Customer Reviews

Golden Years of Dick Haymes [ORIGINAL RECORDINGS REMASTERED] 4CD SET

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This Jasmine Music collection of Dick Haymes on 4 cds with over 100 tracks is a great price!

For collectors of Haymes some of the tracks are duplicated on other recordings but this is definitely worth the price.
Duets with Helen Forrest, Bing Crosby, the Andrew Sisters (I guess that counts as a quartet !) are all represented.
The pressings are clean and the sound is wonderful.

Highly recommended.

Dick Haymes had one of the most mellow voices of the early bona fide crooners, and this collection is "golden" indeed! It is virtually a "complete" collection of his very best work. He was among the best crooners of an era that brought forth many, such as the early Sinatra and the great Buddy Clark. If you enjoy great baritones, rank Dick with the two named above, and such true crooners as Jack Jones, Matt Monro, Steve Lawrence, Perry Como, Don Cherry, and John Gary. For those of you who are too young to recall these super male singers, you have no idea what you are missing - like, real music.

Dick Haymes really wanted to be a songwriter, but nobody was interested in his writing - however, they liked his voice and he ended up having a very successful career as a singer. I notice that none of the songs here credit Dick as a songwriter, so I assume that he gave up his ambitions in that direction. As a singer, Dick started his career as a singer with Harry James and had a couple of top ten hits during that time. However, one record that didn't chart upon initial release in 1941, I'll get by, made number one when re-issued in 1944. By that time, Dick had firmly established his solo career, but the bonus hit would presumably have come as a welcome bonus.

Dick's solo career started with a flourish in 1943, his first two A-sides (You'll never know, It can't be wrong) both making number one, while their B-sides charted in their own right, both easily making the top ten. Dick never made number one again except for the already-mentioned re-release of I'll get by, but he had plenty of other top ten hits, including several excellent duets with Helen Forrest. All their seven top ten hits together are featured here, but the equivalent Helen Forrest compilation contains all 18 of their duets. Wisely, the compilers of this set didn't duplicate all 18 duets here.

Of the solo tracks here, perhaps the most famous song is Love letters, which didn't make the top ten for Dick, though it came close despite being the B-side of Till the end of time (a top three hit for Dick, but a number one hit for Perry Como). Love letters appears to have gone almost un-noticed until Ketty Lester covered it and had a huge international hit with it in the sixties. Elvis Presley followed suit a couple of years later. Alison Moyet had a huge UK hit with the song in the eighties. All of which shows that you can't hide a good song. Another song here, The more I see you, also inspired a sixties cover that became an international hit, this time by Chris Montez. At least the potential of the song was recognized first time around, Dick's version having been released as an A-side and becoming a top ten hit.

Helen Forrest is not the only female singer guest in this compilation, as there are also eight duets with the Andrews sisters (three of which also feature Bing Crosby), three duets with the Patty Andrews, two duets with Judy Garland and one duet each with Evelyn Knight, Ethel Merman and Eileen Wilson. Between them, these duets produced four minor hits, so the public definitely preferred Helen Forrest as Dick's duet partner, However, these duets are interesting in their own way. Fans of the Andrews sisters in particular have plenty of reason to invest in this set. I have a lot of Andrews sisters compilations and some of the duets featured here are new to me.

There is plenty of great music here by a balladeer who was a major star in his time. If you enjoy those other great male balladeers of the forties, Bing Crosby and Perry Como, you'll love Dick's music - and it's unlikely that there will ever be a better collection of it than this one.

This is an excellent four CD set of nothing but the best from Dick Haymes. He could sing better than most of them during his time, although oddly enough he is not remembered the way he really should be. This CD set boasts extensive liner notes by Geoff Milne along with recording dates, notations about the people who sang duets with Haymes and the writers of each song. In addition, the sound quality overall is quite good.

While there's very little about Haymes' early wishes to be a songwriter and how his hits charted that I can tell you because of an excellent review already posted here, I can reinforce the fact that when Dick Haymes sang, people listened. He could make millions of fans happy with his full baritone voice and there was true sincerity, honesty and passion in his voice when he sang. His songs could make the airwaves sizzle, too! This is obvious when you listen to the many tracks here that have him singing solo; and his duets with the likes of Judy Garland, Helen Forrest, Ethel Merman, The Andrews Sisters and Bing Crosby (among others) are all beautiful to listen to over and over again.

In fact, the four CDs total five hours of playing time--I love it! This is fine music by a true artist.

While the musical accompaniments always fit in well with Dick's vocals, he remains squarely front and center, only sharing the spotlight when he performed with other artists. And when he did perform with others, wow how good they sounded!

I highly recommend this CD set for any fan of Dick Haymes. It remains a fine addition and even essential to any collection someone would want of Dick's genius. The more casual fan may want to start with a single CD although his singing is so special that this makes a fine place to start--and it won't be the last music by Dick Haymes you get for your music library!

What a wonderful voice Richard Haymes had. It's a shame so few of the arrangements here do that voice justice. Nothing swings, heck they barely creep forward. No jazz, just endless arrays of violins, harps, pianos and I thought I heard an accordion on one track. It's like expecting Sinatra and Riddle and getting Lawrence Welk. Great voice though, and some of the numbers with the Andrew Sisters are swell, but that's about it.

This guy was far FAR better than Sinatra!! What an incredibly intimate voice when necessary that, on the next note, could just soar to full voice with no problem. Wonderful musician. Of all the uncertainties of his life, the one true thing was his ability to sing and sing like no other man in his field. A true original.

This is a wonderful collection of Dick Haymes of the 40's. I love, love, love it! Thanks! If you're a fan, you will love it also. He is the star of the old Musical "State Fair".