Up a lazy river by the old mill run

Continuing my trip back through the 1963 album charts.

14/07/63 : All Star Festival - Various Artists

This is definitely an album that would be ignored under normal circumstances but it's actually an interesting one - you only have to look at the names on the album cover to know something is going on here.

OK, maybe not it's not all that interesting musically - except that it is, because of the weird mix of stuff going on. We've got Nana Mouskouri warbling in Greek, Maurice Chevalier and Edith Piaf rambling in French, Luis Alberto del Parana wittering in Spanish and Caterina Valente doing whatever she does in Italian - all very random. The bizarreness isn't confined to foreign languages though because we've also got Anne Shelton doing an incredibly dated version of "Greensleeves". Having said that, I did enjoy Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong's "Lazy River" because there's some serious charisma on display and Mahalia Jackson's "Nobody But You, Lord" is some very fine gospel indeed. So it's interesting because it's just so odd and you also may also have noted that a lot of the people I've mentioned are women - the third album of the year to feature them!

We're at #16 in the charts this week on the second week of a two week run - feels about right for something so bizarre, yeah? Oh no - this was its second run, with the first one being seventeen weeks, with it peaking at #4. Quite obviously. The top five this week were The Beatles, The Shadows, Cliff Richard and compilations from Buddy Holly and Cliff Richard - I think West Side Story is the only album featuring women to appear in the top five all year so far. And the highest new entry was a Ray Charles best-of (#20). 

Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for the album or the festival - and the rest of the internet suggests that no actual physical festivities took place, but it was a charitable exercise organised by the UN High Commission for Refugees whereby all the artists and labels involved gave up their rights on the tracks for two years and the proceeds went to help refugees. Google AI maintains its form by confidently and wrongly telling us that the first charity album was The World Wildlife Fund's No One's Gonna Change Our World in '69, so this could possibly actually be the first one ever but history hasn't really recorded it as such - so that's cool, isn't it?

discogs.com tells us you can spend anything from £1.50-£10 on it but it seems like you don't really get anything different for all that extra cash. This was an interesting offering from a historical concept but I'd struggle to say it's particularly of interest on the musical front, except for the sheer variety on display.

21/07/63 - Decent enough

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