Search - Johnny Desmond :: All Those Wonderful Years

Another of ASV's good anthology disks

Bruce R. Gilson | Wheaton, MD United States | 08/30/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"ASV-Living Era has produced a number of CDs that feature collections of songs by a single artist popular in the 1940s and 1950s, usually giving the anthology the title of one of the songs in the collection. I have already reviewed some of these anthologies, and this is yet another in that series.



Johnny Desmond is less well-known than many of the others in the series, and he was one of a large number of male performers (often Italian-American; Desmond's real name was DeSimone!) who broke out from the Big Band era to establish themselves as solo vocalists around the latter part of the 1940s. Unlike Vic Damone, Tony Bennett, and many others, however, Desmond never achieved as much popularity as a soloist as he had had as a Big Band vocalist, and this CD provides a lot of recordings that had been hard to find up until now. Many of the songs were bigger hits for other artists (although in quite a few cases they made the charts as well; this was an era when it was not unusual for multiple performances of the same song to chart simultaneously!) and only two of the songs, "The Picnic Song" and "Woman," were bigger hits for Desmond than for rival singers. In most cases the other artists were similar-sounding male singers, though in one case at least, "Mister and Mississippi," it was Patti Page who had the big hit version. But Desmond's versions, in my estimation, sound pretty good.



This is a good collection to have if you are into late-40's/early-50's popular music; most of the recordings in the collection are not otherwise available. (I'd been particularly eager to get the Desmond recording of "The Picnic Song," which seems not to have appeared on CD before this one.) And it's well produced, with informative liner notes, as is typical of ASV-Living Era. I recommend it.



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