It's always fair weather when hep cats get together

Continuing my trip back through the 1959 album charts.

15/03/59 : Como's Golden Records - Perry Como


I assume this is a compilation and so should really be ignored, but the normal rules have gone out the window this year. Having said that, I'm kinda intrigued to see how good the best of Perry actually is...

Well, I couldn't find this particular best-of on Amazon because of all of his other best-ofs on there, but it was easy enough to recreate it and do you know, it's really not bad at all. Yes, it's dated but that's not exactly surprising because of some the recordings go back to the 40s and the songs are generally older - "When You Were Sweet Sixteen" was actually written in 1898! Generally, the musical arrangements are decent enough and he's got a nice voice - there are some tracks on here I'd go as far as to say I liked because who could really argue with "Catch A Falling Star" (#1 in the US), "Papa Loves Mambo" and "Magic Moments" (#1 in the UK)? There are also some great track titles here - "A Hubba-Hubba-Hubba (Dig You Later)" and "Hot Diggity (Dog Ziggity Boom)". I was also intrigued as to why Amazon had "Wanted" marked as Explicit - a Google search was unable to explain things, but I was surprised to learn it was the second best selling single of '54.

We're at #10 in the chart this week on his second week of a two week run, both at #10 but he managed to get to #4 earlier in the year. The top five this week were South Pacific, My Fair Lady, Gigi, Mantovani and Elvis Presley with no new entries or named women in the charts.

Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for the album, but that's not massively surprising because his discography listed "selected" compilation albums and still manages to come up with nearly forty of them, although they do cover fifty years! He really had quite the career - apparently he often wouldn't declare his sales so the suspicion he had many more million selling tracks than are actually listed. All in all, he seems like a decent kinda guy - he was married to the same woman for 65 years, which is often an indicator for such things.

"Customers also listened to" - well, who knows but I suspect it might involve other Como compilations. And it's easy to be rude about people from the old days but I really didn't mind this at all - it's a decent selection of tracks done well with some classic tunes amongst them.

18/01/59 - A very decent album
22/03/59 - A different and decent album

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