A minor cabaret artist of the forties, Williams was one of several popular performers who achieved recording success on the back of rock’n’roll in the fifties. However, it was not until the sixties, when TV enabled him to display his relaxed singing style and easy-going fireside personality, that he became a superstar.Williams and his three elder brothers were encouraged to sing by their father. By the late thirties they were singing professionally as staff artists on radio stations in Des Moines,  Chicago and  Cincinnati before moving to  California in 1943.

   There the brothers soon found film and radio session work. They made their recording debut as backing singers for Bing Crosby on the Academy Award winning song ‘Swinging on a Star’. That same year Andy dubbed Lauren Bacall’s singing voice in ‘To Have and Have Not’. Next, the brothers teamed up with comedienne Kay Thompson in 1947 and worked the cabaret circuit with varying degrees of success until 1952, when Andy finally went solo. He recorded unsuccessfully for Columbia and then, in the ‘folk’ manner popularized by Mitch Miller, for the RCA subsidiary, Label X, before signing to the Cadence label in 1955. By then a resident singer, alongside Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme on Steve Allen’s influential Tonight television show, Williams did not find record success until 1956 when his version of ‘Canadian Sunset’ hit the Top Ten. However, the song that established him was ‘Butterfly’ which topped the American and British charts.                             
   Subsequent Top Ten hits saw him edging back to the mainstream, performing popular songs which highlighted his smooth delivery and clear enunciation ‘I Like Your Kind of Love’, ‘Are You Sincere’, ‘The Hawaiian Wedding Song’, ‘Lonely Street’ and ‘The Village of Bernardette’ all recorded in 1959. Then in 1961, Williams changed record labels, joining Columbia he later bought Cadence so as to control his earlier recordings and found a new agent who secured him a weekly TV show on CBS, where his relaxed manner brought immediate success. His first big hit on Columbia, and his best remembered pop performance, was ‘Can’t Get Used to Losing You’. But more significant was the 1962 album, ‘Moon River’ and ‘Other Great Movie Themes’, produced by Robert Mersey.                           
   Throughout the sixties and seventies, as the market for popular music declined compared to that for rock, Williams regularly recorded well known film and show tunes which he could showcase on his TV shows, as a .way of increasing his chances of chart success and album sales. Hits of this type included ‘Days of Wine and Roses’, ‘On the Street Where You Live’, ‘(Where Do I Begin) Love Story’ and ‘Love Theme from ‘The Godfather’.                                 
   Williams was also one of the first popular performers regularly to include songs from contemporary writers on his albums. Thus, one of his biggest hits of the seventies was Neil Sedaka’s ‘Solitaire’ from the album of the same title for which producer Richard Perry provided a contemporary but ‘adult’ sound around Williams’ soothing tenor. By then, however, the charts were virtually irrelevant to Williams. A rich man, forever in the public eye through his television specials and golf tournaments, Williams was a fixture in the world of popular entertainment.