In 1954 the Erroll Garner Trio introduced the instrumental “Misty.” A year later Johnny Burke penned the lyrics, creating the song we know today. “Misty” remained relatively unknown until Johnny Mathis popularized the vocal version with his million-selling recording in 1959. Versions of “Misty” to make the pop charts include

• Error Garner Trio (1954, instrumental, #30)
• Johnny Mathis(1959, #12)
• Lloyd Price (1963, #21)
• Ray Stevens (1975, #14)

Although it was never a number one hit, “Misty” has been performed by hundreds of instrumentalists and vocalists. Ray Stevens, who is best known for novelty songs such as “Ahab the Arab,” won a Grammy Award for Best Arrangement with a hit recording he says came about by accident. During a rehearsal he and his band were fooling around and played “Misty” on a banjo, a fiddle, and a steel guitar. They liked the sound and recorded it, never expecting “Misty” would bring Stevens his second Grammy.

There are several variations of the origin of “Misty.” One has Erroll Garner sitting on an airplane waiting for take off and looking out the window into the mist and observing a rainbow; another has him in the air flying from Chicago to New York; and a third simply says he was in an airplane thinking about his wife. Regardless, as a musician who could neither read nor write music, he hummed the tune to himself repeatedly while he hurried home to play his melody on the piano for transcription.

Paul McCartney has said he woke up with the melody to “Yesterday” in his head but felt he had heard it before so did not record it until verifying its originality with a number of friends. Once transcribed, Erroll Garner, like McCartney, wondered if “Misty” was a composition he had heard before but not remembered.

“Misty” was originally introduced via Erroll Garner’s Contrasts album on the EmArcy label in 1954. The album title was courtesy of Garner’s manager, Martha Glaser, who recalls, “When I was sequencing this session I heard two of Erroll’s distinct facets: the romantic balladeer and the hard-driving, swinging guy. So I decided to call the album Contrasts.”

The success of his ballad has created an interesting irony: “Misty” is not an imitation as Garner once feared it could be but rather a source for imitation by others. The inventive and briskly changing harmonic structure is often used as the basis for jazz improvisation, one famous example being Billy Eckstine’s “I Want to Talk about You.”

Interestingly, this depiction of lovesick romance has not discouraged appreciative listeners, instrumentalists, or vocalists. “Misty” has become Garner’s best-known composition. ASCAP named it as one of the 25 most performed standards of the 20th Century, and no other song published since 1954 has been recorded by more jazz artists except for “Satin Doll” (1958), which was originally recorded as an instrumental in 1953.

“Misty” is also notorious as the title song for the movie thriller, Play Misty for Me (1971), in which Clint Eastwood starred and made his directorial debut. Eastwood plays a late-night disc jockey who has a casual affair with one of his listeners. She in turn becomes his stalker, calling his request line several times each night, saying in her throaty voice, “Play ‘Misty’ for me.” Also featured in the film was Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” which became one of the biggest hits of the 1970’s.