Percy Faith
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Percy Faith (April 7, 1908 – February 9, 1976) was a band-leader, orchestrator and composer, known for his arrangements of standard tunes with lush string sections and female chorus vocal and wordless. The female chorus became a Percy Faith signature with his mid to late 60's "Young Lovers" projects, and was used in his final Holiday album "Christmas Is" released in 1967.
He was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He played violin and piano as a child, and played in theatres and at Massey Hall. After an injury in a fire, he turned to conducting, and his live orchestras utilized the new medium of radio broadcasting. Beginning with defunct stations CKNC and CKCL, Faith was a staple of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's live-music broadcasting from 1933 to 1940, when he resettled in Chicago. In 1945, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He made many recordings for Voice of America. After working briefly for Decca Records, he worked for Mitch Miller at Columbia Records, where he turned out dozens of albums and provided arrangements for many of the pop singers of the 1950s.
His most famous and remembered recordings are Delicado (1952), song from the Moulin Rouge (1953) and Theme from A Summer Place (1960), which won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in 1961.
Percy Faith died in Encino, California and was interred in the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California.
