Details

In August of 1963, Reprise Records released Sinatra’s Sinatra, an album in which songs that had been successes for Frank Sinatra on his previous record labels, Columbia and Capitol, were re-recorded – the gimmick being that they were now being presented in stereo sound for the first time. It’s presumably no co-incidence that the same month, Sammy Davis, Jr. stepped into the Reprise recording booth to lay down tracks for an LP with identical intent.

After all, Capitol had released a Sinatra compilation LP in July 1962 (which went to #15 on the charts), and Sammy’s previous label, Decca, released their own Davis compilation LP, Forget-Me-Nots For First Nighters in April 1963. Reprise clearly wanted to compete with its artists’ old labels on the turf of its artists’ old recordings.

Despite having nowhere near the degree of success at Decca that Frank had at Capitol, Sammy nonetheless had a number of tunes which were now associated with him in the popular culture consciousness: most notably “Hey There”, “The Birth of the Blues”, “That Old Black Magic” (all of which were Billboard charting singles), and songs from Porgy and Bess and Mr. Wonderful (in which he had starred).

However, branding the resulting album as a ‘treasury of golden hits’ might have been gilding the lily slightly – of the remaining eight cuts, only one of the originals had been a charting single (“In A Persian Market” spent all of one week on the UK charts in 1956). To be fair, five of the album’s 11 recordings did originally appear on Starring Sammy Davis, Jr., Sammy’s most successful LP and his only Billboard #1 album.

All re-recordings were given new charts by Morty Stevens. In most cases, he was taking a second pass at songs he had originally arranged – the exceptions being “And This Is My Beloved” and “Hey There” (Sy Oliver), “Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess” (Buddy Bregman), and “Spoken For” (Joesph Gershenson).

Each song on the album is, in and of itself, a fine recording; Sammy is clearly a more mature singer than he was at Decca. Because the album acts as a ‘best of’ exercise, by definition the song selection is somewhat random, and the lack of thematic link limits the LP’s overall impact. Furthermore, between them, Stevens and Davis occasionally struggle to find truly new takes on the originals.

On the whole, though, this is a thoroughly enjoyable album for Sammy Davis, Jr. neophytes and aficionados alike, providing some of Sammy’s most well-known numbers with both top-notch instrumentation and vocal interpretation.