Details

All of the songs on Sammy Awards were written specifically for the cinema between 1935 and 1954. Now, to say that Sammy Davis, Jr. was a cinema aficionado would be something of an understatement. He had one of the most extensive private film collections in Hollywood, and took an inordinate number of movies on the road with him traveling around the world; wherever Sammy was, either at home or a hotel room, he was screening films for friends.

Sammy was further obsessed by movie trivia – as anyone who has read his book Hollywood in a Suitcase would know – and used to hold competitions with another film buff, Mel Tormé, in which they would try to catch each other out with some small detail of motion picture history. The two even went head-to-head with one another on the 1969 celebrity movie trivia game show The Movie Game. The show’s host Army Archerd later recalled “the stars were serious about displaying their savvy about Hollywood and the two best-informed players turned out to be Sammy Davis, Jr. and Mel Tormé.”

So it is no surprise that Sammy would decide to record an entire album of songs that not only hailed from motion pictures, but that also shared this trivial connection to each other: all had been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song … and lost. In fact, when Australian record label Festival issued Sammy Awards, in true Aussie tell-it-like-it-is fashion, it changed the title to Academy Award Losers! The movies in question and the songs selected from them are:

Roberta (1935) – Lovely To Look At
Pennies From Heaven (1936) – Pennies From Heaven
Carefree (1938) – Change Partners
Blues In The Night (1941) – Blues In The Night
Youth On Parade (1942) – I’ve Heard That Song Before
Something To Shout About (1943) – You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To
Love Letters (1945) – Love Letters
Anchors Aweigh (1945) – I Fall In Love Too Easily
Casbah (1948) – For Every Man There’s A Woman
Romance On The High Seas (1948) – It’s Magic
Royal Wedding (1951) – Too Late Now
The Man That Got Away (1954) – A Star Is Born

This was Sammy’s second album utilising the services of Buddy Bregman as arranger and conductor, and Bregman split duties with Sammy’s regular musical director, Morty Stevens. All 12 cuts were recorded across a two-day session in New York in June 1959, six with full strings, six without strings.

Sammy is in good form throughout (although some of the slower numbers lack a little bit of depth), and his performance is summarised by Burt Korall on the LP’s liner notes as “a happy blend of show business, romance, seriousness and pulsation”. A fair summary of the album, and indeed of Sammy Davis, Jr. himself.