What's your name? Is it Mary or Sue?

Continuing my trip back through the 1963 album charts.

14/04/63 : A Bobby Vee Recording Session - Bobby Vee

Our second visit with young Bobby this year (and he's not finished with us yet) - last time I liked it, but that was a best-of so, it will be interesting to see what we have here.

Yeah, it's pretty similar to last time except that I don't know any of the tracks. It's all very Buddy Holly-ish, so was already sounding a bit dated compared to some of the stuff we've heard from the year but it's done well enough. And at twelve songs in 25 minutes, he's really not hanging about - he looks super young on the album cover though!

We're at #15 in the charts this week with a re-entry on a single week's visit, but he managed a nine week run earlier in the year, peaking at #10. The top five this week were Cliff Richard, Buddy Holly, The Beatles, West Side Story and Elvis Presley with the highest new entry being one Bobby Vee (#20).

Wikipedia tells us it's his sixth album (he released TWENTY albums in the 60s, including ten in '61-'63!) - there's remarkably little else of interest on there other than telling us he released a couple of singles from it. Critically, it was pretty well received with Billboard declaring him to be in "fresh, appealing vocal form" but it really didn't sell in the US, only reaching #121 in their chart (and I'm surprised they counted that far down considering we only bothered going as far as #20).

discogs.com tells us there are no copies for sale over here, but if you head to the US you can pick up a decent enough copy for $4 or, if you fancy shelling out $50, you can pick up a version that's still shrink-wrapped - how on earth have they kept it that way for 64 years?!? This was pretty enjoyable and feels nicely "of it's time" - although there's certainly an argument that that time was coming to an end.

21/04/63 - A most peculiar offering

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