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Musical work[edit]
Gleason standing with Irish author Brendan Behan, arms around each other
Brendan Behan with Jackie Gleason in Gleason's dressing room after a performance of Take Me Along (1960)
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Gleason enjoyed a secondary music career, lending his name to a series of best-selling "mood music" albums with jazz overtones for Capitol Records. Gleason felt there was a ready market for romantic instrumentals. His goal was to make "musical wallpaper that should never be intrusive, but conducive".[21] He recalled seeing Clark Gable play love scenes in movies; the romance was, in his words, "magnified a thousand percent" by background music. Gleason reasoned, "If Gable needs music, a guy in Brooklyn must be desperate!"[9]
Gleason's first album, Music for Lovers Only, still holds the record for the album longest in the Billboard Top Ten Charts (153 weeks), and his first ten albums all sold over one million copies.[22]
Gleason could not read or write music; he was said to have conceived melodies in his head and described them vocally to assistants.[9] These included the well-remembered themes of both The Jackie Gleason Show ("Melancholy Serenade") and The Honeymooners ("You're My Greatest Love").[10] There has been controversy over the years as to how much credit Gleason should have received for the finished products; biographer William A. Henry III wrote in his 1992 book The Great One: The Life and Legend of Jackie Gleason that, beyond the possible conceptualizing of many of the songs, Gleason had no direct involvement (such as conducting) in the making of these recordings. Red Nichols, a jazz great who had fallen on hard times and led one of the group's recordings, did not even get session-leader pay from Gleason. Cornetist and trumpeter Bobby Hackett, who soloed on the albums and was leader for seven of them, when asked by musician-journalist Harry Currie in Toronto weeks before Hackett's death what Gleason really did at the recording sessions, Hackett replied "He brought the cheques."
However, this alleged statement is at odds with others made by Hackett, who said to writer James Bacon: "Jackie knows a lot more about music than people give him credit for. I have seen him conduct a sixty-piece orchestra and detect one discordant note in the brass section. He would immediately stop the music and locate the wrong note. It always amazed the professional musicians how a guy who technically did not know one note from another could do that. And he was never wrong." [23] Nearly all of Gleason's albums are still available, and have been re-released on compact disc.
He had a lead role in the musical Take Me Along, which ran from 1959 to 1960 and for which he won a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical.
