Mitch Miller was behind the scenes as much as he was the scene and he seemed to like it that way. Like it or not, he helped shaped the music of a recovering country in and era where millions would look back on with nostalgia, but he would also give music to that era. Today's song is a fun tune called "Kalamazoo to Timbuktu" featuring vocals from the lovely Paulette Sisters, of which I could find very little information about. The song was written by Marshall Barer, Margaret Wise Brown, and Alec Wilder and was inspired by a 1951 Little Golden Book written by Margaret Wise Brown entitled "The Train to Tibuctoo". Miller's take was recorded in December 1951, releasing the following March.

Mitchell William Miller was born on July 4, 1911 in Rochester, New York. He learned to play the oboe as a teenager and only because it was the only instrument left to audition for in his junior high orchestra. He would received a scholarship to the Hochstein School of Music & Dance to further his study of the instrument. In college he would end up becoming good friends with Goddard Lieberson, the future president of CBS Music Group. His first foray into music after graduating was with the Alec Wilder Octet (1938 to 1941), as well as performing with David Mannes, Andre Kostelanetz, Percy Faith, George Gershwin, Frank Sinatra and Charlie Parker.

It wasn't all just dance and pop music for Miller. He would play the English horn in the Largo movement of Dvořák's New World Symphony in a 1947 recording conducted by Leopold Stokowski, and would take part in the Mozart's Oboe Concerto in C Major with the CBS Symphony Orchestra, broadcast for Voice of America in 1948. He was also part of the CBS Symphony, providing musical accompaniment on the 1938 radio broadcast of Orson Welles's "The Mercury Theater on the Air" production of "The War of the Worlds".

In the late 40's, Miller would join Mercury Records as their head of Artists and Repertoire (A&R) and would go on to join Columbia Records for the same job in 1950. Most of what the public heard from Columbia in the 1950's and 60's had to be approved through Miller, which would go on to shape what pop standards defined the decade including Johnnie Ray, Percy Faith, Ray Conniff, Jimmy Boyd, Johnny Mathis, Tony Bennett, and Guy Mitchell (who's stage name was based on Miller's first name). He helped give new direction to artists who had been with the label a while already like Doris Day, Dinah Shore and Jo Stafford. He would also get credit for discovering Aretha Franklin who recorded with Columbia for five years before moving to Atlantic.

Mitch enjoyed many styles of music but specifically hated Rock and Roll. He is known to have passed on Elvis, Buddy Holly and even the Beatles, all of whom would go on and be HUGE money makers for rival labels. He did, however, sign Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins, but only because of their more country sounding repertoires. It seems Miller was a controversial figure at Columbia with performers like Harry James, Rosemary Clooney and even Frank Sinatra all blaming him for slow periods in their career thanks to his to unrelenting ideas of what the artists should record.

Speaking of recording, in the early 1950's, Miller because recording with Columbia as Mitchell Miller and his Orchestra, producing a string of successful albums and singles. They would become Mitch Miller and the Gang shortly after, selling over million copies for his version of The Yellow Rose of Texas and the marches from The Bridge on the River Kwai which lasted 29 weeks on the Billboard pop charts in 1958. He would continue morphing different bands to his needs and recorded and conducted well into the 1980's.

In 1961, a one-off episode on the NBC TV show "Startime" entitled "Sing Along with Mitch" would become its own weekly show, hosted by Mitch and backed with a male chorus. Viewers would be presented with the lyrics at the bottom of their screen and encouraged to sing along from home. Of course he would have celebrity guests on the show as well such as George Burns, Milton Berle, Shirley Temple, Johnny Carson, Jerry Lewis, Wally Cox, and Buddy Hackett. The show would run until 1964.

Miller would leave Columbia Records in 1965 and joined MCA, Inc as a consultant. He would continue working various jobs in the music industry and generally doing what he felt like doing until his retirement. He was awarded an Honorary Membership to the Barbershop Harmony Society in 1985 and received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. He would posthumously be inducted into the Rochester Music Hall of Fame in 2013 after his death in 2010 at the age of 99.