First successes

Warned by Miller not to imitate Frank Sinatra (who was just then leaving Columbia), Bennett began his career as a crooner singing commercial pop tunes. His first big hit was Because of You, a ballad produced by Miller with a lush orchestral arrangement from Percy Faith. It started out gaining popularity on jukeboxes, then reached #1 on the pop charts in 1951 and stayed there for 10 weeks, selling over a million copies. This was followed to the top later that year by a similarly-styled rendition of Hank Williams' Cold, Cold Heart, which helped introduce Williams and country music in general to a wider, more national audience. The Miller and Faith tandem continued to work on all of Bennett's early hits. Bennett's recording of Blue Velvet was also very popular and attracted screaming teenage fans at concerts in the famed Paramount Theater in New York (Bennett did 7 shows a day, starting at 10:30 a.m.) and elsewhere.


The Young Tony BennettIn 1952, Bennett married Ohio art student and jazz fan Patricia Beech, whom he had met the previous year after a nightclub performance in Cleveland. Two thousand female fans dressed in black gathered outside the ceremony at New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral in mock mourning. Bennett and Beech would have two sons, D'Andrea (Danny) and Daegal (Dae).

A third #1 came in 1953 with Rags to Riches. Unlike Bennett's other early hits, this was an up-tempo big band number with a bold, brassy sound and a double tango in the instrumental break; it topped the charts for eight weeks. Later that year Bennett began singing show tunes to make up for a New York newspaper strike; Stranger in Paradise from the Broadway show Kismet reached the top, as well as being a #1 hit in the United Kingdom and starting Bennett's career as an international artist.

Once the rock and roll era began in 1955, the dynamic of the music industry changed and it became harder for existing pop singers to do as well commercially. Nevertheless Bennett continued to enjoy success, placing 8 songs in the Billboard Top 40 during the latter part of the 1950s, with In the Middle of an Island reaching the highest at #9 in 1957.

In 1956, Bennett hosted the television variety show The Tony Bennett Show as a summer replacement for The Perry Como Show.