Henry Mancini, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Lauryn Hill and Toto have one particular thing in common: a best-album Grammy. From the moment Mancini's The Music From Peter Gunn stomped all over recordings by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Van Cliburn back in the Grammys' inaugural year of 1959, every single album of the year featured music — except one. In 1961 a full-time certified public accountant from Oak Park, Ill., won best album for The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, a stand-up comedy album recorded in Houston.

Similarly, every best-new-artist Grammy winner, other than Milli Vanilli in 1990, was a musician with an exception in 1961: Bob Newhart.

The Button-down Mind was recorded 50 years ago this February and released later that year. Newhart — referred to on the album cover as “the most celebrated new comedian since Attila (the Hun)” — eventually found greater renown for his TV work, but the album was a landmark recording. It was the first comedy album to top Billboard's charts, and as NPR claimed in 2007 when the album was placed in the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress, it “changed the direction of American humor.”

The album's existence is a bit of a fluke, to hear Newhart tell it.

A disc-jockey friend of his in Chicago pitched a tape of some of Newhart's humor to Warner Bros., which asked him to record his next show. “And I said, ‘Well, see, we have a problem there because I'd never played in a nightclub,' ” Newhart told NPR's Andrea Seabrook. “And they said, ‘Well, I guess we're going to have to book you into a nightclub.' So in February 1960, with all the bravado I could muster, I walked downstage, and I would do stand-up comedy.”

Newhart walked downstage at the Tidelands Club in the Tidelands Motor Hotel at 6500 South Main, which, based on anecdotal evidence, seems to have hosted more music than comedy back in its day. I've found online references to Tommy Dorsey and Chet Atkins playing the club. (As for the hotel, I'm fairly certain it was the Rice Grad House that I called home during the summer of 1994 — don't look for it today, though, as it was knocked down.) Newhart told the Chronicle in 2005 that he was on the hook for an 18-minute set, which included Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue, a still-funny “what if” account of how a phone conversation might have gone between the president and the New York PR mad men of Newhart's era about his upcoming Gettysburg address.

“I came off and walked by the maitre d's table,” Newhart said. “He said, ‘Go back out. They're still applauding.' And I said, ‘But that's all I have.' He said, ‘Well, go back out.' So I walked back out and said, ‘Which one would you like to hear again?' ”

In December the album was reissued on CD (a silly soul seeking $200-plus on Amazon for his '90s-issued CD didn't get the memo). My copy is an old LP purchased at an antiques store on 19th Street for an amount that I'd call a bargain; at some point before it belonged to me it was the property of Buddy Mitchell, or so says the cursive writing in the top right corner of the jacket.

Regardless of format, the recording still sounds good and strangely familiar. The style and tics that would inform Newhart's subsequent work are already in place. It can seem a quaint recording by today's standards. Newhart's trademark stammering has been drowned out in modern comedy by a dead-horse approach of turning bug-eyed outrage into a full ranty froth (notable exceptions include the late, great Mitch Hedberg and Jim Gaffigan).

If Newhart's humor over the years has included outrage, it still comes across as befuddlement. It's imaginative more than topical, crafted rather than impulsive, poised not spewed. On the jacket are points made by his friend Dan Sorkin: “Bob is a true craftsman in every sense of the word. His approach to humor is clean, as modern as tomorrow's newspaper, funny as hell.”

Unlike the Tidelands, New-hart is a midcentury artifact that avoided razing — he's a rare comedian who has successfully entertained at least three generations. And if he is sometimes difficult to hear amid the din today, there are still great rewards for those who listen closely to his murmured musings.

andrew.dansby@chron.com