In discussing the plight of understudies, the article noted that Mary Martin, singing without a microphone, gave more than 2,000 performances in "South Pacific" in the 1950's without missing one.
The young Merv eventually auditioned for a job as a pianist at KFRC radio in San Francisco, was hired as a singer instead and got his big break a few years later with the Freddy Martin band, singing an implausible cockney novelty number called "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts".
For "Snow Angel," I've invited the brilliant Amber Martin to sing with me and my beloved traveling companion Nath Ann Carrera will be on guitar.
Ms. Arthur started to say that she hadn't seen the likes of Lenya since, but she remembered one exception: Mary Martin singing "A Cockeyed Optimist" at a White House gathering during the Reagan years.
He sat on the couch, strummed his Martin acoustic guitar and was singing "The Pusher" by Steppenwolf.
The first Quiznos campaign from Martin featured deliberately poorly animated characters called spongmonkeys singing the praises of Quiznos sandwiches in purposely off-key voices.
As one of his early collaborators, the Swedish artist E-Type, says in "The Cheiron Saga," a 2008 Radio Sweden documentary about Martin and his former colleagues at Cheiron Studios, in Stockholm, "With his own demos, Max Martin singing himself, those would have sold ten million or more, but he wasn't an artist; he didn't want to be an artist".
It's a little like George Martin singing lead vocals on Hey Jude to give it that extra bit of polish, or Quincy Jones jazzing up Michael Jackson's Thriller by out-dancing him.
Lauren Martin of Fact wrote that "if you're going to release an eight minute song with only two verses and a hook", singing the words "strawberry" and "bubblegum" 34 and 20 times respectively "begins to grate".
