The record in context

“Wonderful! Wonderful!” was written by Sherman Edwards and Ben Raleigh, and recorded by Johnny Mathis in the fall of 1956 — among his first sessions after signing with Columbia Records. Released as a single in early 1957, it reached No. 14 on the American pop chart: his first hit, and the opening note of the most remarkable twelve months any young singer has ever had.

The context matters. Mathis’s 1956 debut album, Johnny Mathis, had been a jazz-oriented affair produced by George Avakian — respectable, slow-selling, and not quite him. For the follow-up sessions, Columbia paired him with producer Mitch Miller, who understood something Avakian hadn’t: this voice didn’t need jazz complexity. It needed great songs, uncluttered, sung straight. “Wonderful! Wonderful!” was the proof of concept — and the album it named, Wonderful Wonderful, would reach No. 4 later that year.

Listen closely

The first thing you hear is the confidence of the phrasing. Mathis was twenty-one, but he sings like someone who has never doubted where the note is. The melody of “Wonderful! Wonderful!” is simple, almost hymn-like, and he treats it with a reverence that never tips into stiffness. Listen to the title phrase: he doesn’t punch the exclamation point. He lets the word “wonderful” bloom, twice, like he’s tasting it.

What made listeners stop — then and now — is the tone itself: a tenor of unusual purity, with a slight catch in it that suggests feeling without ever indulging in it. Compare him to the belters of the era and the difference is obvious; compare him to the crooners and you hear something else — a modern, almost classical control of breath and line. The arrangement is spare by design: Miller keeps the orchestra polite and distant, so the voice fills the foreground alone.

It’s tempting to hear this as a warm-up for the masterpieces to come — and in chart terms, it was, with “It’s Not for Me to Say,” “Chances Are,” and “The Twelfth of Never” all arriving within months. But “Wonderful! Wonderful!” deserves better than to be a footnote. It’s the sound of an artist discovering, in real time, exactly what his instrument is for: not showing off, but showing the song. Everything Mathis would do for the next sixty years — the patience, the clarity, the refusal to hurry — is already here, in under three minutes, from a twenty-one-year-old who’d chosen music over the Olympics.

Play it first in this collection, as we’ve placed it. It’s the hello before the conversation gets interesting.