Cara Mia

Written by the Italian composer Mantovani (the title means "My Beloved), this was a huge UK hit in 1954 for a British singer named David Whitfield. Mantovani's string orchestra played on his version. The song also did well in America, leading to appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and making Whitfield one of the first British singers to make an impact in the US. As a result of the song's success in America (it was a million seller), Whitfield became the first ever British male singer to be awarded a Gold Disc.

The first lead singer of Jay & the Americans was Jay Traynor, who was replaced by Jay Black (not really a Jay - his real name is David Blatt). Original group member Kenny Vance explains: "When Jay Traynor left the group, Jay Black came over to one of the guys' houses. He was selling shoes for Thom McAn making $60 a week, and he drove up with an old car, with a rope holding the hood down, and he came in the house and he had that song in mind, because I think he thought that the original guy that did that was David Whitfield, and he sang it on the Ed Sullivan Show. That version, there's a bridge to it, there's a whole kind of different feeling to it. Like in a Johnny Cash movie, because we only knew three or four chords ourselves, those are the four chords we played to it, and it became a rock and roll song. We left out the bridge because we couldn't play it. And that was it, he loved the song. We would do it in our show for many years, and then finally I think in '65 when our contract was sold to United Artists, they decided to record it, and it became a smash." (Read more in our interview with Kenny Vance.)

Shortly after this was released, radio station WTRY in New York aired a "special version" in which lead singer Jay Black (real name: David Blatt) held the long note near the end of the song for over a minute, then continued without missing a beat.