Bill St. Clair Swings Stephen Foster Favorites in a New Fresh Manner (Parade, SP 327)

Steven Foster classics in swing time: Bill St. Clair and the Eddie Maynard Orchestra beautifully manage this goal.  It helps when the songs are terrific, the vocalist is excellent, and the arrangements spot on.  This LP is a wonderful surprise--way above the norm for Parade.

However, as we congratulate Bill St. Clair and the Eddie Maynard Orch., I think it's fair to ask... do or did either of those persons exist?  Under those names, I mean?

Let's look at the evidence: This LP also showed up on Spinorama, Palace, Coronet, and Riviera.  Here, the orchestra is credited to Eddie Maynard, but elsewhere it's assigned to Fontanna, Mark Andrews, David Bruce, and... artist-unknown.  And, on Coronet, Bill becomes Dick Neilson.  The Fontanna version (on Palace), gives no vocal credit at all, though at least it's in stereo.  And had I known it was the same album, I'd have gone for it (because of the stereo), but the Parade monaural audio is nice enough--after I fixed it up, that is.

Bill, or Dick, or whomever, has a marvelous voice, and the Stephen-Foster-in-Swing-Time theme is beautifully managed, but we really have no reason to believe this singer is, in factual reality, named Bill St. Clair.  In fact, at my fake-hits YT channel, I have a Bill St. "Claire" on Big 4 Hits singing "Shake Rattle and Roll," and it doesn't sound like the same guy.  As for Eddie Maynard, he was a name-drop bandleader at SPC, Spinorama, and Parade.  A fill-in-the-credit bandleader.  

To be fair , Bill and Eddie ("Bill and Eddie"?) also put out an LP on Promenade called Let's Be Frank, on which Bill (or whoever he is) does a decent job imitating Frank Sinatra.  This might compel us to believe that Bill St. Clair was the singer's real name, but there's the problem of the many different credits for these Stephen Foster tracks.  And there's the problem that Bill seems to have done nothing outside of the rack-jobber realm.  Nobody said rack-jobber detective work was easy...

Anyway, according to the liner notes, "This is a great unique album and will provide many hours of listening enjoyment."  (If put it on repeat play, I guess...)  "Bill has a tremendously great voice," the notes continue, and Bill is a singer "from the Boston area who has his own TV and radio shows."  Except, I can find no online confirmation of same, and Google's AI can't, either.  No TV or radio shows on file for one Bill St. Clair.  Still, this is a superior budget-album experience--fine vocalist, spot-on arrangements, and great American tunes.  Hats off to Bill, Dick, Fontanna, Artist Unknown, and everyone else involved.

DOWNLOAD: Bill St. Clair Swings Stephen Foster Favorites.zip FLAC

Beautiful Dreamer

I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair

Nellie Bly

Old Dog Trey

Ring Ring de Banjo

Old Folks at Home

My Old Kentucky Home

Gentle Annie

Oh Susannah

Hard Times

Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming

Camptown Races

Lee

Repost: Society Favorites (That Are Our Favorites)--(Royale VLP 6042)

I'd featured this LP in 2017, and the Zippylink upload is long gone.  So, I've re-re-ripped this excellent but junkily-pressed LP in the best audio I can manage, and the sound is acceptable, save for a "wow"-filled Body and Soul and a "Twilight Three" track clearly remastered from a worn master.  I did a good deal of de-noising on the latter.

Royale, you'll recall, belonged to Elliott Everett "Eli" Oberstein, whose labels were probably the cheapest of the cheap, though I hesitate to make a claim that cheap--I mean, that large.  As is not infrequently the case with Eli, the music here is quite decent--much better than the second-rate vinyl it was pressed on.  Best of the bunch are the marvelous pre-RCA and Columbia Percy Faith sides, which date from the 1947 (orig. on the Majestic label).

Vintage easy listening which can't be beat, despite the Oberstein-quality reissue.  And can we assume that Society Favorites (That Are Our Favorites) was followed by Society Favorites (That Aren't Our Favorites)?


DOWNLOAD: Society Favorites Royale.zip FLAC

Body and Soul--Stevens Orchestra
Sweet and Lovely--Nat Brandwynne and Orchestra
Dancing in the Dark--Percy Faith and Orchestra
You and the Night and the Music--The Twilight Three
I Cover the Waterfront--Stevens Orchestra
I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plans--Chauncey Gray and Orchestra
That Old Black Magic--Percy Faith and Orchestra
The Continental--Jerry Wald and Orchestra

Society Favorites (That Are Our Favorites)--Royale VLP 6042 (10")

Lee

A Singing Science Record: Tom Glazer and Dottie Evans--Space Songs (1959)

 

How could I possibly have passed up a Singing Science Records "Ballads for the Age of Science" LP called Space Songs, with Tom (pre-On Top of Spaghetti) Glazer, Dottie Evans, and the Tony Mottola Orchestra directed by Hecky Krasnow, with lyrics by Hy (Unchained Melody) Zaret and music by Lou Singer?  I ask you.  I think Volunteers of America wanted $1.20 for it, and I thought, "This'll be different."  And it is.

Label: Motivation Records, a division of Argosy Music Corporation, and packed with clever, catchy songs for the classroom.  My favorite is probably Gravity, which Guy Mitchell and Mindy Carson would have had a ball (no pun intended) with: If the Earth is a ball, why don't we fall off, While it spins around; If the Earth is a ball, why don't we all go flying off the ground?  Yeah, why is that?  Well, the Earth has a force that pulls and draws all matter toward its core.  And the pull of the force called "gravity" is why we don't fall off.  Ahhhh... now I see.

