Kitty 16

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.

SOMM Recordings continues its widely acclaimed championing of the music of Charles Villiers Stanford with a captivating collection of his Children’s Songs by mezzo-soprano Kitty Whately and baritone Gareth Brynmor John, accompanied by pianist Susie Allan.

Mezzo-soprano Kitty Whately trained at Chetham's School of Music, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the International Opera School of the Royal College of Music. Having won both the Kathleen Ferrier Award and Royal Overseas League Award in the same year, she attended the prestigious Academy of the Verbier Festival. She writes of this project: 'It has been my great pleasure to record with Joseph once again. We have long shared a mutual passion for early-twentieth-century-romantic Lieder and talked of making a disc including songs by Mahler and Strauss.

Born Kitty Jean Bilbrew in 1923, White grew up in a musical family, her mother and father being vaudevillian performers. White was a well-trained vocalist with perfect pitch. She was also a good music reader, which allowed her to find studio work. After recording a couple of albums for EmArcy, White even appeared in a number of movies during the early 1950s, including King Creole (with Elvis Presley), Last Train from Gun Hill and The Old Man and the Sea.

Kitty Kallen was a band singer, and later a soloist, who lit up bandstands with a handful of top leaders during the '40s. She's remembered for three reasons: big-band fans know that she was the one who replaced Helen O'Connell in the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra in 1943, also that she sang the vocal chorus on a pair of Harry James hits, "I'm Beginning to See the Light" and "It's Been a Long, Long Time," and virtually everyone with a radio in 1954 knew that she recorded the year's most popular song, "Little Things Mean a Lot."