Search - Burl Ives :: Little Bitty Tear

A pretty good disc, but there's only one!

John A. Kuczma | Marietta, GA USA | 05/13/2000

(4 out of 5 stars)

"The reviews posted for this album are a bit confusing, so I'll begin with this brief disclaimer: Little Bitty Tear is a single disc, with 10 tracks, on the MCA label. It is an AAD recording, totally dependent on original analog recordings as its source material. Perhaps some of the negative comments on sound quality are due to that.So far as the songs, Little Bitty Tear offers Burl Ives at his maudlin best. The top cuts are the title tune and Funny Way of Laughing, both soft country tear jerkers that stay oddly touching, despite their somewhat dated sound. The album also includes interesting renditions of Blue Tail Fly, Polly Wolly Doodle and Waltzing Matilda.Burl Ives' singular voice and peculiar delivery appeal to a very select group of fans. If you are one of those, you will find this album very satisfying. However, if you are only familiar with the featured hits, the rest of the album will likely not have much impact.Either way, this is a respectable little collection at a very good price. Well worth the investment."

Burl Ives, man with a legendary voice, great CD set

Stephen Lerch | Elkton, MD United States | 01/10/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"As has been noted in other reviews, this is actually a review of the 5 CD box set released by Bear Family in Germany, not the MCA Specials single disc. This is a review of Little Bitty Tear(if you think you're on the wrong page, search Amazon for B0000282UX as the item number) and NOT A Little Bitty Tear. I am not sure why Amazon cannot distinguish between the 2, but please make sure you are looking at the box set and not the single CD release when considering this review.



What Bear Family has done is a proper restoration and remastering job via licensing the audio from MCA whom owns the original Decca recordings. If you hear a bit of missing audio or other anomaly it is due to the condition of the source material and Bear Family being unable to do anything to repair this. It seems they've spared no expense on this set and it shows.



For those audiophiles who squirm when you read "remastered," fear not. Bear Family showed the proper respect and properly remastered this. There is no dynamic range compression; I would say these recordings are as close to the original analog recordings as can be possible for CD. It helps that Burl's music is mainly vocals based; who buys Burl Ives music for the guitar work?



There are a total of 144 tracks in this set. There is no Christmas music included (there are plenty of Christmas CDs available with Burl however).



There is an instance of a duplicate track, Gater Hollow, however it's not really a duplicate as there seems to have been 2 unique versions of the track recorded by Burl and both are included here for completeness' sake.



There is some of Burl's "gospel" music included, mainly on Disc 2.





The book that comes with this set is really well written and is Vinyl LP sized. You have a capsule history of Burl (I'm sure there is a lot more to tell but space is limited) and includes a complete listing of all the original recordings the tracks on these CDs originated from, including the recording date and the studio in which they were recorded.



The set may be relatively expensive (it is an Import), however you can't find a better collection of Burl Ives anywhere else. You have a 4 year collection here (Nashville Years 1961-1965) and it does an amazing job of capturing the essence of Burl. If you never buy anything else from Burl, you still have a large portion of every "style" he ever had if you decide to purchase this top quality set.





Burl Ives - R.I.P"