The Legacy Vault Opens For Christmas With Ray Price, Jerry Vale, John Davidson, More

Without a doubt, 2014 has shaped up to be another joyous year for fans of Christmas music. Sony Music’s Legacy Recordings has been at the vanguard of delivering holiday music with a recent batch of titles from Johnny Mathis, Perry Como, Frank Sinatra and others as part of its Classic Christmas Album Series. Sony has also licensed festive titles from Robert Goulet, Rosemary Clooney, The Brothers Four and Frank DeVol and the Rainbow Strings to Real Gone Music. Those titles have recently been joined by 20 digital-only releases from the Columbia and RCA libraries which can be found in The Legacy Vault, all of which are new to the digital format.

Since its inception in 2013, The Legacy Vault has allowed fans to suggest undigitized titles from the vast Sony Music Library for digital release. The Legacy Vault Christmas Series is open for business now, and has something for everyone to place under the digital Christmas tree.  Four titles were added to the Christmas series last year, with another 16 having recently arrived in time for this year’s merriment.

Fans of classic vocalists will appreciate the holiday titles from musical theatre star, actor and television personality John Davidson, talk show host Mike Douglas and the late, great Italian-American singer Jerry Vale. Also on the television front, the Vault has trips down Memory Lane via The Waltons Christmas Album and Bonanza star Lorne Greene’s Have a Happy Holiday. Other warmly nostalgic albums being issued digitally for the first time include easy listening favorites John Gary’s Christmas Album and The Melachrino Strings’ Christmas Joy, and one for fans of the Bronx Bombers: Yankee Stadium organist Eddie Layton’s 1964 The Organ at Christmas! NFL fans aren’t left out, either, thanks to the reissue of John Facenda’s The Nativity. Many football fans knew the broadcaster and NFL Films narrator, simply, as “The Voice of God,” but on this 1964 release, he celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ.

A number of vintage country-and-western titles are also part of this release slate, from legends like Ray Price, Boots Randolph, Hank Snow, Jimmy Dean and even the satirically-minded Homer and Jethro, known as the “Thinking Man’s Hillbillies.” The Beers Family’s 1967 Appalachian folk-flavored Christmas album for a Columbia is a rare slice of Americana. Other releases available now include RCA’s 1972 A Golden Age Christmas with songs from the earliest part of the twentieth century (from artists like Enrico Caruso, John McCormack, and Richard Crooks), a treat from Polka King Frankie Yankovic, a holiday set from instrumental group The Three Suns (reportedly Mamie Eisenhower’s favorite group!) and a groovy winter wonderland courtesy of The Moog Machine’s Christmas Becomes Electric. More reverent is The Edwin Hawkins Singers’ gospel-R&B holiday fusion, Peace is Blowin’ in the Wind, from 1969.

Hit the jump for more information on these titles including a complete list!

The Beach Boys’ New Digital “Copyright Collections” Offer 1964 Rarities, Two Complete Concerts

 

With another year rapidly drawing to a close, many fans were wondering if 2014 would bring another round of “copyright extension collections,” i.e. releases designed to circumvent recent European Union copyright law.  The answer, of course, is “yes.”  To greatly simplify, E.U. law now holds that a recording is protected for 75 years under copyright in the E.U. (the period previously was 50 years) but only if that recording has been released.  As a result of this change in law, the past couple of years have seen collections issuing rarities from Bob Dylan, The Beatles, the Motown family of artists and The Beach Boys, simply to keep these recordings in copyright.  Last year, Capitol issued The Big Beat 1963 with a number of Brian Wilson/Beach Boys titles.  Following suit, the label has today released two more Beach Boys titles.  1964: Keep an Eye on Summer has 46 session highlight and rarities – many of which have never even been bootlegged – while Live in Sacramento 1964 has the two full shows from which the original Beach Boys Concert LP was culled.

