Raymond Lefevre

• Born 1922, Paris, France

Raymond Lefevre gave Paul Mauriat a run for his money in the easy listening instrumentals biz, as the two kept pushing tunes into the Top 40 charts in the late 1960s. Mauriat grabbed the only #1 instrumental of the period with "Love is Blue," but Lefevre beat him out in several Eurovision song contests and had several other big hits with "La La La (He Gives Me Love)," "Soul Coaxing," "Puppet on a String," and "A Whiter Shade of Pale."

Lefevre's easy listening version of Gilbert Becaud's "The Days the Rain Came" briefly hit the U.S. Top 40 list in 1958, but most of the time, Lefevre was focused on French audiences. He arranged and conducted nearly as many albums for the French label, Barclay, as Percy Faith did for Columbia/CBS in the U.S. Unlike Mauriat and Franck Pourcel, Lefevre stuck for the most part to standard easy listening orchestrations, and he was less likely to incorporate rock rhythms or rhythm sections.

Recordings