canadian bandleader, orchestrator, composer and conductor Percy Faith died on this day in 1976. Percy Faith is often credited with popularizing the "easy listening" format. I'm a huge fan of Easy Listening and also Percy Faith. I can still remember as a child listening to a local radio station playing the top 100 rock n roll hits, and Percy Faith's "Theme from a Summer Place" was number 1. I agreed that "Theme from a Summer Place" was a great song, perhaps THE perfect song, but it is not Rock Music. I still have a Percy Faith LP, and I regularly listen to many other greats in the genre, such as Ray Coniff, Billy Vaughn, James Last, Bert Kaempfert, Paul Mauriat, Mantovani, Henry Mancini, Herb Alpert, the Carpenters, etc.
What a lot of people don't know is that Easy Listening music often out-sold bigger, hipper rock artists of the same period. Take The Carpenters. The Carpenters had three number-one singles and five number-two singles on the Billboard Hot 100 and fifteen number-one hits on the Adult Contemporary chart, in addition to twelve top-10 singles. They have sold more than 100 million records worldwide, making them one of the best-selling music artists of all time. Percy Faith's Theme from A Summer Place was a Number One hit for nine weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1960. The Billboard Book of Number One Hits called it "the most successful instrumental single of the rock era."
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