Mark Linett and Alan Boyd have produced these two new (and alas, digital-only) releases, and Linett has remastered all tracks.  Capitol/Brother Records has happily provided detailed liner notes, including comprehensive track-by-track annotations, at The Beach Boys’ official website.  Boyd writes, in part, that “This new collection, made possible by the fact that the Beach Boys, starting in 1964, made a point of holding onto their work reels (and greatly enhanced by the recent recovery of some long lost tapes from the Shut Down Vol. 2 album sessions) shows the Beach Boys at their zenith, offering glimpses of the camaraderie, optimism and high spirits behind the creation of these timeless records, and highlighting the incredible vocal arrangements, compositional skills, and rapidly evolving production techniques that placed the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson at the forefront of pop music in 1964 and for all time.”

Linett adds, “On this set we’ve presented highlights from many of the group’s sessions during 1964, mostly previously unreleased (even on those ‘unofficial’ discs often found at record shows). As someone who has been listening to, archiving and mixing the group’s recordings for nearly thirty years, it was exciting for me to hear these newly discovered sessions for the first time. They fully demonstrate that the Beach Boys were great musicians as well as singers and that, contrary to popular opinion, they played on most of their records, with the occasional addition of members of the ‘wrecking crew.’”

After the jump, we have more details and the complete track listings for both titles!

An Outlaw Looks At 75: Legacy Goes Digital With David Allan Coe’s Columbia Collection

This week, David Allan Coe turns 75.  Over those three-quarters of a century, Coe has given a face to outlaw country, raising rabble and raising hell even as he recorded some of the most enduring albums of the genre.  In celebration of the perennial rebel’s landmark birthday, Legacy Recordings is making 20 of his classic albums (and over 200 songs), originally released between 1974 and 1989, to digital service providers including Amazon MP3, iTunes and Spotify.  The digital initiative launches today with five titles released between 1974 and 1977 (The Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy, Once Upon a Rhyme, Longhaired Redneck, Rides Again and Tattoo) and continues weekly through September 23, totaling four batches of five albums.

Legacy’s online collection from the vaults of Columbia Records spans the period between 1974’s major label debut The Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy (so named for Coe’s outrageous onstage get-up) and 1989’s Crazy Daddy and includes such signature songs as “Would You Lay with Me (In a Field of Stone),” “Take This Job and Shove It,” “Mona Lisa Lost Her Smile” and “She Used to Love Me a Lot.”

The controversial, anti-establishment country hero’s body of work remains one of the most exciting and most daring in the country oeuvre, and this one-stop (digital) shopping just might provide a welcome entrée to a daunting, large discography.

After the jump, you can raise a little hell by perusing the complete release schedule to mark David Allan Coe’s 75th!

Masterworks Goes “On the Town” With Roslyn Kind’s RCA Albums, Bernstein Musical’s London Cast

Masterworks Broadway has announced the balance of its summer slate of CD-Rs/DD reissues from the Sony Music archives with both releases making their debut in the digital domain.  Next week, the label will reissue for the very first time both RCA albums by vocalist and cabaret star Roslyn Kind – not only a talented artist in her own right but also the half-sister of one Barbra Streisand.  Then, on August 19, Masterworks will bring to CD-R and DD the original 1963 London Cast Recording of Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s On the Town, just in time for its Broadway revival this fall.

Masterworks describes the unusual circumstances behind Roslyn Kind’s 1968 debut album Give Me You: “On a late spring morning in 1968, seventeen-year-old Roslyn Kind graduated from high school in Brooklyn and immediately began a new job later the same day.  ‘I graduated to ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ in the morning,’ she recalls, ‘and that evening I was in RCA Studio B, down around 23rd Street in Manhattan, making my first recording.’  The young singer remained at RCA for two albums and a handful of singles, and now both of those albums will be available once more.

