Customer Reviews

Nipper's Greatest Hits: The 50's, Vol. 1

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3 star:		(1)
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This Nipper's collection does a marvelous job of representing the bewildering hodge-podge of sounds that made up the popular music of the 1950s. There is mainstream pop like Perry Como's "Catch a Falling Star", mainstream country like Hank Locklin's beautiful "Send Me the Pillow You Dream On" and the early rock sounds of Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel" and Neil Sedaka's "Oh, Carol."

Mario Lanza's "Be My Love" is nearly operatic, Perez Prado's "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White" represents the big band sound, and Harry Belafonte's catchy "Banana Boat (Day-O)" has a strong calypso character.

The mastering of this disc is very good and the sound quality may surprise you. The Nipper's 1950s GH discs are an excellent way to jump start a '50s collection or to just take a quiet journey back to a simpler musical time. Either way, this disc and its companion will provide many hours of listening pleasure. Highly recommended.

This CD compilation contains the only ever BMG released real stereo version of Perry Como's 1958 classic "Catch a Falling Star". For many years, RCA Victor denied the existence of these tapes, now referred to as binaural, where Perry's voice is recorded solely on one side with everything else on the other. Listening to Perry's vocal harmony with the Ray Charles Singers within this simple arrangement is remarkable . . . considering that it was never supposed to exist! RCA's release of this song, and others, subjected to electronic reprocessing to simulate stereo seems all the more ridiculous when you hear the real thing! This stereo version was also released by Time-Life within their series "Your Hit Parade" for the year 1958. "Catch a Falling Star" was the very first record certified as "Gold" by the Record Industry Association of America" and Perry received a Grammy that same year for his performance.

When this series first hit the market back in 1988 from BMG/RCA it was greeted enthusiastically by all fans of 1950's music, not only for the generous 20 selections offered (at a time when most only offered 10 to 12), but also the digitally remastered sound that made these golden oldies come to life again, the voluminous 6-pages of track-by-track notations by Ron Furmanek, Steve Kolanjian, and Patrick Snyder, and the great cover art by Christoph Hitz.

Since then, of course, many of the selections offered have been included in numerous compilations, both for the individual artists covered here and in other multi-artist sets. And, in retrospect, if there was a fault it was in trying to cover a decade like the 1950s in just two volumes.

In that span RCA Victor [1,917] was second only to Columbia [2,220] in terms of total hit singles [Capitol with 1,739 was third and Decca with 1,178 fourth], so attempting to come up with a definitive 40 of Nipper's Greatest Hits was a fool's errand right from the get-go for producer John Snyder.

I could fill out ten pages of titles that would have been better suited to such a 2-volume set ... and sound arguments could then be made both for and against THEIR inclusion. So let's just consider the two volumes as a decent collection of "40 of Nipper's Greatest Hits" and leave it at that.

This one offers [in order] two from 1950, one from each of 1951 and 1953, three from 1955, two each from 1956 and 1957, four from 1958, and five from 1959 [Jim Reeves' He'll Have To Go hit its peak early in 1960]. With the exception of tracks 6, 13, and 15 to 17, all were Top 10 on the Billboard Pop Top/Hot 100, and seven were # 1 hits [tracks 2,3,5,8,9,12 and 18].

Eddy Arnold's 1955 version of Cattle Call [he had first recorded it back in the 1940s] only hit # 69 Top 100 but was a Country # 1, while Don Gibson's Oh Lonesome Me, also a Country # 1, made it to # 7 Top 100. Lou Monte's classic rendition of Lazy Mary (Luna Mezzo Mare) reached # 12 in 1958. In Hank Locklin's case, Send Me The Pillow You Dream On was a # 5 Country and a # 77 Top 100, Guess Who by Jesse Belvin topped out at # 31 Top 100 but was a solid # 7 on the R&B charts, and Floyd Robinson's Makin' Love [still not easy to find] settled at # 20 Hot 100 in 1959. Both The Three Bells and He'll Have To Go were huge hits on both the Country and pop charts.

It's nice to see that these are still available, and at a very reasonable price, but I would suggest you get a copy of each now before they are withdrawn from circulation because, at some point, they will become collector's items.

I wish I could figure out the rhyme and reason as to what songs Nipper has access to and what they do not because the Greatest Hits Collections for the 50's (and 40's) are not as great as the ones for the 60's (and 30's). Go figure. Yes, there is Elvis doing "Heartbreak Hotel" and Harry Belafonte singing "Banana Boat (Day-O)," but I have not heard of half of the artists on this CD left along half of the songs. If anything this particular album leans more towards country, with "Oh Lonesome Me" by Don Gibson and songs by Jim Reeves and Eddy Arnold, and easy listening with Perry Como and Dinah Shore. Of course, most of us would be hoping for a bit more early rock'n'roll than Neil Sedaka's "Oh! Carol" and "The Rock and Roll Waltz." Instead we get Mario Lanza, not that there is anything wrong with that. As always the rule of thumb is quite simple: If there are five songs that you would like to add to your music collection, then this album is worthy of your consideration. Of course, if you were old enough to have heard some of these songs in the first place, then the odds might be more in your favor.