Doris Day

While Collectables Records often has been able to pair complementary albums in its series of discount-priced two-fer reissues of Doris Day's catalog, there are also stray LPs that don't sound like any of their siblings and so can only be teamed in mismatched combinations. Such a set of non-identical twins is found on this CD containing Love Him! and Show Time. Love Him!, which arrived after a lengthy break in Day's recording career in the winter of 1963-1964, found her working under the aegis of her 21-year-old son, Columbia Records producer Terry Melcher, who attempted to update and broaden his mother's musical approach, having her cut recent songs associated with Elvis Presley plus selections from the country and R&B charts…

The songs heard on The Love Album first came to light nearly 30 years after their recording, but they should never have lingered in the vaults so long; what's more, if an LP had appeared on schedule, it would have easily remained Doris Day's finest album of the '60s. But neither her commercial fortunes nor the market for Tin Pan Alley songs (even standards) appeared particularly bright in 1967. Day had just broken with her record label Columbia, and was producing herself for the first time; and most of her contemporaries were either fighting the tide of pop culture or only keeping their head above water by covering new standards such as "Sunny" or "The Windmills of Your Mind." Day chose instead to sing a collection of songs whose cumulative age was something like 350 years old (although the chestnut "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" had been revived by Elvis Presley only a few years earlier)…

When Doris Day freed herself from those cotton candy films she appeared in, where her singing for the most part was limited to cute novelty tunes, she showed that she could successfully sink her vocal teeth into some solid standard material. The LPs compiled on this CD come from the late '50s, when she was recording for Columbia with backing from an orchestra headed by Paul Weston. The songs fall into two categories. The first are those where Weston employed a large, sugary string section. The far more interesting tracks are those where the strings were held out and Day was backed by a dance band group with some jazz personages present…

I Have Dreamed (1961). "The mood of these songs is dreamy," writes annotator Pete Martin, thus defining the theme of Doris Day's second LP of 1961. As usual, someone - Day herself, her conductor, a Columbia Records A&R person - had chosen a theme for her album and picked a group of songs, most of them interwar standards that derived from stage musicals or movies. Dreaminess was a concept familiar to any band singer of the 1940s, and Day was such a singer, so she certainly knew her way around "I'll Buy That Dream," even if the hit versions of the 1945 song were by such competitors as Helen Forrest (with Dick Haymes) and Kitty Kallen (as vocalist with Harry James' band)…

Love Me or Leave Me was one of Doris Day's greatest, and least likely, successes. Coming out of a string of light movie musicals, she turned in a dramatic performance in this film biography of singer Ruth Etting. She looked nothing like Etting and made no attempt to sound like her, either. But since Etting's recordings of the 1920s and '30s were long out of print and she made only a few films, that was less of a problem than it would have been for a performer whose voice and appearance were better preserved and available. The film was a popular and critical success, but the soundtrack, consisting entirely of Day's renditions of Etting signature songs like the title tune and "Ten Cents Dance," plus a couple of newly written songs, was a blockbuster, spending months at the top of the charts and becoming far and away the best selling of the relatively new 12" LPs of 1955…

In the wake of the Stan Getz albums Jazz Samba (1962) and especially Getz/Gilberto (1964), Brazilian bossa nova was all the rage with the jazz-pop set of the early and mid-'60s, and many pop singers took the opportunity to record albums full of songs by Antonio Carlos Jobim. Doris Day might not come to mind immediately as someone well-suited to the lightly rhythmic style, but she had always had a feel for mid-tempo material that provided a showcase for her warm, rich voice. Still, you might have thought of her as a bit lightweight for the easygoing, yet intricate Brazilian sound. But by her early forties, the eternally ingenuous singer finally was showing signs of maturity. She had taken a distinctly different tack on Love Him!, the 1964 album produced by her son, Terry Melcher, and here she sang the lyrics like a grown-up woman, her voice even betraying an attractive huskiness here and there…

This release combines two up-tempo Doris Day albums from the late '50s and early '60s. The discs were not released sequentially; 1959's Cuttin' Capers was followed by two 1960 releases, What Every Girl Should Know and Show Time, before Bright and Shiny appeared in 1961. But the two albums share a sprightly tone. The theme of Bright and Shiny is happy songs - "I Want to Be Happy," "Happy Talk" - while Cuttin' Capers is even more frolicsome. There are songs that were newly written at the time, such as the scene-setting "Cuttin' Capers," which leads things off, and "Twinkle and Shine," the title song from Day's reissued 1961 film (the first time around in 1959 it had been called It Happened to Jane), which closed the disc, but for the most part the songs are drawn from the Great American Songbook, dating back to the mid-'20s for tunes like "I'm Sitting on Top of the World" and "I Want to Be Happy"…

This 2012 collection of 69 songs on three discs is truly awesome! All songs were mastered from the original Columbia recordings and sound great. Since this collection spans her career (recordings from the 40's, 50's and 60's), a special kudos must go out to the unlisted balance engineer; a very smooth and even run! Classic track after classic track, like The Very Thought Of You (1950), Dream A Little Dream Of Me (1957), Sentimental Journey (1945), It's Magic (1948) and Happy Talk (1961) to name a few. The first eight tracks on Disc #3 are from her great film role, "Calamity Jane," in which she overwhelmed Howard Keel, who was nobody's idea of a second fiddle.