CDs: Merman on London

In terms of solo, studio LPs featuring her standard song repertoire, Ethel Merman's list may begin with Songs She Made Famous, a ten-inch Decca LP pressing of a 1947 collection of seven of her greatest hits, conducted by Jay Blackton. Most of the tracks from that set, along with tracks from her Decca Annie Get Your Gun and Call Me Madam albums, became part of Decca's two-LP Ethel Merman: A Musical Biography 1956, which also included many original recordings along with some amusing narration by the star.

In 1961 and still in top voice, Merman recorded for Reprise a solo album called Merman...Her Greatest!, arranged and conducted by Billy May, who also guided her live, 1962 Las Vegas set for Reprise. In 1979, there was the bizarre Ethel Merman Disco Album, with the star repeating her standards in contemporary settings.

Veering away from those standards, Merman made a mid-'50s solo Decca disc again with Blackton called Memories, featuring forty popular songs from the gay nineties to the roaring twenties. In 1987, MCA issued The World Is Your Balloon, a compilation of rare Decca singles Merman made in the 50s, all of songs she never otherwise recorded "A Little Girl from Little Rock," "If I Knew You Were Comin' I'd've Baked a Cake".

Beginning as it did in 1930, much of Merman's Broadway career happened before the advent of full-length cast albums. So there are major numbers from Merman shows prior to Annie Get Your Gun that she never got to preserve on disc. She might have remedied the situation in the '60s and '70s. Indeed, record producer Ben Bagley once told me that he went to considerable pains to persuade Merman to record some of those numbers on his "Revisited" albums. But while the star always expressed interest, she never got around to doing so.

Merman concluded her Broadway career with her final performance in Hello, Dolly! in late 1970. But she went on to an extensive concert career, spending the next decade performing the songs associated with her, along with the occasional new selection.

In the early '70s, Merman recorded three albums for London Records Decca in the U.K., all with Stanley Black conducting the London Festival orchestra and chorus. One was a studio-cast disc of Annie Get Your Gun 1973. It was Merman's third recording of the show, and, as she had made a wonderful-and superior-- Annie album as recently as 1966, from the Lincoln Center revival, London's '73 Annie was entirely unnecessary.

Her other two London Records albums were solo recitals, one devoted to her greatest hits, the other featuring a few familiar songs along with quite a few she had never sung before. Merman Sings Merman 1972 features twelve selections associated with the star. She introduced all but one of them in her Broadway shows. The exception: Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band," which was heard in two Berlin compilation films in which Merman appeared, Alexander's Ragtime Band and There's No Business Like Show Business. Merman also sang the song on the widely-viewed television program "The Ford 50th Anniversary Show" in 1953.

One might have preferred to find Merman at this juncture documenting those early, unrecorded show songs. But such a disc would not have sold as well. And by the '70s, several of Merman's solo LPs were out of print, so Merman Sings Merman, documenting the star's essentials, was a plausible idea. If some of her sustained notes were no longer as steady as they once had been, Merman was still in strong voice. And as for the zest, style, volume, diction, intonation, tone, and electricity-they were all intact and unmistakable. Because she tended not to vary her interpretations much, the performances here of such numbers as "I Get a Kick Out of You," "I Got Rhythm," "Everything's Coming Up Roses" and "Blow Gabriel Blow" are classic Merman.

There are some amusing interjections from the chorus, which also takes on the male half of the counterpoint number "You're Just in Love." The longest track here is also the one Merman sang the least in her later years, her forthright "Eadie Was a Lady." Merman Sings Merman also preserves forever a bizarre error she sometimes made in concerts: In the lyric for "There's No Business Like Show Business," Merman sings, "Even with a turkey that you know has fold," and nobody seems to have caught it.

Merman's third London Records disc, the solo album Ethel's Ridin' High 1974, includes three songs "Gee, But It's Good to Be Here," "Some People," "Ridin' High" the star introduced on Broadway. Otherwise, the songs are new to her, and they include such '60s Broadway fare as "The Impossible Dream," "Nothing Can Stop Me Now," "On a Clear Day," "What Kind of Fool Am I?," "Sunrise, Sunset," and "People," the latter briefly heard as part of another Jule Styne song, "Some People." The set is completed with "Someone to Watch Over Me" and "Whispering." On a "Dick Cavett Show," Barbara Cook expressed her amusement at Merman's ironically boisterous account of a song called "Whispering."

The original LP cover photo of Merman riding a carousel horse was campy, and it set the tone for a couple of the renditions. There's something unintentionally but inevitably amusing about hearing the brassy, no-nonsense Merman singing "Sunrise, Sunset" or "The Impossible Dream." But they're fun to hear, as is her bombastic "What Kind of Fool Am I?" And you'll note that the instructions in her belty "Ridin' High" to "ring bells...blow horns, beat gongs" are carried out to the letter.

Because it features Merman's only recordings of most of these songs, Ethel's Ridin' High may be of greater interest than Merman Sings Merman. But the good news is that English Decca has managed to fit both LPs onto a single, twenty-two-track CD, and it makes a fine combination release. The sincerity and confidence of all of these performances are hard to resist.

And speaking of Merman and that "Ford 50th Anniversary Show," coming out next week on a VAI DVD and to be reviewed here soon is a half-hour of excerpts from that 1953 program, including the celebrated, thirteen-minute Merman-Mary Martin duet; Martin's solo fashion sketch; and two more Merman numbers, "Alexander's Ragtime Band" and "Mademoiselle from Armentiere."

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