Give Me You, primarily helmed by composer and arranger Lee Holdridge, featured Kind wrapping her expressive, big pipes around an array of contemporary songs beginning with the title track by the Broadway team of Larry Grossman and Hal Hackady (Play It Again, Sam, Minnie’s Boys, Goodtime Charley) and continuing with material from Jimmy Webb (the Bacharach-esque “If You Must Leave My Life”), John Lennon and Paul McCartney (“The Fool on the Hill”), future Holdridge collaborator Neil Diamond (“A Modern-Day Version of Love”), Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil (“The Shape of Things to Come”) and Holdridge himself (“Who Am I?”).

Following this auspicious debut, Kind returned to RCA’s studios for 1969’s This is Roslyn Kind.  She returned to the Mann and Weil songbook with “Make Your Own Kind of Music” (which Barbra Streisand would later perform) and also surveyed tunes by the likes of The Association’s Larry Ramos (“It’s Gotta Be Real”) and Harry Nilsson (“I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City”).  Roslyn remained on RCA for a 1970 single with “Foresight” from the musical Gantry backed with Grossman and Hackady’s “Rich Is” from Minnie’s Boys, and eventually moved on to Streisand’s label, Columbia, where she recorded songs by Paul Williams and Peter Allen, among others.  She’s appeared on Saturday Night Live and The Nanny, headlined at The Plaza’s Persian Room, and returned in 1994 with another full-length LP.  Today, Kind is a draw in concert, most recently performing a hot-ticket engagement at New York’s 54 Below nightspot.

Give Me You/This is Roslyn Kind will be released exclusively for purchase via MasterworksBroadway.com on July 22 as MOD CD-Rs, as well as for digital download.  The CD-Rs will be available through Arkiv Music on August 19, plus streaming and downloads via digital service providers the same day. After the jump: details on On the Town, plus full track listings for both titles and more!

Give It to Us, Baby: Rick James’ Motown Masters (and More) Are Digitally Reissued

Singer, songwriter, bassist, producer, partier, punk-funk pioneer – however you know him, one thing’s clear: he’s Rick James. (You’ll have to imagine the word that usually follows.)

Though the world lost the “Super Freak” hitmaker 10 years ago this summer, his legend continues: this week sees the release of his authorized biography Glow, written with David Ritz, and to celebrate, two labels are joining forces to update his killer catalogue in the digital domain.

From the earliest moments of his musical career, Rick James (born James Ambrose Johnson, Jr.) was a bad boy. That career actually started with a violation of the law: Rick failed to report for active naval duty and fled to Canada, forming a band called The Mynah Birds (whose lineup would include some amazing heavy hitters of rock and roll, including Nick St. Nicholas of Steppenwolf and Neil Young on guitar!). The Mynah Birds were signed to Motown, but Rick’s past caught up to him, resulting in a yearlong jail sentence and an album that remains unreleased. As Rickie Matthews, the artist began writing and producing for Motown in the late ’60s, then hopscotched around several West Coast bands before returning to the Detroit-bred label in 1977.

Even before Prince laced up his highest heels, Rick James – whether it was solo, with his Stone City Band or protegees like the late, great Teena Marie – was one of the first major artists to meld traditional black soul and pop stylings with traditional rock and roll, a style he’d come to call “punk funk.” Tracks like “You and I,” “Mary Jane” and “Love Gun” were sensations in dance clubs and among rock critics. It was his fifth album, 1981’s Street Songs, that made him a crossover star, thanks to the Top 40 hits “Give It to Me Baby” and “Super Freak (Part 1).” (The latter, of course, will never die thanks to MC Hammer’s rap smash “U Can’t Touch This,” released in 1990.) Rick partied hard and played hard, releasing 11 Top 10 R&B singles over eight years with Motown’s Gordy label.

