It ain't so much a question of not knowin' what to do

Continuing my trip back through the 1956 album charts.

25/11/56 : Oklahoma! - Various Artists

The first album of the year I can claim to be even vaguely familiar with and that's all because of an "interesting" night out we had earlier this year.  It will be interesting to compare the original recording with both the version of the musical we saw and the recording of Carousel I recently endured.

Well, this was far better than Carousel - yes, it still sounds old fashioned but it has way better tunes and the sound quality was also far, far better.  I really like "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top", "Kansas City", "I Caint Say No" and the title track and these are all fine versions of them - properly musical theatred up in the way they weren't when we saw them recently.  Overall, I'd say this is probably the most enjoyable album I've listened to this year - the only thing that annoyed me is that some of the tracks end in very bizarre places eg one cuts off in mid sentence.

We're at #3 in the charts with a re-entry this week and this one had considerably more success than Carousel over the years with 31 runs between now and '61, with the longest one being 59 weeks and it spent three weeks at #1.  The rest of the top five were TKAI (back to the original soundtrack!), Lonnie Donegan, Carousel and Elvis Presley (which I've only just realised I've already listened to!).

For a change, Wikipedia does have an entry for the album - there's not an awful lot on there, but it does tell us that this was one of the first stereo albums and it was the first album to be certified "gold" in the US.  Looking at the entry for the musical, this was the first Rodgers & Hammerstein creation and it's based on the 1931 play, Green Grow The Lilacs. The original Broadway production opened on March 31, 1943 and ran for an unprecedented 2,212 performances - and I'm sure that version was way better than this one.

"Customers also listened to" "no similar recommendations" - which seems odd, but I think we can safely assume that other old musicals are likely to feature there.  I enjoyed this and it made me want to go and see a more traditionally set version of the show - I suspect a local school will oblige sometime soon!

I'm very uncertain what I'm going to do for my next entry because we appear to have run out of albums for the year, but I'm sure something will come to me...

28/10/56 - A bit samey, but historically important
02/12/56 - Very old-fashioned

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