Johnny Mathis, a pop music singer and one of the best-selling recording artists of the 20th century, said this week that he would perform only four more live concerts before retiring from touring after nearly 70 years.
Known for his “velvet voice” on romantic ballads like “It’s Not for Me to Say” and “Wonderful! Wonderful!” Mr. Mathis has been singing standards and soft rock since his teenage years, but he started touring professionally after his debut album was released in 1956.
Mr. Mathis, 89, will pick up the microphone for shows in April and May, but his concerts scheduled for the summer and fall have been canceled.
“It’s with sincere regret that due to Mr. Mathis’s age and memory issues which have accelerated, we are announcing his retirement from touring and live concerts,” a statement posted on his website said.
Mr. Mathis’s final concert is scheduled for May 18 at the Bergen Performing Arts Center in Englewood, N.J. The other concerts are April 10 in Shippensburg, Pa.; April 26 in Shipshewana, Ind.; and May 10 in Santa Rosa, Calif.
Some tickets remain available for his final concerts, his website noted, and refunds will be issued for the ones that were canceled.
Mr. Mathis grew up in San Francisco, where in 1955 he got a job singing on the weekends at a club. Its owner eventually persuaded George Avakian, a record producer and talent scout with Columbia Records, to see him.
After he listened to Mr. Mathis sing, Mr. Avakian sent a telegram to Columbia that read, “Have found phenomenal 19 year old boy who could go all the way. Send blank contracts.”
Mr. Mathis is widely recognized as a pioneer of the romantic ballad style that emerged in the 1950s as a pop-music alternative to high-energy rock ’n’ roll. Mr. Mathis would go on to make more top-selling albums than any other modern pop performer except Frank Sinatra, by the end of the 1970s.
Forty years ago this month, the critic Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times that “Johnny Mathis is still the most compelling exponent of a time-honored crooning tradition carried forward in recent years by the Bee Gees, George Benson, Al Jarreau and Julio Iglesias.”
Mr. Holden noted in his review of a concert at Radio City Music Hall in New York that while Mr. Mathis’s “ethereal, androgynous tenor, with its built-in sob and breathy hesitations, has darkened perceptibly, it communicates the same aura of adolescent longing that it did in 1957.”
In 2003, Mr. Mathis received the Grammys’ lifetime achievement award.
At his peak, he was booking some 200 concert dates a year.
“The road is my home,” he once said. “I carry my best friends with me. We work together, play together. I have no other life.”
But midway through his career, Mr. Mathis admitted that he was uncomfortable onstage. “I hate it,” he said. “But it’s something I’ll have to do all my life. I don’t know how to do anything else.
“There are moments when the emotion comes out and I get absolutely carried away, and I know that this is right, this is wonderful.”
