Leroy van Dyke - The Auctioneer (Remastered) (1994)

"Auctioneer" wasn't the first song to set bid-calling to music, but it was the most successful. Leroy Van Dyke, a real-life auctioneer, wrote and recorded the song as his first single for Dot Records, and in so doing scored a major crossover hit on the pop and country charts. The arrangement is deceptively simple, consisting only of Van Dyke on voice and acoustic guitar, and a session player on electric guitar. The flip side of the single, "I Fell in Love with a Pony Tail," found Van Dyke balancing between country and teen-oriented music, which foreshadowed his coming experiments with pop and rockabilly. The Auctioneer is an anthology of Van Dyke's complete Dot recordings from 1956-1958, including the aforementioned songs. The material varies in style and quality as Dot tried to sell Van Dyke as another Pat Boone or Sanford Clark. There are rock remakes of country and R&B songs ("I'm Movin' On," "Chicken Shack Boogie"); rock songs ("Leather Jacket," a cover of Elvis Presley's "Poor Boy"), and attempts to reprise the "Auctioneer" formula ("Down at the South End of Town.") Despite the inclusion of several previously unreleased songs and one alternate take, the collection has only 15 tracks, which is brief by Bear Family's standards. Bear Family's anthology of Van Dyke's Mercury recordings, Walk on By, offers nearly twice as many songs for the same price. On the other hand, the original hit recording of "Auctioneer" is hard to find on CD, and The Auctioneer is one place where it can be found.