Eventually, though, he’d fly the coop for Reprise, earning an R&B chart-topper in “Loosey’s Rap” with Roxanne Shanté. But his second album for the label, 1989’s Kickin’, was shelved, and the 1990s were a blur of cocaine addiction and legal charges. James returned to music making in the late ’90s, and got one last major exposure shortly before his death: a loving comedic tribute from Dave Chappelle, whose Chapelle’s Show featured an extended sketch about James (featuring Chappelle as the young musician and James himself recounting his abusive friendship with Charlie Murphy, brother of comedian Eddie, whose debut R&B album was produced by James) that made them both stars.

The celebration of James’ life leads us to two conjoined catalogue initiatives from both Motown/UMe and Reprise/Rhino – and the full specs are after the jump!

Near Wild Heaven: R.E.M. Bundle Warner-Era B-Sides for Digital Box

No sooner did R.E.M. plan a generous digital equivalent of a two-disc set collating nearly all of their B-sides and rarities for I.R.S. Records have the departed Athens quartet – or label Warner Bros., anyway – planned a massive digital bundle of their B-sides for their major label era.

Complete Warner Bros. Rarities 1988-2011 features a similar packaging scheme as its I.R.S. comparison, but the scope of time certainly allows for more material – 131 tracks, in fact. The complete claim is not entirely true – several obscure instrumental versions only available on vinyl singles are no shows, and some EPs as well (2001’s Not Bad for No Tour, last year’s Record Store Day exclusive of live cuts from the concert on the bonus disc of Warner Bros. debut Green). But there’s far more to parse here than any other Warner-era rarities set (the only one being the bonus disco to In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003). Soundtrack songs, live cuts, the odd single versions and even the 12″ promotional single of “Shiny Happy People” are replicated herein. It’s certainly an investment at $79.99, but for the true fan who’s missed a lot of these tracks along the way, probably worth it.

If only this had a physical release; it’d likely rival the likes of other Rhino-era B-side boxes like The Cure’s Join the Dots and The Jesus and Mary Chain’s The Power of Negative Thinking. In any case, Complete Warner Bros. Rarities 1988-2011 is available now, and yours to enjoy after the jump (along with an intensely thorough discographical breakdown!).

This One Goes Out: R.E.M.’s Early B-Sides Collected on Digital Set

On Tuesday, May 19, the same day that Warner Bros. Records issues R.E.M.’s 2-CD Unplugged 1991/2001: The Complete Sessions, UMe will offer a digital-only package for fans of the Athens, Georgia band’s earliest days.

Complete Rarities: I.R.S. 1982-1987 collects 50 previously released odds and ends from Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry.  These rarities have been culled from such releases as the 1987 Dead Letter Office (originally released in the wake of the success of Lifes Rich Pageant, prior CD reissues of the band’s I.R.S. albums, compilations, and non-LP singles and B-sides.  Though the track listing for the release is broken up as Disc One and Disc Two, no current plans for a physical release have been revealed.

The one-stop-shopping set includes all 15 tracks from Dead Letter Office, plus a selection of diverse covers (Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer’s “Moon River,” Roger Miller’s “King of the Road,” Archie Bell and the Drells’ “Tighten Up,” The Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do is Dream”), non-LP singles and B-sides, variant mixes, alternate takes and live performances from Boston, Seattle, Santa Monica and The Netherlands.  The rare material from 2006’s compilation And I Feel Fine… The Best of the I.R.S. Years 1982–1987 is collected here, as are the band’s two contributions to the soundtrack of the film Athens, GA: Inside/Out, recently reissued on CD by Omnivore Recordings.

There’s nothing new here for longtime collectors, of course, but a physical CD release would make a fine companion to the deluxe reissues of R.E.M.’s I.R.S. catalogue (Murmur, Reckoning, Fables of the Reconstruction, Lifes Rich Pageant, Document) that have arrived in recent years.  In the meantime, just click on the jump to check out the complete track listing with discographical annotation for Complete Rarities.  The collection will be available from the typical digital service providers tomorrow, May 19, from Universal Music Enterprises.  No pre-order links are active yet, but we will update as soon as they are working!

