Percy Faith (April 7, 1908 -- February 9, 1976) was a Canadian bandleader, orchestrator, composer and conductor, known for his lush arrangements of pop and Christmas standards. He is often credited with popularizing the "easy listening" or "mood music" format. Faith became a staple of American popular music in the 1950s and continued well into the 1960s. Though his professional orchestra-leading career began at the height of the swing era, Faith refined and rethought orchestration techniques, including use of large string sections, to soften and fill out the brass-dominated popular music of the 1940s Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Faith "Theme from A Summer Place" is a song with lyrics by Mack Discant and music by Max Steiner, written for the 1959 film A Summer Place, which starred Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue. Percy Faith recorded the most popular version of the tune in the Columbia 30th Street Studio in New York City,[1] which spent an at-the-time record of nine consecutive weeks at number one on the still-young Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in early 1960.[2] It remains the longest-running number-one instrumental in the history of the chart. It reached number two in the UK. It hit number one in Italy under the title "Scandalo Al Sole". Faith won a Grammy Award for Record of the Year in 1961 for his recording. This was the first movie theme and the first instrumental to win a Record of the Year Grammy. Faith re-recorded the song twice -- first, in 1969, as a female choral version, then, in 1976, as a disco version titled "Summer Place '76". In 2008, Faith's original version was ranked at number eighteen on Billboard's top 100 songs during the first fifty years of the Hot 100 chart. Read more: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_from_A_Summer_Place

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