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During the mid-1960s, Reprise producer Jimmy Bowen had worked wonders with Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, generating hit records in an era of ever-changing musical tastes. Bowen was shooting for the trifecta with Sammy Davis, Jr. but during this period Sammy was spending less and less time in the recording booth and was increasingly distracted. He’d spent a summer in London filming Salt & Pepper in 1967, and from April to September of 1968 he was busy with the Chicago and West Ends runs of Golden Boy.

Bowen’s Billboard #1 success with Frank Sinatra in 1966 had come with “Strangers In The Night”, a Bert Kaempfert tune that was given a contemporary feel. In February 1968 another Kaempfert number, “Lonely Is The Name”, arrived and Bowen felt it might fit the same mould. For the recording, Sammy was paired with arranger H.B. Barnum, a fellow child-actor turned singer who was now making his name as a jazz-funk arranger and producer with Capitol Records (Barnum had arranged and conducted an instrumental album of the score to Golden Boy in 1965, which might be how he came onto Sammy’s radar).

Sammy Davis. Jr., H.B. Barnum and Jimmy Bowen

The resulting single was heralded by The Boston Globe as “[Sammy Davis, Jr.’s] most commercial sounding record in some years … this one has great sound and is a beautiful song.” Alas, it didn’t make much impression on the Billboard Hot 100, but it did make it to #12 on the Billboard Easy Listening chart. This made it Sammy’s best performing single on that chart since “The Shelter of Your Arms” in 1963, and well worth building an album around. Lonely Is The Name was Sammy’s first LP release in 10 months, and consisted of a couple of new recordings combined with previously recorded material from 1966 and 1967. The result was a somewhat disjointed mix of styles.

Bowen’s Billboard #1 success with Dean Martin in 1964 had come with “Everybody Loves Somebody”. Bowen had taken a number that had been recorded with an intimate arrangement (a quartet accompaniment on Dream With Dean), and handed it over to arranger Ernie Freeman to create a more modern and commercial interpretation. In 1966, Bowen seems to have tried a similar tack with Sammy – he took two numbers (“We’ll Be Together Again” and “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye”) that Sammy had recorded with the sole accompaniment of Laurindo Almeida on guitar, and had Sammy re-record them just weeks later with Ernie Freeman arrangements for a full orchestra.

Both were released as singles but failed to chart. Reprise dusted them off for inclusion on Lonely Is The Name, along with “The Good Life” and “All That Jazz” which had been recorded around the same time. What seemed to work for Sinatra and Martin didn’t seem to work for Sammy, but Bowen never gave up on the search for a bona fide Sammy  … and he would eventually find it, just two months after Lonely Is The Name hit record stores.

For Sammy, nothing was as important as maintaining his relevance in popular culture, and Lonely Is The Name reflects his first steps in trying to broaden his repertoire. It includes visits to the worlds of Stevie Wonder, P. J. Proby, The Fortunes, and includes two songs lifted from the oeuvre of ‘sunshine pop’ – “Up, Up and Away” (originally by The 5th Dimension) and “Don’t Take Your Time” (originally by Roger Nichols & The Small Circle Of Friends). In its review of the LP, the Los Angeles Times identified this shift: “Davis moves in on the post-Davis generation.”

In the end though, what made Sammy Davis, Jr. unique was his ability to inhabit so many genres, but still be Sammy. Contemporary critics agreed – Robert Moore in his column Record Turntable wrote about Lonely Is The Name: “Davis is one of those entertainers who communicates with his audience whether on disc or in person … Each of these [tunes] demonstrates how an entertainer uses his material and shapes it in his image. They are all different but they are all entertaining – and that’s what a singer does: he produces a good sound in an entertaining way that is all his own. He is not a mirror of someone else.”