South Pacific (soundtrack)

• 1. Introduction

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  The South Pacific soundtrack arrived in record stores in March 1958, and within months it had done something almost no album had done before: it sat at number one in both the United States and the United Kingdom simultaneously. In the UK, it would not merely visit the top spot. It would take up residence there for 115 weeks. That figure is not a typo. For more than two years, a film soundtrack held the highest position on the British charts. By 2006, British buyers alone had purchased more than 1.8 million copies of the record.

  But the album's chart dominance is only part of the story. Behind the scenes, the composers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein had an unusual degree of control over what listeners would actually hear. The voices coming out of people's speakers were not always the faces they had watched on screen. Who was singing, and why? And how did a recording rooted in a 1949 stage musical become one of the best-selling soundtrack albums in British chart history?

• 2. Who Was Actually Singing

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  Rodgers and Hammerstein insisted on accomplished vocalists for the soundtrack, regardless of whether those singers appeared on screen. Only two leading performers sang their own parts in both the film and on the album: Mitzi Gaynor, who played Nellie Forbush, and Ray Walston, cast as Luther Billis. Walston had history with the role. He had played Luther Billis in the original national tour and in the original London production, making him one of the few cast members with stage roots in the show.

  For the three other major singing roles, the studio turned elsewhere. Giorgio Tozzi, an opera-trained bass-baritone, dubbed the voice of Emile DeBecque. The role of Bloody Mary went to Muriel Smith, who had played that same character in the original London production of the stage musical. Joe Cable's vocal parts were handled by Bill Lee. The result was a soundtrack that represented a deliberate creative choice by the composers: they wanted the best possible voices paired with their songs, whatever that required.

• 3. From Mono to Stereo

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  When the film premiered in March 1958, the soundtrack LP was available in the United States in mono only. RCA Victor issued it in two formats at launch: a standard edition and a deluxe gatefold cover edition. The stereo version came later, arriving in August 1958 as part of RCA's first batch of stereo LP releases. That stereo edition came in a standard cover only.

  The track listing on the LP and CD followed an order that may have surprised filmgoers: the songs were arranged as they appear in the original Broadway musical, not as they appear in the film. There was at least one exception to this pattern. In the European print of the film shown at the Dominion Theatre in London, the songs did appear in the film's own sequence rather than the Broadway order.

• 4. A Record That Rewrote the Charts

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  In the United States, the South Pacific soundtrack reached number one on the Billboard 200 and held that position for seven months, which stands as the fourth longest run at number one in the chart's history. That alone would have secured the album's reputation. What happened in the United Kingdom went further still.

  The album entered the UK Albums Chart in 1958 and spent 27 consecutive weeks in the top five before finally climbing to number one in November 1958. Once there, it stayed. The first 70 weeks at the top came consecutively, covering the entire calendar year of 1959 without interruption. When the full run was tallied, the album had spent 115 weeks at number one and remained in the top five for 214 weeks. The figure of 1,803,681 copies sold in the UK as of 2006 gives a concrete measure of how deeply the record penetrated British households over those years.