The Queen

Bear Family, the venerable German label that does reissue boxes of U.S. artists better than any American label – with the possible exception of Mosaic – has taken the cream of Kitty Wells' career and issued one of the most historically important collections in the history of country music. The Queen of Country Music is a four-CD box, with exhaustive biographical and session notes by Charles Wolfe that document, in their entirety, nine years of Ms. Wells career, from its inception through to its turning point and superstardom, the years 1949 to 1958; there are 114 tracks in all. Along with every major hit and B-side from the eras, the set includes classic original versions of "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels," "Hey Joe!," "I Hear the Jukebox Playing," "Lonely Side of Town," "Making Believe," "Dust on the Bible," "The Place That Kills," "Right or Wrong," "Just When I Needed You," "The Great Speckled Bird," "Jealousy," and many others.

Many years ago there was a thriving Queen market for silver discs with labels such as Gypsy Eye, Queen Digital Archives and Wardour pumping out many interesting titles each month. These days Wardour produce a couple of titles per year (and not very good ones at that) and both Gypsy Eye and QDA are gone leaving on Tarantura, trolling the vast Mr. Peach tape archive, as the sole provider of great Queen silver titles. Rare Cuts Vol. 1-6 is the releases of a new Queen-dedicated label Master Stroke. Like QDA a decade ago, their initial efforts focus upon collecting upgrades of very common material and mixing up with much more rare tracks…

Queen is a British rock band formed in London in 1971. The band has released a total of 18 number one albums, 18 number one singles and 10 number one DVDs, and have sold over 300 million albums worldwide, making them one of the world's best-selling music artists…

When we last left Harry Christophers and his cracker jack a cappella chorus the Sixteen, they were making fabulous recordings for the wonderful Collins label. But that was back in the halcyon days of the CD boom, those far off times called the '90s, when everyone with a little capital and a lot of taste could start a record label. Back in the '90s, Christophers and the Sixteen made more than a dozen wonderful recordings for Collins, among them one of the most moving recordings of Henry Purcell's Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary ever made. But the digital boom went bust and so did Collins, taking with it all of Christophers and the Sixteen's discs.

Queen Samantha was a 1970s disco artist produced by the Parisian musician Harry Chalkitis. Gloria Brooks, a singer from Chicago, was the lead vocalist on many of Chalkitis' recordings. All of the songs were co-written by Chalkitis and his wife Myriam (except a charting cover version of "The Letter", originally by The Box Tops)…

As Queen's second live album, Live Magic might appear to be a bit unnecessary, but a closer look reveals that it's a better record than the previous Live Killers. Culled from a variety of dates from the 1986 Kind of Magic tour but concentrating on the final show at Knebworth, Live Magic captures Queen, and Freddie Mercury in particular, at the height of their powers. While the set list might rely a bit too heavily on mediocre mid-'80s material for some tastes, the band is tight and professional, and Mercury has an undeniable hold over the crowd. It's to Queen's credit that the energy rarely dips over the course of the record.

Queen were straining at the boundaries of hard rock and heavy metal on Sheer Heart Attack, but they broke down all the barricades on A Night at the Opera, a self-consciously ridiculous and overblown hard rock masterpiece. Using the multi-layered guitars of its predecessor as a foundation, A Night at the Opera encompasses metal ("Death on Two Legs," "Sweet Lady"), pop (the lovely, shimmering "You're My Best Friend"), campy British music hall ("Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon," "Seaside Rendezvous"), and mystical prog rock ("'39," "The Prophet's Song"), eventually bringing it all together on the pseudo-operatic "Bohemian Rhapsody." In short, it's a lot like Queen's own version of Led Zeppelin IV, but where Zep find dark menace in bombast, Queen celebrate their own pomposity.