VA - Dot's Cover To Cover...Hit Upon Hit (1995)

The perceived wisdom regarding Dot Records is that the company built its business by getting clean-living, well-scrubbed white performers to cover and capitalise on predominantly black R&B hits of the day. This, of course, is a fairly one-dimensional view. For though Dot did score heavily with 'cover' versions in the period 1955-57, they also had original hits (Jim Lowe The Green Door and Sanford Clark The Fool to name but two). Also, it's arguable that many of the white 'cover' versions of R&B hits that were recorded actually expanded and developed the wider public interest in black music. Many young teenagers' parents would have frowned on their children buying, say, a Little Richard recording of Tutti Frutti whereas Pat Boone singing the song made it an acceptable choice. The subversive sting in the tale was that as the teenage taste for rock'n'roll grew, the kids got the message ahead of the adults and were soon able to sort out the wheat from the chaff. That said, Pat Boone remained the second biggest selling artist of the time (Elvis Presley was No 1)."Dot's Cover To Cover...Hit Upon Hit" tells the story with 30 cover versions and all of them hits. Among them, Green Door man Jim Lowe tackles Chuck Berry's Maybelline and Carl Perkins' Blue Suede Shoes, Pat Boone digs into Fats Domino's Ain't That A Shame, Ivory Joe Hunter's I Almost Lost My Mind and Little Richard's Long Tall Sally, Gale Storm cuts Smiley Lewis' I Hear You Knocking, and Nick Todd rocks along on Danny & The Juniors' At The Hop.In 1957, owner and founder Randy Wood (then 39 years old) sold Dot to Paramount Pictures for $3 million (staying on as head of the company, which continued to prosper well into the 1960s). "It happened to be my desire to make records for the pop market" Woods told sleevenote writer Rob Finnis "Everyone said, 'You can't do it: it's foolish-.-you don't stand a chance against the majors', but I went ahead and made a couple of records and they sold!"