Misty

Misty — Johnny Mathis and the Standard That Endured

There is a particular quality to a song when it outlives every era it passes through. Misty had that quality before Johnny Mathis ever sang a note of it. Erroll Garner composed the melody as a piano instrumental in the early 1950s, and by the time lyricist Johnny Burke added words, the tune had already proven itself as a piece of music that seemed to exist outside of time, immune to fashion, incapable of sounding dated. Mathis brought it to the pop charts in the autumn of 1959, and his version became the definitive one for a generation that hadn't grown up with the earlier jazz recordings.

Mathis at His Peak

By 1959 Johnny Mathis was among the most commercially potent vocalists in America. His albums were perennial bestsellers, fixtures on the charts for months at a stretch; his voice, a high, luminous lyric tenor with an almost instrumental purity of tone, had become the sound of a certain kind of romantic feeling that radio could not quite manufacture any other way. Misty suited him with an exactness that seemed almost too perfect: the song's dreamy, cloud-wrapped imagery matched the soft-focus quality of his voice as though Burke had written the words specifically for his instrument. The recording appeared on Mathis's Heavenly album and was lifted as a single that fall, finding an immediate audience among listeners who wanted something more refined than the twist records and novelty tunes crowding the charts.

The Chart Climb of Autumn 1959

The Hot 100 entry came on October 5, 1959, at position 58. Over the following weeks the record rose with quiet assurance: 47, 39, 30, then 18 by early November. It peaked at number 12 on November 30, 1959, and remained on the chart for 13 weeks in total. For a song that was, structurally speaking, a jazz standard interpolated into the pop market, number 12 was a substantial achievement. Mathis had found the audience that existed between the jazz club and the pop radio station, and Misty proved how large that audience actually was when a record was good enough to reach it.

A Standard Among Standards

What distinguishes Misty in the catalogue of pop standards is its combination of harmonic sophistication and emotional directness. Garner's original melody moves through chromatic shifts that give the song its characteristic feeling of gentle disorientation, the sense of being slightly unmoored in a very pleasant way. Burke's lyric builds the central love metaphor from weather: the narrator describes the confusion and helplessness of desire as being lost in fog, uncertain of direction, dependent on the beloved to provide orientation. It's a conceit that sounds corny in summary and feels completely, naturally right in performance, which is the hallmark of a lyric that genuinely works.

The Record's Long Shadow

In the decades since 1959, Misty has been recorded by an almost uncountable array of artists across every genre that touches on the American songbook. The Mathis version, though, retains its authority as the pop standard against which others are measured: partly because of how well his voice inhabited the song, and partly because the 1959 recording placed it permanently in the Hot 100 era, giving it a pop pedigree alongside its jazz credentials. Clint Eastwood's 1971 film Play Misty for Me returned the song to cultural prominence and introduced it to a younger generation, but Mathis had already done the essential work of cementing it in the popular imagination.

The Invitation to Listen

Put Mathis's Misty on in a quiet room and let the first eight bars do what they always do: slow everything down to a tolerable, luxurious pace. The voice sounds as though it's arriving from somewhere slightly above and behind you, wrapping around the melody with a tenderness that does not strain for a single syllable. Few recordings from the Hot 100's first decade have aged as gracefully. Press play and let the fog roll in.

“Misty” — Johnny Mathis's singular moment on the 1950s charts.