Oscar Brand - Roll Your Leg Over: Bawdy Songs and Backroom Ballads (1955-1958) (2020)

Songwriter, author, song collector, disc jockey, talent scout, and folk singer - these are just some of the many musical hats that the late Oscar Brand wore during a career that began in the 1940s and ended only with his death, at the age of 96, in 2016.

During that long career, Oscar recorded prolifically - particularly in the 1950s and 1960s - when he cut almost 100 albums in total, including as many as ten volumes of the 'Bawdy Songs' that make up this new 2CD set from Jasmine. These were incredibly popular and, for their time, incredibly risqué, full of the double entendre and frequent explicit language that you didn't hear in popular music of the day. In this collection you will hear the first four volumes complete, as originally released between approximately 1955 and 1958. If popularity dictates, there is more than enough repertoire for a second similar collection.

The popular 1960s huge selling UK 'Rugby Songs' albums were based entirely on Oscar's concept and included many of the same songs, incidentally.None of these albums have ever been issued on CD before, and all have been out of print on vinyl for decades. Their reappearance on Jasmine after many years of semi-obscurity will delight all who may have come across them in their youth, and - more importantly - restores to catalogue historically important material by one of America's true national treasures.