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A star-spangled hit Just like the '60s, this Letterman will sing national anthem at Pirates game Saturday, July 22, 2000 By Ed Masley, Post-Gazette Pop Music Critic
In the early '60s, shortly after hitting No. 13 with a vocal-group cover of Fred Astaire's old No. 1, "The Way You Look Tonight," the Lettermen offered to sing the national anthem at the Pirates game while staying in Monroeville for a three-week run at the Holiday House.
Although the group was based in California, Tony Butala had the Pirates in his blood, having grown up in Sharon, Mercer County.
As Butala, who's doing the anthem again tomorrow at the Pirates game, recalls, the Lettermen soon were performing the anthem in ball parks all over the country.
In 1989, shortly after being hailed in People magazine for their national anthem, the Lettermen sang it again -- in Seattle -- at which point they'd done it in every Major League park in existence. A fan club member notified the Guinness Book of World Records, Butala recalls, "And they said, 'That's no big deal; it's not worthy.' "
A founder of the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in Sharon, Butala got his start on radio at KDKA in the '40s on a show called Starlets on Parade.
"My mother, she used to put blackface makeup on me," Butala recalls. "Even though it was radio, to get inspired to do my Al Jolson impersonations, which I did at 7-8 years old, I was full regalia with my tuxedo and my blackface."
After a couple of years on radio, Butala went to California with his mother, a nurse, who was going to care for a cousin in Los Angeles.
While there, he happened to audition for the Mitchell Boys Choir.
"The good news," he says, "was I got the audition. The bad news was I got the audition. My mother was faced with, what does she do, leave her 10-year-old kid in California? So we asked my dad what he thought and he said whatever I wanted to do was fine with him."
His mom went home, Butala stayed and six months later, he was in a picture with Bing Crosby called "White Christmas."
Within two years, he was doing so well, he moved the family -- all 12 of them -- out to California.
Then, as often happens, "At 141/2, I became an ugly, awkward adolescent with pimples, and my boy soprano days were over."
He stayed on as assistant choir director with Mitchell and put a vocal group together with a high school friend, Concietta Ingolia, who struck out on her own as Connie Stevens, acting in "Hawaiian Eye" and charting with "Kookie, Kookie (Lend Me Your Comb)."
At that point, Butala recalls, "I decided to form a group with just three men singing harmonies that were kind of between big band and rock 'n' roll sounds. That's how I came up with the Lettermen."
To stand out from the other vocal groups with school names -- Four Preps, Danny and the Juniors, Four Freshmen, etc. -- he dressed the group in letter sweaters.
By the time their second single, "When I Fall in Love," came out, though, the Lettermen sweaters, he says, were "real, real square. I put 'em in mothballs."
Through the years, they've done their best to keep up with the changing times -- from mutton- chops to platform shoes and afros.
"Whatever was in style," he says, "we changed to that style."
The members were changing as well. Today, he's backed by two much younger Lettermen. Their latest album finds them covering the theme from "Titanic" and Whitney Houston's favorite Dolly Parton song, "I Will Always Love You."
The key today, as it was in the '60s, is entertaining the audience.
As Butala says, "There are a lot of big hit record artists who do shows but they're not entertainers. ... Some young kids who have never seen a show, they think that when you see Michael Jackson with all the laser beams and the smoke and the fire, they think that's entertainment. That's just a spectacle. ... When the Lettermen perform in 10,000-seat auditoriums, it's not this huge screaming, then it dies off in two seconds. It's 20 or 30 seconds of applause after every song."
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