I also met, early on Ella Fitzgerald. Her songbooks are some of the most amazing bodies of work.

He has the distinction of having the longest tenure of any recording artist on the Columbia Records label having been with the label from 1956 to 1963 and from 1968 to the present. He was a high jumper and a hurdler and he played on the basketball team. Mathis eulogized him in October 2008 at his funeral to thank him for giving him his first chance as a singer.

John Royce "Johnny" Mathis (born September 30 1935Gilmer Texas United States) is an American singer of popular music. While he concentrated on theme-oriented albums of show tunes and traditional favorites during the 1960s he began incorporating soft rock by the 1970s and remained a popular concert attraction well into the 1990s. Starting his career with singles of standard music he became highly popular as an album artist with several dozen of his albums achieving gold or platinum status and 73 making the Billboard charts and Guinness World Record music chart historian Paul Gambaccini confirms "Johnny Mathis has sold well over 350 million records worldwide".