Search - Gordon Macrae :: Broadway Album

Low Budget Album, Some Clunkers Thrown In To Fill Space

Dos Ojos | 12/12/2005

(2 out of 5 stars)

"This album has collected songs from various periods in Gordon Macrae's career. Unfortunately, some of these songs suffer from his deteriorating voice in the 1960s and 70s. The recording quality varies from song to song, which tells you that the record label 'Pair' is a low budget operation.



The best songs are "If I Loved You", from "Carousel" and "Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin", from "Oklahoma". Inexplicably, the song "People Will Say We're In Love" is not taken from the "Oklahoma" soundtrack, since this duet is done with an uncredited female who is not Shirley Jones. You're better off buying the soundtrack albums for "Oklahoma" and "Carousel".



"The Impossible Dream" and "Somewhere A Place For Us" are just awful. There's a hoarseness in his voice which is sad to hear. They should never have included these songs. They probably threw these in because they're more contemporary.



"Some Enchanted Evening" and "Younger Than Springtime" seem to be from MacRae's younger period; he's singing them in a deep voice and languid style, when he was still a big band singer and was copying Bing Crosby. They're not bad, but not the best versions of either song. It doesn't even sound like MacRae. It's too bad, since MacRae had the voice to really nail these songs and he doesn't even try.



Another big mistake is "Deep In My Heart Dear". It's a duet with an opera soprano, perhaps Dorothy Kirsten. The soprano outsings MacRae in both volume and style. Maybe his microphone wasn't working when it was recorded; when they sing together, you can barely hear him. This album is supposed to be about MacRae, right?



The funniest cut is "Old Man River". MacRae hits all the notes from deep to high, but he does it in a fake sounding 'black' accent. Tote dat barge, lif dat bale! Ruined the song for me. Paul Robeson (black singer who made "Old Man River" famous) did a version of "Danny Boy", without a fake Irish accent.



I have never heard of the record label 'Pair'. Probably a low budget repackager of previously recorded songs. They just copied various MacRae songs from other albums without trying to match the recording quality, so the voice sounds very different from song to song.







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