Andy Williams - Butterfly - The Very Best Of CD

Although now in his eighties, Andy Williams continues to perform and record regularly and he remains as popular today as at any point in his long, illustrious career. However, decades before he evolved into a Easy Listening/MOR icon, selling millions upon millions of albums, he was a successful mainstream Pop singer. He’d initially established himself via a run of hit singles for the Cadence label back in the 50s, with whom he scored an impressive fifteen US chart entries between 1956-60, during which period he honed and perfected the vocal style which would stand him in such good stead over the ensuing decades.

This compilation anthologises those early hits (CD1) and for good measure also includes the pick of his album tracks during this same period, drawn from a half-dozen fine LPs (CD2). Like many of his contemporaries, many of Andy’s early record successes were either covers or revivals - a scenario which reached its bizarre apogee in the Spring of 1957 with his cover of Charlie Gracie’s R&R classic ‘Butterfly’. Even more bizarrely, perhaps, Andy actually came out on top of his chart battle with Gracie, topping both the US and UK listings to win his first gold record. However, despite its extraordinary success, his R&R ‘career’ proved to be pretty short lived and it was soon ‘business as usual’...

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