[7] Nine of these 54 recordings made the top 10 (including 1957's "Butterfly", which spent three weeks at number one),[8] and 32 of them are also on the list of 44 entries that Williams had on the magazine's Easy Listening chart,[9] which was started in 1961.

[13] The album also included "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year", which was written for The Andy Williams Show and became a staple of his annual Christmas specials.

[14] Although covers of the song he originated by artists such as Garth Brooks[15] and Harry Connick, Jr.[16] had single chart runs in Billboard upon initial release, the recording by Williams enjoyed widespread popularity several decades after it debuted.

[17] When Billboard started its Holiday 100 chart in 2011, the Williams classic began annual appearances there and had its best showing in 2018 when it got as high as number two,[18] and in 2016, after the magazine changed its Hot 100 rules regarding older songs,[19] "Most" began returning there each December as well and also hit a high point during the 2020 holiday season when it reached number 5.

"[23] When Williams arrived at Cadence on December 1, 1955, label founder Archie Bleyer immediately had him record two holiday songs, "The Wind, the Sand and the Star" and "Christmas Is a Feeling in Your Heart".

[29] Williams turned to the popular duo of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for his second Cadence LP, which included songs from their Broadway musicals Carousel, The King and I, Oklahoma!, and South Pacific.

[30] Indeed, each of the long players he made for the label had its own specific focus, such as songs from Hawaii or France, and it was during this phase that he recorded Lonely Street, his first release to reach the pop albums chart in Billboard magazine.

[26] But several singles, including "Butterfly", "I Like Your Kind of Love", and "Lips of Wine", followed the burgeoning rock and roll trend.

"[31] Williams's move to Columbia Records in 1961 heralded the start of a highly successful series of albums produced by Robert Mersey that focused on standards, including many from stage and screen, with some Easy Listening hits of the day eventually becoming part of the formula.

[1] His top 10 release from 1966, The Shadow of your Smile, featured covers of the Beatles songs "Michelle" and "Yesterday" and foreshadowed the shift that Williams would be making over the next few years toward contemporary material.

His next LP, In the Arms of Love, peaked only as high as number 21, making it his lowest charting studio album with Columbia to date and helping to explain why it didn't sell enough to receive Gold certification.

He began his next string of Gold records in 1967 with Born Free, which relied exclusively on recent hits from the pop and Easy Listening charts and became the first of five more top 10 albums he would release.

[3] When Clive Davis became President of Columbia Records that same year, he paid close attention to the label's Easy Listening artists since most of them were experiencing a decline in sales.

Two Williams concerts in 1993 became his first domestic releases of live material: These releases are composed of performances taken from The Andy Williams Show: 1999 Since many radio stations in the US adopt a format change to Christmas music each December, many holiday hits have an annual spike in popularity during the last few weeks of the year and are retired once the season is over.

The list of the "Top 10 Holiday Songs (Since 2001)" that was published by Billboard in 2009 ranked "It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" at number five,[76] and on the 2010 countdown of holiday songs receiving the most radio airplay as determined by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) the Williams classic came in at number four.