Warm & Willing

In 1962 Andy Williams signed a deal for a weekly television series, The Andy Williams Show, to be launched in the Autumn of that year. To coincide with the show, Andy and his regular producer, arranger and conductor Robert Mersey went into the recording studio to assemble an album Warm And Willing, that was designed to be a foretaste of what to expect on the television series. To this end, several songs from the Great American Songbook were selected, including Broadway compositions from George and Ira Gershwin, Frank Loesser and Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. Rounding out the album was Stranger On The Shore, a vocal version of Acker Bilks huge hit, which Andy had taken into the Top 40 of the pop chart. Warm And Willing would become a Top Twenty success, peaking at #16 on the album chart.