’60s Vocal Group The Lettermen Announce Founding Member Tony Butala Has Died At 87

• Tony Butala, founding member of The Lettermen and the group’s last surviving original member, has died at 87.
• The Lettermen announced his passing this week; an exact date and cause of death were not disclosed.
• Butala helped shape the trio’s signature harmony on hits including “The Way You Look Tonight,” “When I Fall in Love” and “Hurt So Bad,” remaining with the group until 2019.

Tony Butala, the founding member of The Lettermen who sang with the group from its earliest days until 2019, has died at 87. The group shared the news with fans on its Facebook page this week. “It is with profound sadness that we announce the recent passing of Tony Butala,” the post read, adding, “We have lost an integral member of The Lettermen family.” The statement did not give a cause or an exact date of death.

If you ever slow-danced to “When I Fall in Love” or heard “The Way You Look Tonight” drifting out of a car radio in 1961, you heard Butala’s voice in the blend. He was born on November 20, 1938, in Sharon, Pennsylvania, so he was only weeks away from his 88th birthday. With his passing, the last of the three young men who built that famous close harmony is gone.

From A Sharon Farm To Disney’s Peter Pan

Butala was singing long before he was a Letterman. He was the eighth of eleven children in a Croatian American family, according to Wikipedia, and he spent much of his early childhood on his grandparents’ farm outside Sharon. He started singing at age 7, and by 8 he was performing on KDKA Radio in Pittsburgh, as OregonLive and American Songwriter both noted in their reports this week. The show was a Saturday morning program called “Starlets on Parade,” and it made the little boy from Sharon a hometown favorite.

In 1951 his mother took him to California, where he joined the Robert Mitchell Boys Choir and sang with it through 1954. That choir work led to one of the most charming footnotes in his career. Butala provided the singing voice for one of the Lost Boys in Disney’s Peter Pan in 1953, the same film that made Margaret Kerry, the original Tinker Bell model, a part of movie history. As a teenager he also sang in a quartet called the Fourmost with a girl named Concetta Ingolia, who would soon become better known as Connie Stevens.

All of that was practice for a sound that would carry him for the next sixty years. The only question was who he would make it with.

How Did The Lettermen Find Their Sound?

The first version of the group came together in 1958 with Butala, Mike Barnett and Talmadge Russell. It did not last, so Butala went looking for new partners and found them in Bob Engemann and Jim Pike. That trio, formed in Las Vegas in 1959 according to the group’s history, became The Lettermen that fans remember. The name echoed the school-themed vocal groups of the 1950s, and their style was the opposite of the rock and roll crowding the charts. They sang standards and love songs in soft, tight three-part harmony, and they sang them without gimmicks.

Two singles for Warner Bros. went nowhere in 1960. Then Capitol Records signed them in 1961, and everything changed quickly. Their cover of “The Way You Look Tonight” climbed to No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 that year and went gold, and “When I Fall in Love” followed it to No. 7 and topped the Adult Contemporary chart. “Theme from A Summer Place” reached No. 16 in 1965. Their medley of “Goin’ Out of My Head” and “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” hit No. 7 and earned a Grammy nomination, and “Hurt So Bad” reached No. 12 in 1969.

The group’s own statement credits Butala with shaping that “3-part” vocal sound, which it said “captivated audiences worldwide.” By the count in the group’s history, The Lettermen collected four Grammy nominations and 11 gold records along the way. Their run on the pop charts slowed after 1969, but the concert halls never emptied, and that is where Butala spent the rest of his working life.

There was one more reason the group lasted so long, and it had everything to do with the man who started it.

Who Was Left From The Original Lettermen?

Lineups changed over the decades. Engemann left in the late 1960s and was replaced by Jim Pike’s younger brother Gary, and other voices came and went as the group kept touring. Through every change, Butala stayed. He sang with The Lettermen from 1958 until he stepped back from performing in 2019, which made him the thread connecting every era of the group.

He also outlived both of the partners who made the first hits with him. Bob Engemann died on January 20, 2013, at 77, after complications from heart bypass surgery. Jim Pike died on June 9, 2019, at his home in Prescott, Arizona, at 82, from complications of Parkinson’s disease. That left Butala as the last surviving original Letterman, a fact American Songwriter and Parade both highlighted in their coverage this week.

The recognition he waited decades for came near the end. In February 2020, a year after he retired, The Lettermen received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and Butala was there to share it. The group, now made up of Donovan Tea, Bobby Poynton and Rob Gulack, is still performing more than 65 years after it began. In its announcement, it said that even though his performing days were over, Butala “was instrumental in laying the groundwork” for the group’s future.

The group’s statement sent its “most heartfelt thoughts and prayers” to “his children, grandchildren, siblings, the love of his life” and the wider Lettermen family. Then it closed the way he would have, with a few lines from his last public solo performance, a song about smiling through hard times. For a man who started singing on the radio at 8 years old, there was no better way to say goodbye.