Pat Boone: An American Musical Icon
Few of us fortunate enough to reach our 90th birthday will have higher aspirations than getting out of bed each morning and perhaps enjoying an improving book. Yet a handful of nonagenarians somehow manage to continue the productivity of decades past, and seemingly defy the exactions of time. Here and there one hears of the gymnast, the concert pianist, or the investor who wows the internet with age-defying agility or mental acuity. Now there’s another name to add to the list of superannuated prodigies: Pat Boone, famed musician, bestselling author, and inspirational speaker, who turned 90 in June and is still going strong. Boone, whose career as an American musical icon was launched in the mid-1950s, just released another hit single, “Where Did America Go?” evidence — if any were needed — that his legendary talent is undiminished seven decades after first bursting on the American scene.
Born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1934, Boone grew up in Nashville. He began his long career as a recording artist in 1953, and within a few years, his crooner’s pipes and movie-star good looks had transformed him into a teen idol. A contemporary and friend of Elvis Presley, Boone, who got started a few months before Presley, was regarded as the only singer in the 1950s to rival him in popularity. Perceived as a wholesome alternative on the pop-music scene to Elvis and much of the rock ’n’ roll counterculture, Boone enjoyed staggering success through the early ’60s, with 38 Top 40 hits and more than 45 million albums sold. According to Billboard, he still holds the record for having more than one hit song on the charts for 220 consecutive weeks. He covered a number of hits sung by prominent black singers of the day, such as Fats Domino and Little Richard, as well as a broad variety of love songs, such as “April Love” and “Love Letters in the Sand.” His popularity among ’50s youth was unparalleled; one 1957 opinion poll, at the height of his fame, showed boys preferring Boone over Presley by a two-to-one margin, and girls by three-to-one.
Boone, a bona-fide American original-cum-Renaissance man (and many-times great-grandson of another American original, Daniel Boone), was not content with his superlative success as a musician. He also became a bestselling author with his autobiography ’Twixt Twelve and Twenty, and had acting roles in more than a dozen movies, including the 1957 hit musical April Love, where he starred opposite Shirley Jones, another wholesome icon of the era. And despite his enormous success both on the charts and at the box office, Boone somehow found time to complete a college degree, graduating magna cum laude from Columbia University in 1958.
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