Obituaries

I wrote about him only a few months ago, but conductor Mitch Miller, 99, has died after a short illness.

I best remember him as host of the singalong show of the early 1960s, Sing Along With Mitch.

The years of Miller's biggest successes were also the early years of rock 'n' roll, and many fans saw his old-fashioned arrangements of standards and folk favorites as an antidote to the noisy stuff the teens adored. As an executive at Columbia, Miller would be widely ridiculed for trying to turn a young Aretha Franklin into a showbiz diva in the tradition of Sophie Tucker.

But Miller was not entirely unsympathetic to rock 'n' roll. In a 1955 essay in The New York Times magazine, he said the popularity of rhythm and blues, as he called it, with white teens was part of young people's "natural desire not to conform, a need to be rebellious."

He added: "There is a steady - and healthy - breaking down of color barriers in the United States; perhaps the rhythm-and-blues rage - I am only theorizing - is another expression of it."

"Miller has often been maligned as a maestro of 1950s schlock ... Yet Miller injected elements of rhythm and blues and country music, however diluted, into mainstream pop," Ken Emerson wrote in his book "Always Magic in the Air."

Miller was one of a kind.

I posted this clip featuring Johnny Carson a few months ago: