Judy Garland - The Garland Touch (1962)

Having waited a year for Judy Garland to follow up her chart-topping, gold-selling, Grammy-winning album Judy at Carnegie Hall, Capitol Records gave up and cobbled together this LP out of previously released tracks and stray sessions. Two songs, "More Than You Know" and "Do I Love You?" appeared on Garland's 1958 album Judy in Love and are simply repeated here. "Comes Once in a Lifetime" and "Sweet Danger," two adequate Broadway show tunes from the 1961-1962 season, appeared together on a Garland single. (The former, by Jule Styne, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green, comes from Subways Are for Sleeping; the latter, by George Forrest and Robert Wright, was in the flop Kean.) The other six tracks were recorded in London in a series of sessions that found the singer revisiting her earlier work, such as "It's a Great Day for the Irish," a song she sang in the 1940 movie Little Nelly Kelly, and her "Judy at the Palace" medley of vaudeville favorites, assembled for her 1951 appearance at the Palace Theater in New York. She is certainly in good voice on these recordings, and even if this patchwork collection is not a worthy successor to Judy at Carnegie Hall, it contains some winning performances.~The Garland Touch Review by William Ruhlmann