Customer Reviews

Very Best of

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This Lady could sing! She brings life to these songs and sounds as if she was having a blast while singing them. House of Blue Lights is my favorite! It was a song that Little Richard mentioned in Good Golly Miss Molly even! Classic then and Classic now. She was so underrated and should be a house hold name but I digress. And I am not just saying that cause she was my Grandmother either....even though she was.

I Love and miss you Granny! You still ROCK!

I want to let all know this one thing: no one sang boogie woogie better than Ella Mae Morse. White nor black. Period. She was the swingingest singer around back in my schoolboy days, and if she were still alive today (she died in 1999) she would be declared a national treasure. It is a shame that someone so purely talented as this great woman was overlooked in her later years. I was thrilled to see that her grandson gave us a review on this website. If all you ever hear is Freddie Slack's fabulous "Cow Cow Boogie" you will be hooked. I place her in the same firmament with Anita O'Day.

By the way, to date myself, in 1952 I was in the 6th grade and one of the top hits in LA was "Blacksmith Blues" by Ella Mae Morse. This woman was also considered one of the first "rockabilly" stars. She could sing it all from country to rock to boogie and jazz. This is a definite buy.

Ella Mae Morse must indeed be the most black-sounding white woman ever to record. I've read her recollection before of the shock of Sammy Davis, Jr., to discover that she was white! No one else who has tried the "Cow Cow Boogie" or "House of Blue Lights" or "Forty Cups of Coffee" has ever come close to Morse's delivery. This is music with nothing to prove. It's just flat fun to listen to! It'll brighten up anyone's day. I've listened a lot while I clean house!

This is a boogie woogie at its best. The belt'em out swing-style blues are a must for collectors of this type of music. This was one of the lps in my mother's collection which I really loved. I have made tape after tape off that old lp, so I was delighted to see this CD of Ella Mae's greatest hits available for sale!

Just wait till you listen to "Get Off It and Go" or "Mr Five by Five." If you've never heard "The Blacksmith Blues" you are in for a treat.

Give her a listen and see if you'll agree, that this music is vintage cool.

A pure romp of fun and joy. So hip, so soulful, so much zest for living in this dear collection by this late big band and accomplished R&B singer Ella Mae Morse. No, you cannot go wrong, and you'll be glad you bought this one - you'll never trade it in. You'll be picking a good one here. Vintage high times. Bless my soul! And God bless you very much Ella Mae, long my you be loved in the forevermore, you dearest of ladies!

In some of my recent CD reviews I have been sort of hard on Collectables for putting out "best of" or "greatest hits of" for an artist which included far too many selections that were NOT hits by any stretch of the imagination. But here they are to be congratulated.

Ella Mae Morse had 10 hit singles on her own for Capitol from 1944 to 1953 and they are ALL here, including her first two in 1944 which were double-sided hits: Shoo Shoo Baby b/w No Love, No Nothin' [both # 4 and from, respectively, the films Three Cheers For The Boys and The Gang's All Here], and Tess' Torch Song (If I Had A Man) [# 11] b/w Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet [# 7 from, respectively, the films Up In Arms and Broadway Rhythm]. All four were backed by the Dick Walters orchestra.

Another 1944 hit was Patty Cake Man, a # 10 that September, and in 1945, with Billy May & His Orchestra backing, she has a # 17 with Captain Kidd and a # 15 with Buzz Me. Her best as a solo artist was, of course, 1952's The Blacksmith Blues [# 3] with Nelson Riddle & His Orchestra backing, something they did again with Oakie Boogie, a # 23 in 1952. Also give a listen to 40 Cups Of Coffee [# 26 in 1953] with the backing of Dave Cavanaugh's Music - later recorded by Bill Haley & His Comets.