The (Motown) Music That Makes Me Dance: The Supremes’ “Funny Girl” Gets Expansion

I’m the greatest star/I am by far! But no one knows it…

– Fanny Brice, Funny Girl

Back in 2012, while reviewing Hip-o Select’s splendidly expanded edition of The Supremes at the Copa, I wrote of the “altogether enjoyable [and] still inexplicably not on CD” album The Supremes Sing and Perform Funny Girl. Indeed, that 1968 LP, featuring Motown’s greatest stars tackling the showstoppers from Jule Styne and Bob Merrill’s score, has long been one of the rarest and most-requested titles in the Supremes discography. Yet Funny Girl has remained unavailable throughout the entirety of the compact disc era…until now. The good news is that the long-awaited reissue will arrive in lavishly expanded form, with twelve bonus tracks, on April 29. But with every parade must come some rain: this deluxe edition of Diana Ross and the Supremes Sing and Perform Funny Girl is currently only scheduled for release as a digital download. It will appear the same day that the 50th anniversary of the Broadway production of the musical is celebrated with a new CD/LP box set of its original cast recording from Capitol Records, sister imprint of Motown Select within Universal Music Enterprises (UMe).

The eight-time Tony-nominated musical by librettist Isobel Lennart, composer Styne and lyricist Merrill opened in March 1964 at New York’s Winter Garden Theatre, sealing the deal on superstardom for its leading lady, Barbra Streisand. Streisand’s tour de force as Ziegfeld Follies comedienne Fanny Brice became the stuff of legend, and Styne and Merrill’s score yielded the near-instant standards “Don’t Rain on My Parade” and, of course, “People.” Funny Girl didn’t go unnoticed by Motown chief Berry Gordy. In concert, Diana Ross rendered the sweetly upbeat “I Am Woman (You Are Man)” to coquettish perfection while Florence Ballard belted the dramatic “People” from the heart.

It wasn’t unusual for The Supremes to switch gears back and forth between Holland-Dozier-Holland’s explosive Top 40 R&B and classic Broadway and standard repertoire. It was all part of Berry Gordy’s plan to make his artists true stars, appealing to the affluent supper club set as well as the teenagers buying the latest 45s. In early 1965, The Supremes began work on There’s a Place for Us, so named for Stephen Sondheim’s West Side Story lyric to “Somewhere,” for which they recorded both “People” and “I Am Woman.” That summer, Diana Ross, Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard made their debut at the Copacabana, singing live many of the songs they had recorded for There’s a Place for Us. With the release of The Supremes at the Copa, the studio album was shelved, eventually arriving on CD in 2004. Other Broadway-themed Supremes recordings were made, however, some even with Holland-Dozier-Holland at the helm. 1967’s The Supremes Sing Rodgers and Hart, produced by Berry Gordy and arranger Gil Askey, reached back to the Broadway of decades before Funny Girl.

In 1968, however, Gordy and Askey had good reason to turn their attention back to the Styne and Merrill musical. Its big-screen adaptation was arriving from Columbia Pictures; Streisand would win an Oscar for reprising her role as Fanny. Hitting record stores on August 26, 1968 (other sources say May) in advance of the movie’s September 19 release, Diana Ross and the Supremes Sing and Perform Funny Girl – performed by the new line-up of Diana, Mary and Cindy Birdsong – included nine Styne and Merrill songs (eight from the stage score and the movie’s title song) plus “My Man,” a signature song of Brice’s that was replaced in the stage score by the ravishing “The Music That Makes Me Dance.” (The movie featured “My Man” instead of “Music,” but Diana and the girls did both!) The Supremes promoted the album with a medley on The Ed Sullivan Show, and even Jule Styne gave his stamp of approval to the project by writing an adoring, appreciative note for the sleeve. The great composer (Gypsy, Bells Are Ringing) observed, “Although the girls are young and new and part of the now world, they have always showed great respect towards composers Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin (and now Jule Styne). Thank God. They are always aware of what’s new by their appreciation of the sounds of Burt Bacharach and Jimmy Webb, etc. What Diana Ross does…is something else again. If I sound excited, I am…My life is now complete. From Frank Sinatra, to Barbra Streisand, to Diana Ross and the Supremes. What a parlay!”

