Go Chase A Moonbeam

Go Chase A Moonbeam — Jerry Vale's Wistful Bid for the Charts

The Velvet Voice of a New York Italian Kid

Picture the fall of 1958: jukeboxes are loaded with novelty records and teenage rock and roll, yet tucked between the soda-shop hits you could still find the polished, velvet-smooth crooning of a young man from the Bronx who had been carefully groomed for something more sophisticated. Jerry Vale had come up through the Italian-American ballad tradition, his voice trained to carry the weight of old-world longing with the precision of a nightclub act that played to adults in suits, not teenagers in saddle shoes. By the time Go Chase A Moonbeam arrived in October of that year, Vale was already a Columbia Records fixture, a reliably elegant presence on a label that also housed Tony Bennett and Johnny Mathis.

A Ballad Built for Supper Clubs

The song itself belongs to the lush, string-laden tradition of late-1950s adult pop: the kind of record where the arrangement does as much work as the singer, and the singer's job is to make you believe every syllable of longing. Vale was masterful at this. The title carries its own poetry, a gentle command that doubles as an admission of futility, and the vocal performance leans into that ambiguity with characteristic restraint. The production, typical of Columbia's pop output in that era, wrapped the vocal in layered strings and soft brass, creating the sonic equivalent of candlelight.

Finding Its Footing on the Billboard Pop Singles Chart

The chart story was modest but real. Go Chase A Moonbeam debuted on the Billboard Pop Singles chart on October 13, 1958, entering at number 89. It made a quiet, patient climb over the following weeks, dipping and rising the way ballads often did when competing against more urgent rock and roll fare, before reaching its peak position of number 60 during the week of November 24, 1958. The record spent seven weeks in the chart's orbit, a modest run that nonetheless confirmed Vale's ability to hold his own with adult listeners in a market increasingly tilting toward the young.

Where Vale Stood in 1958

To understand this single's place, you have to understand what Jerry Vale was building toward. He had already scored genuine pop hits in the early and mid-1950s, and his management and label were positioning him as a long-term entertainer in the Sinatra/Bennett mold rather than a flash-in-the-pan teen idol. He played the Copa, the Fontainebleau, the kind of rooms where adults paid real money to hear a beautiful voice. Go Chase A Moonbeam fit that world exactly: a record with no pretense of chasing trends, simply offering two-and-a-half minutes of refined, uncomplicated beauty.

The Lasting Glow of an Understated Moment

The song has never become a signature Vale track in the way that his Italian-language recordings or his later pop standards would be, but it captures something true about its moment: the brief window when adult pop and rock and roll coexisted on the same charts before the latter swept the former into the supper club circuit for good. For collectors and fans of 1950s vocal pop, the record is a small gem, a reminder that elegance was still commercially viable even as the ground shifted beneath it. Press play and let the strings carry you somewhere quieter, somewhere the moonbeam is still worth chasing.

“Go Chase A Moonbeam” — Jerry Vale's singular moment on the 1950s charts.