Possessed of one of the most distinctive female voices of her era, Ella sang briefly with Jimmy Dorsey in 1939 before hooking up with Freddie Slack & His Orchestra for two of the biggest hits of 1942 - Cow-Cow Boogie [# 9 from the Abbott & Costello film Ride 'em Cowboy], and Mr. Five By Five [# 10 from the Ritz Brothers film Behind The Eight Ball]. She followed that up with Slack in 1943 with Get On Board, Little Chillun [# 19], the melody of which Trini Lopez would use 23 years later for his 1966 hit I'm Comin' Home, Cindy. In 1946 she had her last hit with Slack on The House Of Blue Lights [# 8] with jabbering by Don Raye, one of the classics of the era.

Her big, jazz-flavoured vocals were instantly recognizable on the radio back then and it's a shame she dropped out of the scene when she did because I think she could have carried on right through the start of the R&R era. Just like Peggy Lee, Dinah Shore, and Doris Day. Highly recommended.

This lady had a style all her own. Only recently discovered her, and I'm so glad I did. She's smooth and jazzy like Billie or Ella, but she's got a little bit of "shout" to her, like Dinah Washington. Her recordings were of excellent quality and the arrangements sophisticated and cool. She sounds like she could do anything with her voice she wanted to, completely without effort. An amazing artist.

Born in 1922, Ella Mae Morse was only fourteen when she scored a singing gig with the Jimmy Dorsey orchestra--and was fired when her actual age was discovered. It was hardly a bump in the road for the vocalist. Three years later she signed with Freddie Slack and jumped into the public arena with "The Cow-Cow Boogie."

Morse had a long and very successful career, recording until 1957 and still giving personal performances as late as 1987. Even so, she was never a household name in the same sense as such 1940s icons as The Andrews Sisters of Betty Hutton. This was partly due to controversy: with a rich, full voice that anticipates the likes of Patsy Cline and Pearl Bailey, many listeners assumed she was black--a factor hardly calculated to promote her fame in a racially segregated society. But it was more specifically due to her unexpected range and her penchant for fusing jazz, blues, swing, big-band, and all the rest. Then as now, music fans tend to lean toward very specific genres, and Morse couldn't be pigeon-holed. Even so, Morse emerged as a singer's singers, a musician's singer. At the time of her death in 1999, she was widely recognized as one of the finest singers to emerge from the 1940s and one of several vocalists who laid the foundations of what we now refer to rythmn and blues.

If you are already a major Morse fan, you'd do well to shell out the big bucks for the five disk BARRELHOUSE, BOOGIE AND BLUES--but if you're only testing the waters this twenty-one selection "Best Of" collection is a very nice way to begin. From the novelty-edged "Cow-Cow Boogie," that pre-figures Western swing, to "The Blacksmith Blues," which was probably her biggest hit, this is classic Ella Mae Morse all the way.

The vast majority of these selections seem to be drawn from Morse's boogie-woogie era of the 1940s; songs such as "Mr. Five By Five," "Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet," and "The House of Blue Lights" are so distinctly World War II that they are musical time machines, bouncing you back to the unique hipster slang and musical idiom. And sure, The Andrews Sisters and Betty Hutton were bigger stars, but after hearing Ella Mae, there's no doubt she equaled and often bested them at every turn.

If the collection has a flaw, it is that it doesn't really sample Morse's later work, which branched out into some unexpected directions: western swing, rockabilly, proto-rock and roll, and latin florishes--and she could do torch with the best, too. Still, after hearing just these songs, it's easy to believe that Morse could do whatever she wanted vocally--turban twirled, solid hooked, and jived out beyond description. Recommended.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

Here in Australia we certainly knew Ella Mae from her radio hit "Blacksmith Blues" but this CD is a lovely showcase of her wider talents.

Some very keen Aussie has also made an extended 5 minute version of he biggest hit which is on a local CD with an extended version of "My bay just cares for me"....and other longer dance versions of old classics

Tom Wynn

This singer is perhaps not too much familiar to the contempory people but here is real Swing and Jazz. That sound like the best black femelle singers and the song selection is as best as it could be, covering the complete career of Hella (1942-1954). Some of the last tracks are pure rock and boogie-woogie. I can highly recommand this exceptional record. The amateurs of Bing Band era cannot be disappointed. A real great Collector item!