Two of the great Broadway stars got together to celebrate Ford's 50th Anniversary one day in June 1953, and Decca was there to record the occasion and later issue it on this 10-inch LP.
Ethel Merman and Mary Martin were both in excellent voice and barely pause to take a breath as they rush through what seems like half the tunes in their extensive repertoire. This kind of applause-inducing medley-mongering was very common in the television variety programs of the day, and they do it well - although maybe not quite so well as the plastered-on applause might have you think.
The television recording takes up one side of the LP, with the reverse being devoted to familiar items, including Merman's amusing set piece, Eadie Was a Lady.
NEW LINK (remastered)
7 comments:
And if listening to this fires one up to see the performance, it's now available on dvd.
My thanks.
C
Nifty. But you leave out the best trivia: that the LP has two "identical" covers, front and back--except that on one side, Merman's on the left and thus gets "top" billing. On the other, the picture's flipped and so is the billing. Smart move by someone at Decca to keep the ladies happy. Must have been important, given the added printing costs.
I've got this on a 12" Deccalite 78--only the medley, covering both sides, in a cheap paper sleeve (same "identical" covers, though.)
Thanks Jeff - both covers are in the download, and I meant to post them both as well. Interesting about the 78 version. Thanks for writing!
Great blog. Thanks for sharing these treasures.
Just one problem. I tried to download the Merman & Martin file and it showed up with a weird ".7z" suffix. Is that an error of some kind? It won't work on my computer, while a couple of your other files, with a ".zip" suffix worked perfectly. Thanks again and best wishes! Joe
Joe,
7z is freeware - www.7-zip.org. I like it but it confuses the heck out of people, so I stopped using it.
New link (remastered version - Apple lossless format):
https://mega.co.nz/#!uBFTSCpI!A4dMH1wVOZdgZI35gWbfgBVi-8oUAYRYKFb9NOrVVII
Thanks Buster!
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