Just Baby

Lily Powers (Barbara Stanwyck) works as a barmaid in her father's factory-town saloon where she learns to deal with the unwanted advances of male customers. When her father dies, she moves to New York City with her maid, Chico (Theresa Harris), to become a ruthless gold digger. First she meets office boy Jimmy McCoy (a young John Wayne in an uncharacteristically clean-cut role) who helps her get a job at the Gotham Trust Company. From there, she seduces and discards various men (George Brent, Donald Cook, Henry Kolker) as she LITERALLY sleeps her way to the top of the company. Jealously between the men causes a murder scene, so Lily takes her furs and jewels and moves to Paris with Chico…

Use of the word baby isn't improved by repetition. Though it doesn't crop up often on this "concept" record including only songs with the word baby in the title, Mindy Carson's vocal histrionics succeed only in dating Baby, Baby, Baby as a relic of its time. Blessed with a strong voice that she wielded with much talent, Carson had unfortunately devolved, by the time this was recorded in 1958, into a belter who attempted to equal the lungs of Kay Starr without her impeccable jazz smarts. There are many excellent songs that fit the bill for entrée on this record "I Can't Give You Anything but Love, Baby," "My Baby Just Cares for Me," "My Melancholy Baby" and the charts by Glenn Osser and Sherman Edwards goose a well-worn standard quite well, but Carson fails to let any syllable cross her lips without worrying it to death.

Shambolic - not a word often used to describe musicians, their recordings or their careers but in the case of Rosco Gordon it seems to fit. Certainly his piano stylings are often referred to as shambolic, however his looping piano style and his ability to place an accent on the offbeat helped to form the foundation of bluebeat and ska in Jamaica. Presented here are the A & B sides of every release he made up to 1961, major hits include "Booted", "No More Doggin'", "Saddle The Cow" plus great tracks such as "Just A Little Bit". This is the first time his exciting recordings have been presented in this way. An undeniably original talent whose contributions to the development of popular music cannot underestimated and this collection fully demonstrates that.

Baby Man, the new album by Fruit Bats, is like nothing else in Grammy-nominated songwriter Eric D. Johnson’s catalog. Little in the arc of his career—including Fruit Bats’ evolution from home recording project to rollicking roadshow, his solo output, and his work with Bonny Light Horseman—points the way to this album, in which his only accompaniment, aside from the occasional blush of synthesizer, is a guitar, banjo, or piano.