He also had nineteen Top 40 hits in (Germany), beginning with the chart-topping ' Sail Along, Silv'ry Moon', also a gold record, which was a cover of a 1937 Bing Crosby hit. He also charted thirty six albums on the Billboard 200, beginning with 1958's Sail Along Silv'ry Moon and ending with 1970's Winter World of Love. Vaughn was the bandleader, and he played the lead guitar on most of his songs. Vaughn charted a total of 42 singles on the Billboard charts, often based on the sound of two alto saxophones and guitar as his 'trademark'. He went on to have many more hits over the next decade and a half and was the most commercially successful orchestra leader of the rock era. He subsequently formed his own orchestra which had a hit single in that same year with ' Melody of Love.' It sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc. In 1954, he left the group to join Dot Records in Gallatin, Tennessee, as music director. As a member of the group, he also wrote their first hit song, ' Trying', which charted in 1952. He soon added his voice to theirs, converting the trio to a quartet. While he was a student there, three other students, Jimmy Sacca, Donald McGuire, and Seymour Spiegelman, who had formed a vocal trio, the Hilltoppers, recruited Vaughn to play the piano with them. He had apparently learned to barber from his father, because he did some while studying at Western Kentucky to support himself financially, when he was not able to get jobs playing the piano at local night clubs and lounges. He decided to make music a career when he was discharged from the army at the end of the war, and on the GI Bill, attended Western Kentucky State College, now known as Western Kentucky University, majoring in music composition. Sultan decided that Vaughn was too valuable to the base's Thirty-Eighth Division big band, and kept him at Camp Shelby for the duration of the war. In 1941, Vaughn joined the United States National Guard for what had been planned as a one-year assignment, but when World War II broke out, he was in for the duration as a valued musician and composer at Camp Shelby, Mississippi. He went on to learn a number of other instruments, including guitar and alto saxophone, his primary instruments.

Vaughn was born in Glasgow, Kentucky, United States, where his father, Alvis Radford Vaughn, was a barber who loved music and inspired Vaughn to teach himself to play the mandolin at the age of three, while suffering from measles. William Vaughn, popularly known as Billy Vaughn (born Richard Smith Vaughn, Ap– September 26, 1991) was an American musician, singer, multi-instrumentalist, orchestra leader, and A&R man for Dot Records.

Polly Vaughn by Barry Moser