Despite the enormous success of the motion picture, the Supremes’ Funny Girl album only reached No. 150 on the Billboard 200 and No. 45 on the R&B chart. The motion picture soundtrack featuring Streisand fared rather better with a No. 12 peak, but Diana, Mary and Cindy didn’t have to wait long to return to chart supremacy. The very next month after the Funny Girl LP’s arrival, the group released the single “Love Child.” By November, it had reached No. 1. And that wasn’t all. Their collaborative album Diana Ross and the Supremes Join the Temptations, released the same month of November, reached No. 2 and its single “I’m Gonna Make You Loved Me” became a Billboard No. 2 Pop smash on 45. Miss Ross kept some of the Funny Girl music in her live repertoire well into her post-Supremes solo years.

What will you find on this new Funny Girl?  Hit the jump for that and more!

It’s 5:15 Again: The Who Revisit “Quadrophenia” In New Live Box, Release 5.1 Surround of Original Album

For fans of The Who, Christmas is coming early this year. The band has taken, in recent years, to marking the holidays with super-sized box sets dedicated to such classic albums as Live at Leeds, Tommy and Quadrophenia. The latter, Pete Townshend’s 1973 mod rock opera, was celebrated in 2011 via a multitude of releases including a 4-CD/1-DVD box set with the original album, two discs of demos, and a DVD of selected songs in surround sound. This June, Townshend and Roger Daltrey will follow up that box with the multi-format (that’s seven different formats, for those keeping count!) release of Quadrophenia: Live in London. And what’s most exciting is that this campaign, centered on The Who’s Quadrophenia 40th Anniversary tour, will premiere the full, original 1973 album in 5.1 on Blu-ray.  In the past, only selections from the album have been made available in surround.

After Tommy, there was Jimmy. He’s the protagonist of Quadrophenia, first a 2-LP studio album by The Who, then a 1979 film and most recently a 2009 musical. Never one for small ideas, Townshend intended Quadrophenia as his way to explore the relationship between the band and its fans by telling the story of a prototypical Mod Who fan. The album yielded some of the most beloved songs ever recorded by Townshend, Daltrey, John Entwistle and Keith Moon: “The Real Me,” “Love Reign O’er Me,” “5:15.”

In 2012 and 2013, Townshend and Daltrey revisited the material in an acclaimed international series of concerts featuring the original Quadrophenia album sequence and a tight encore set of six Who favorites. That tour wrapped up at London’s Wembley Arena on July 8, 2013, where it was preserved for this audiovisual presentation. Following in the footsteps of other artists including The Beach Boys, The Who used the concerts as an opportunity to reunite with their late bandmates, too. Keith Moon was heard on “Bell Boy” and John Entwistle on “5:15.” Conceived in large part by Daltrey, the concerts (and the film) featured archival footage of The Who as well as images of the historical events that informed the original album and beyond. Appropriately enough for Quadrophenia, the concerts merged rock and theatre into a singular experience.

After the jump, we’ll explore all of the various Live in London releases! Plus: full track listings and pre-order links!