Dottie Evans I know as a singer for Enoch Light on the Waldorf label, and she is excellent here.  Unusually clever lyrics and ingenious melodies (many P.D.-familiar) combine to make a highly entertaining offering.  And I had to promise myself to limit my manual click repairing to the loudest clicks--otherwise, I'd have been another week fixing this.  Well-recorded but not the best pressing.  Actually, when the label is "Motivation Records," the experienced collector isn't expecting background silence.

Other gems: What Is the Milky Way, Beep Beep (Here Comes the Satellite), and Why Does the Sun Shine?  And the second number had me curious as to how many satellites we had in orbit when this LP was made (in 1959).  Answer: Only 14.  Imagine when the space-junk count was that low, way back when I was two.

And What Is a Shooting Star? (A shooting star is not a star, Is not a star at all; A shooting star's a meteor that's heading for a fall) has confirmed my correct guess that a meteorite is a meteor after it has burned and/or broken up in our mesosphere.  Anyway, a surprisingly entertaining classroom album, or maybe not so surprising, given the talent involved.  Other LPs in this series include Energy and Motion Songs, Nature Songs, and Weather Songs.


DOWNLOAD: Space Songs--Tom Glazer, Dottie Evans.zip FLAC



Zoom a Little Zoom (Rocket Ship)

What Is the Milky Way

Constellation Jig

Beep Beep (Here Comes the Satellite)

Why Does the Sun Shine

What Is a Shooting Star?

Longitude and Latitude

It's a Scientific Fact

Ballad of Sir Isaac Newton

Friction

Why Are Stars of Different Colors

Why Do Stars Twinkle

What Is Gravity

Planet Minuet

Why Go Up There

Tom Glazer & Dottie Evans, Tony Mottola Orchestra, 1959

Lee

Ferdie Grofe: Grand Canyon Suite--original 1932 recording (from 12-inch 78 rpm album) by Paul Whiteman and His Concert Orch.

 

A 50/50 mix of original 1932 issues, plus two 1941 reissues--all the original 1932 recording, of course.  Working with sets from different eras meant using two response curves, but my VinylStudio software is more than up to that challenge.  Five movements across eight 12-inch 78 sides presented a bit of an editing challenge, but nothing major.  The movements are Sunrise, Painted Desert, On the Trail, Sunset, and the spectacular Cloudburst.  More than nine decades later, this suite remains magnificent.  Or, should I say, grand.

My album (the holder) pictured above is the 1941 album, and exactly when or where I came across the two original discs (Sunrise and Cloudburst), I don't remember, save that it was at a Goodwill.  The original price tag of $1.99 is still on the album's spine, meaning that I bought this set well before the recent sound-recording price hike at GW.  Maybe this album came with the mixed 1932 and 1941 pressings.  And someplace in my mess of 78s there's the 1941 reissue set I bought back in 1978 at a Cincinnati book store.  You know, if this room were about twice the size, I could get my collection in some kind of order...

The background on this famous suite is all over the internet, so I won't repeat those details here.  Recorded April 26-28, 1932, making this performance just shy of 94 years old.  Amazing fidelity for the period, and even more amazing: The wide dynamic range, all the way from ppp (pianississimo) to fff (triple forte).  And I can find no definite year for Grofe's expanded orchestration of the suite, though it may have been around the time of Andre Kostelanetz's superb 1941 recording, which I posted here.

Enjoy!

DOWNLOAD: Grand Canyon Suite 1932.zip

Sunrise

Painted Desert

On the Trail

Sunset

Cloudburst

Grand Canyon Suite (Ferdie Grofe)--Paul Whiteman and His Concert Orch., 1932

Lee

Return to the blog: Strauss Waltzes in Dance Tempo: Al Goodman, 1940

 

I'm back!  These are all eight selections from from the 1940 10-inch 78 set, Al Goodman's Invitation to the Dance--Strauss Waltzes in Dance Tempo, and though they may not make for the most dynamic comeback post in sharity history, we have to ask if these once-known-by-everybody works have retained their fame.  Strauss, Jr.'s magnificent waltzes were a major part of sound recording history for, oh, 100 years or so, but come 2026 does the average person know The Blue Danube by ear (or even by name)?  Thus, these could be a new experience for some (but not for my regulars!).  Anyway, I found this set in the still-for-99-cents record boxes at the big city Goodwill, and the cashier only charged me once for this set (rather than a buck a pop).  Maybe she knew that a 4-disc 10" 78 set=one 10-inch LP, but probably not.  She was likely surprised that anyone was interested in this thing.  One of those, "I don't know what this is, so I'll just go with a single charge" thrift-store-checkout events.

Naturally, these waltzes have been considerably abridged, since complete performances would have run this into a four- or five-volume set, but even so, we get the first and second waltzes/themes of Blue Daube, each with a sub-melody (for a total of four strains), and for Tales from the Vienna Woods, we get the first, second, and fourth waltz, plus part of the coda.  No wonder it's so hard (for me, anyway) to remember the names to all of these.  Any given "Strauss waltz" can amount to six distinct themes.  Melodies just poured out of this genius.

Anyway, a very pleasant return to the blog, and Goodman's brand of easy-listening/mood/light provides an interesting contrast to the distant-mike sound of his fellow label mates Andre Kostelanetz and Morton Gould, whose mood selections had nice, suspended-in-space acoustics.

This set is ordered in a "manual" (pick-up-the-record-and-turn-it-over) format: Sides 1/2, 3/4, etc.  Or else the selections could be heard out of order on a changer.

Strauss Waltzes in Dance Tempo (1940).zip FLAC

Blue Danube Waltz

Wiener Blut (Vienna Blood)

Southern Roses Waltz

Wine, Women and Song

Tales from the Vienna Woods

Voices of Spring

Emperor Waltz

Artist's Life

Al Goodman and His Orchestra (Columbia set C 13, 1940)

Lee