OBITUARY: NOVELTY SONG HIT-MAKER GUY MITCHELL.

Byline: Stephen Holden The New York Times

Guy Mitchell, the jocular pop crooner of lightweight songs who epitomized the clean-cut boy next door in the early 1950s, died on Thursday at Desert Springs Hospital in Las Vegas. He was 72 and lived in Las Vegas.

The cause was complications following surgery, said his wife, Betty Mitchell.

Between 1950 and 1960 Mitchell had nearly 40 hit records, most of them novelties, folk tunes and country songs, all under the aegis of the Columbia Records producer Mitch Miller. In 1956 Mitchell's cover of Marty Robbins' country hit ``Singing the Blues'' was the No. 1 pop single for a near record-breaking 10 weeks.

The son of immigrants from Yugoslavia, Mitchell was born Al Cernick in Detroit. When he was 11, his family moved to Los Angeles, where he auditioned for Warner Bros.; the company groomed him to be a child star. But his film career was delayed when the family moved to San Francisco, where Mitchell appeared regularly on the radio shows of Dude Martin, a country singer.

In 1947 he became a vocalist with Carmen Cavallero's orchestra, with which he made his first recordings for Decca. In 1949 he won ``Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts'' as a soloist. When Frank Sinatra refused to record two songs for Columbia Records while the band was waiting in the studio, Miller, who had heard Mitchell sing on demonstration records, called him in as a last-minute substitute.

Those two songs, ``My Heart Cries for You'' (a soupy adaptation of an 18th-century French ballad, ``Chanson de Marie-Antoinette'') and ``The Roving Kind'' (an adaptation of an English folk song, ``The Pirate Ship,'' that had previously been recorded by the Weavers) became back-to-back Top 5 hits.

He went on to enjoy a succession of jaunty hits, including ``My Truly, Truly Fair'' and ``Pittsburgh, Pa.''

In addition to his wife, Mitchell is survived by two sons, Joseph Stanzak of Twin Falls, Idaho, and David Stanzak of Spokane, Wash., and five grandchildren.