Pat Boone

Google Pat Boone – be warned, more than 1.9 million results show up! – and a word picture of an astonishing, long lasting, still thriving career in music and entertainment emerges. Singer, actor, TV host, producer, songwriter, author, motivational speaker, TV pitchman, radio personality, record company head, TV station owner, sports team owner, family man, humanitarian, a man unafraid to air his views. A lot of Pat Boones from which to pick and choose.A lot of Pat Boones to go around. Right now, Boone – the #10 all time top recording artist, according to music industry bible, Billboard – is the Lion in Winter, five decades of recording history behind him and a busy future ahead.

Boone runs his own record company, The Gold Label, designed for legendary artists of a certain age and certifiable talent (all with million-selling gold records to their credit). “It’s a senior tour for singers,” he jokes. “But there is a qualification: they have to be able to sell records.” So far Glen Campbell, Jack Jones, Roger Williams, Patti Page, Cleo Laine, Sha Na Na and others (as well as Boone himself) have lived up to the Founder’s Maxim. More than 30 Gold Record albums have been released to date.

Boone has involved himself in a couple of personal projects: “For My Country,” a musical acknowledgment to the National Guard that Boone wrote himself, and regards as a follow-up to his Pledge of Allegiance pitch, “Under God,” recorded a couple of years ago, which became Boone’s 61st hit record. Tuned to current events, close to Boone’s heart and views, both stirred up debate as well as sales. “It’s not just liberals who can stir things up through recordings,” he says.

An updated pictorial autobiography, “Pat Boone’s America 50 Years” has joined the line of more than a dozen autobiographical and motivational books. He became a book author for the first time, writing the still-in-print “Twixt Twelve And Twenty,” in 1958 as a Teen Idol, himself barely out of his own teens. His newest book venture, co-written with Cord Cooper, is “Questions About God And the Answers That Could Change Your life”. This book addresses one of today’s hottest topics, and is packed with facts that will challenge readers’ thinking.