Chuck Berry fanatics, your ship has come in, and it’s the Queen Mary — or maybe we should call it the Queen Maybellene. As you’d expect from the Bear Family label, which specializes in gargantuan reissues, this 16-CD, 396-song box doesn’t simply span Berry’s career, it embraces virtually every musical note the man has ever issued. You’ll find all of his released album tracks and singles, starting with an obscure 1954 recording and including everything from the Chess, Mercury and Atco labels, plus every surviving alternate take. Also here are five CDs’ worth of concert performances from 1956 to 1972.
A characteristically humongous (8-CD) box set from the wonderful obsessive-compulsives at Bear Family, documenting the Killer's '60s tenure at Smash Records. Lewis made consistently good music during this period, but the combination of his personal scandals and the British Invasion made him a pariah to radio programmers until mid-decade, when he returned to his country roots. Highlights of the set include the entirety of a Texas live show, with Lewis and his crack band rendering various early rock standards at dangerously high (i.e., proto punk) speed, some excellent duets with his (then) wife Linda Gail, and gorgeous renditions of standards like Willie Nelson's "Funny How Time Slips Away" and Merle Haggard's "Lonesome Fugitive." Lewis fans with deep pockets should grab this one immediately…
In the vast Canadian wilderness, there lives a very special bear family. Just out of hibernation, two black cubs have a pure white mother. She's not a polar bear or albino - locally she's known as a ghost bear. This far north, winter is never far away, and this unusual family must work hard to find enough food to see them through. They will also need to avoid other large predators, but being so different could bring them unwelcome attention.
Buck Owens turned Bakersfield, California into the epicenter of hip country music in the mid-'60s. All it took was a remarkable streak of number one singles that steam rolled right through Nashville with their electrified twang, forever changing the notion of what constituted country music and codifying the Bakersfield sound as hard-driving rhythms, trebly Telecasters, and lean arrangements suited for honky tonks, beer joints, and jukeboxes all across America. Half-a-century later, these remain sonic signifiers of Bakersfield, so the term no longer conveys a specific sound, place, and era, a situation the weighty Bear Family box The Bakersfield Sound: Country Music Capital of the West 1940-1974 intends to rectify.
While the first Flatt & Scruggs box on Bear Family documented the band's development over its first 11 years – 1948-1959 – this set captures the band at the height of its meteoric rise to fame into the stuff of legend. First and foremost, Flatt & Scruggs eclipsed the fame of their mentor, Bill Monroe by having six charting singles in Billboard between the mid-'50s and 1960. They also got reviewed in Playboy and Downbeat magazines and began to play the Newport Folk Festival and appear on stages with Joan Baez, Cisco Houston, the Kingston Trio, New Christy Minstrels, Woody Guthrie, John Jacob Niles, and many others.
It's a statement of Johnny Cash's longevity that the eight albums collected here – each one a concept collection devoted to American historical themes – were considered worthy and viable commercial releases back when, and that most were very successful. This four-CD set assembles Ride This Train, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Bitter Tears, Ballads of the True West, Mean as Hell! (Johnny Cash Sings Ballads from the True West), America: A 200 Year Salute in Story and Song, From Sea to Shining Sea, and The Rambler, all in one place. They fit together as a body of work, and he put a lot of heart into all of these songs individually…
After 25 years wildlife cinematographer, Jeff Turner, and his family return to BC's Great Bear Rainforest to film a very special white Spirit Bear family.
8-CD box (LP-size) with 47-page book, 137 tracks. Playing time approx. 725 mns. The third German Jazz Festival in 1955 was a four-day event that featured nearly 30 groups and soloists. It was recorded by Deutsche Grammophon for release on Brunswick, but only parts of it were released on long-deleted EPs. The complete tapes survived though. The 1954 festival was also recorded, but only the portion issued on an EP was saved. Now the surviving portion of the 1954 festival and the entire 1955 festival are issued complete by Bear Family on eight CDs.