1935-1944: Thanks for the Memory

Mildred Bailey | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (November 3, 1998)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Giants of Jazz (Ita)
• ASIN: B00000DAK2
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #968,779 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. Lover, Come Back to Me

2. It Had to Be You

3. I Never Know

4. Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone

5. I Didn't Know About You

6. I'll Get By (As Long as I Have You)

7. St. Louis Blues

8. Evelina

9. Thanks for the Memory

10. Don't Be That Way

11. Gulf Coast Blues

12. 'Tain't What You Do (It's the Way That You Do It)

13. Barrelhouse Music

14. Rock It for Me

15. Arkansas Blues

16. Darn That Dream

17. I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You

18. Peace, Brother!

19. I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm

20. There'll Be Some Changes Made

See all 22 tracks on this disc

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Worth it for the Title Song alone Mildred=Jazzy Jazzy Joy, February 14, 2005

By 

Tony Thomas (SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 1935-1944: Thanks for the Memory (Audio CD)

Just the title song here, "Thanks for the Memory," is enough to buy this CD. You'll never think of Jack Benny again after you hear this. She does the tune without being cynical, maudlin, or sappy, and boy does she swing it. Then old Mildred probably swung when she was asleep, when she did her laundry, or just walking down the street. They didn't call her Mrs. Swing for Nothing.

Mildred Bailey was not just the first real female Jazz band singer. She was one of the earliest real jazz singers and she continued to have a jazz based strain to her singing throughout her career unlike some singers with her success who might have gone more pop. She was fun. She was fun. She was fun. She jived, she joked, she played. You are going to smile when you hear Mildred and know she is really serious when she is serious. She could bring out the jazz in the most wooden of accompaniest, but usually she had great musicians, white, black or otherwise playing behind her, because Mildred is fun.

In an age before television, Bailey continued to have fans white and Black who did not know she was white. This remains true even recently when I have loaned tapes of Mildred to other African Americans without any liner notes or anything and had them ask why they had never heard of this great Black singer.

However, I do find it distressing that Mildred Bailey seems to be so forgotten. She was the first prominent female band singer in Jazz. She was and is fun to listen to and a great voice. Mildred was actually able to swing and swing hard even with Paul Whiteman. She produced masterpieces using some of the same small groups as Billie Holday for HER Columbia recordings, although Bailey semed to prefer Herschal Evans to Lester Young. Bailey was also pretty out front for the time as a white female singer performing with an all black combo--"Mildred Baily and Her Oxford Browns." Mildred was simply magnificent in the small combos her husband Red Novro organized, She had a sense of humor about her performances and a bit of salaciousness that you won't find in Billie's recordings.

I don't think it was just out of sentimentality, but in tribute to her artistry, that Sinatra and Bing Crosby (who owed his career to Bailey's bringing him in contact with Whiteman)spent thousands of dollars helping her out in the last years of her life when health problems and the end of her career led her to very hard times.

Mildred was a great singer, a great jazz pioneer, and a lot of fun. How does anyone get along without the joy her music has brought to my life. There have been times when my life was worse than it is now when I was depressed and just thinking about one of Mildred's tracks on this CD started to turn my life around!

4.0 out of 5 stars Jazz Days On My Mind, July 12, 2009

By 

Alfred Johnson (boston, ma) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: 1935-1944: Thanks for the Memory (Audio CD)

Musically, I am a blues man. I am informed, malformed, deformed, reformed by the blues. Then I am a rock man. And a folk man, in all its variants. So where doe that lead me into an exposition of jazz that I have recently started to write more about in this space. Well, let's just call it an extension of the blues (not hard to do by the way). And the clearest example of that is Lady Day, Billie Holiday. Yes, I know that she was a jazz singer extraordinaire. But, the way she swept my blues away when I was down in the dumps sure makes me think she was the queen of the blues (Bessie Smith being, of course, outlandishly the "Empress").

All of this is by a very round about way of bringing the jazz singer under review, Mildred Bailey into the picture. Billie Holiday set the standard in the 1940's (and to a lesser extent in the 1950's when the dope started to get the best of her) for the phrasing of a jazz song, for the hush that signaled a new direction to the song, for the ... well, underlying sense of the song. For that something unsayable but certainly knowable when a song is done right. Mildred Bailey and others (who will be highlighted here later) had that in spots and that is why she and this "greatest hits' compilation of her work are being reviewed here.

So what sticks out here in that regard? How about her rendition of Duke Ellington's "I Didn't Know About You". Or King Oliver's "'Taint What You Do". Or, for that matter, Crosby's " A Ghost Of A Chance". And, of course, "Gulf Coast Blues". Finally, though, let us see why she is a cut below Billie and Bessie- "St Louis Blues". That is the cut line. But she still is good. Listen up.

5.0 out of 5 stars Thanks for the memory: Mildred Bailey, October 19, 2002

By 

Graham G W Jones (Sheffield, South Yorkshire United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 1935-1944: Thanks for the Memory (Audio CD)

As a fairly new jazz explorer, I "discovered" Mildred Bailey after hearing one track on a compilation and decided I would like to hear more....I did and love this CD. Although the tracks were recorded 50-60 years ago, they are of high quality. Lovely (and extensive)choice of material.

I don't think you will be disappointed with this.