Blue Barron - The Blue Barron Collection 1938-53 (2021)

Although widely associated with swing, the mainstream pop music of the late 1939s and ’40 was also characterised by the strand of easy-on-the-ear orchestral dance band music with featured vocalists – sometimes called “sweet” music - performing the prolific output of fine new songs from Broadway, Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley. None was more typical of that strand than the Blue Barron Orchestra, whose record labels during the first era of its career referred to them with the words “Music of Yesterday and Today Styled the Blue Barron Way”. Blue Barron was the stage name of bandleader Harry Friedman, who launched his orchestra on the Floating Palace showboat New York in 1936. This 48-track 2-CD set comprises selected A & B sides from his releases on the Bluebird, Hits by Blue Barron and MGM labels during these years, in a recording career which was interrupted by service in WWII. It features all his career hits, including the No. 1 “Cruising Down The River”, and the Top 20 chart entries “At a Perfume Counter, “Darn That Dream”, “You Walk By”, “Chi-Baba, Chi-Baba”, “You Were Only Fooling”, “A Strawberry Moon”, “Powder Your Face With Sunshine” and “Are You Lonesome Tonight”. It includes performances by his featured vocalists Russ Carlyle, Clyde Burke, Babs Ryan, Charlie Fisher, Betty Clarke, Dolores Hawkins, George Nolan, Bobby Beers, Johnny Goodfellow, Susan Laughton & The Blue Notes.