Everybody Loves Somebody: Legacy Acquires Dean Martin’s Reprise Catalogue, Launches Reissue Campaign

How lucky can one guy be…

Dean Martin is said to have once observed that the two smartest decisions he ever made were partnering with Jerry Lewis…and breaking up with Jerry Lewis.  When the split occurred, Martin was 39 years old, but convinced that a successful solo career was still ahead of him.  Was he ever right!  The former Dino Paul Crocetti was among the lucky few to have a successful second act in showbiz, and his career as just Dean Martin even eclipsed the first act as one-half of the beloved Martin and Lewis team.  Martin first took flight as a singer at Capitol Records beginning in 1948, eight years before dissolving his partnership with Lewis.  He remained at the Tower through 1961, making his final recordings there in December of that year.  On February 13, 1962, he entered United Western Recorders on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard to begin his tenure alongside pal Frank Sinatra as one of the flagship artists for the Chairman’s Reprise Records label.  Over the years, Martin’s Reprise catalogue has changed hands numerous times, and last week, it was officially announced that its new home will be Sony’s Legacy Recordings.

In partnership with The Dean Martin Family Trust, Legacy has begun remastering titles from Martin’s Reprise (1962-1974) and Warner Bros. (1983) periods for an ongoing reissue campaign.  The first title to emerge under the Legacy deal was the recent Playlist: The Very Best of Dean Martin, which was newly remastered by Vic Anesini.  The Reprise period, of course, includes many of Martin’s most enduring hits.  He famously took on The Beatles – and triumphed! – in 1964 when Ernie Freeman’s contemporary arrangement of “Everybody Loves Somebody,” a 1947 song by Sam Coslow, Irving Taylor and Martin’s frequent collaborator Ken Lane, knocked the Fabs’ “A Hard Day’s Night” right off the No. 1 spot on the Billboard 200 at the height of Beatlemania!  Despite Dino’s protestation that “I do not like rock singers, rock is out with me, I can’t stand rock,” Freeman’s heavy rock-influenced backbeat gave Martin the edge to introduce his laid-back croon to a new generation.

More major hits followed including “I Will,” “The Door is Still Open to My Heart” and Lee Hazlewood’s “Houston,” and by the beginning of 1966, Martin had notched seven Top 40 pop hits and six Top 40 albums – in addition to juggling the demands of his popular variety show!  Dino remained with Reprise for most of the rest of his recording career.  Even considering the seismic shifts in musical styles as the sixties continued, Martin’s hits hardly waned, with “In the Chapel in the Moonlight” and “Little Ole Wine Drinker Me” both going Top 40 in 1967.  When Reprise issued two greatest-hits collections in 1968, both achieved gold status.  In 1971, he re-signed with the label for another three-year contract, and in 1974, he would record his final music for the House That Frank Built although legal wrangling would prevent the songs’ release until 1978.  Martin gracefully bowed out of the recording business, smartly refusing to subject himself to disco and other styles that affected the music of so many of his contemporaries.  Not that Martin completely avoided pop and rock in his years at Reprise; quite to the contrary.  He recorded songs by Jimmy Webb, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, The Bee Gees, Kris Kristofferson, John Hartford, Tony Hatch and Jackie Trent, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, and even Smokey Robinson.  Martin also built up a considerable catalogue of country music at Reprise.

Dino continued to appear on television and onstage during his retirement from the recording studio, and in 1980 purchased back his Reprise recordings from the label (which had itself purchased fourteen albums from Dean in 1971).  Yet most of these albums remained incredibly difficult to find in the CD era until the release of Bear Family’s definitive complete Dean Martin series of box sets (four, in total, with two each dedicated to Capitol and Reprise) and Collectors’ Choice’s series of Reprise two-fers.

In 1983, Martin was coaxed by his longtime producer Jimmy Bowen, head of Reprise parent Warner Bros.’ Nashville division, to record one more album.  My First Country Song became a respectable No. 49 entry on the Country Albums chart, and its title track – a duet with Conway Twitty – also became a Top 40 country hit.  Though the album would turn out to be Martin’s last, he did record one last song, “L.A. is My Home,” which was released in 1985 on the MCA label.  (It was also the closing theme song to the television show Half Nelson on which Dean appeared.)  There’s no mention of whether “L.A.” is included in the current Legacy deal.

What can you expect from Legacy’s Dean Martin series?  Hit the jump!