There once was a man who loved his woman

Continuing my trip back through the 1958 album charts.

20/04/58 : The Pajama Game OST - Various Artists


Another six weeks skipped over, of which My Fair Lady was #1 for five of them and we saw no non-soundtrack albums at all, brings us to another soundtrack album about which I have absolutely no expectations. I had to take a punt on which version of this album to listen to because I could have gone for the musical version with John Raitt and Janis Paige or the film version with John Raitt and Doris Day - can you guess which one I went for?

Yeah, you've got to love a bit of Doris, dontcha? I think few would describe this is as her finest work - it's fine and I imagine a load more fun if you're watching the visuals, but it felt very dated. John and Doris make a nice romantic couple though - even if I didn't really have the faintest idea what was going on. I was quite surprised to recognise "Hernando's Hideaway" - I never knew it came from this musical.

We're at #4 in the charts this week on the last of a two week run, with it having had a six week run earlier in the year, peaking at #3 and the rest of the top five are a soundtrack clean sweep for The Duke Wore Jeans, Pal Joey, The King And I and Oklahoma!.

Wikipedia does have an entry for the album which basically just tells us that it "contains songs from the movie of the same name" - thanks for that guys! Digging a little deeper, I learned that John Raitt was the lead in the original production of Carousel and the original touring version of Oklahoma!, so he was obviously quite a big thing back then - and he's also Bonnie's dad. I also learned the film has a 91% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, so it's obviously better than I suspected from listening to this. Apparently the film producers were happy to take all the cast from the musical except they needed one of the main stars to be a "name", so if Frank had taken the role he was offered, then I suspect I'd have listened to the musical version.

"Customers also listened to" "no similar recommendations" - which quite surprised me because, although I can't claim I loved it, it was certainly more enjoyable than a load of the classic musicals I've endured from around this time.

08/06/58 - Oh look, it's him again!

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