Eddie Fisher's recording career took a remarkable nosedive during the second half of the 1950s. He was one of the top pop singles artists of the period 1952-1954 and continued to score hits during 1955 and 1956, but his record sales fell off the table thereafter. It's puzzling that RCA Victor didn't make more of an attempt to break him in the lucrative LP market. Instead of recording two albums a year, as many of his competitors did, he cut only one per year in the early '50s. As his sales declined, he recorded less; he didn't make an album at all in 1957. By 1958, when he released
As Long As There's Music, no one really cared, and RCA dropped him. The tragedy of this botched career development is that
As Long As There's Music was the best album he made for RCA in the '50s. By the age of 29, he had outgrown his tendency to over-emote, and he was singing in lower, more natural keys. The LP had no special theme; it was just a collection of good songs by quality songwriters, songs that had not been over-recorded by
Fisher's competitors. The lead-off track, for example, came from the semi-hit musical A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, with music by
Arthur Schwartz and
Dorothy Fields, while the title song was a forgotten
Sammy Cahn-
Jule Styne number from the 1944
Frank Sinatra movie Step Lively. By now the veteran of countless supper clubs,
Fisher sang with confidence and maturity, not straining, but achieving a bell-like tone. He was still tempted to bellow on occasion, but he had grown more respectful of lyricists, and that led to better interpretations. He had grown up and become a very good singer. But in the record business, he couldn't get arrested anymore.