Tweet   Joseph Raymond Conniff was an American bandleader and arranger best known for his Ray Conniff Singers during the 1960s.  Conniff was born in Attleboro, Massachusetts, and learned to play the trombone from his father. He studied music arranging from a course book. He became famous as bandleader for introducing the "hum-sing-hum" chorus to pop music. Conniff noticed how the public usually lat More..ches onto only fragments of a song’s lyrics, so he crafted arrangements of standards and hit tunes that emphasized their most memorable refrains. He had his faceless, ever-perky choir (picture a New England dinner theatre production of Night of the Living Dead) hum most of the songs, only chiming in with the key lyrics. Not only did Conniff's concoctions move millions of units, but the style was widely copied by just about every easy listening and jazz act throughout the 1950s and '60s. While Conniff was a lounge music revolutionary, his earlier roots in hot jazz helped ensure that his own music was often much better and more fun than that of his many imitators.