Shannon Bolin

Reader woolfnotes recently asked me if I had this recording by musical theater's Shannon Bolin. Not only did I not have it, I didn't even know it existed.

But I was intrigued enough to hunt up some lossy transfers on YouTube (thanks to kadoguy) and remaster them, adjusting the balance and pitch in the process.

Bolin is of particular interest to me as one of the featured performers in Adler and Ross' second musical, Damn Yankees. She played the wife of Joe Boyd, who disappears one night after making a pact with the devil to become a star with his favorite baseball team, the Washington Senators. Bolin recreated her role in the film version of the musical.

Shannon Bolin and Stephen Douglass during the
Damn Yankees recording sessions

This 1955 LP was likely recorded while she was in Damn Yankees' Broadway production, which ran from May 1955 to October 1957. In approach it is similar to a cabaret program, consisting mainly of unfamiliar material, thus the title Rare Wine. I can't find any evidence that Bolin ever appeared in cabaret, however. Her experience was mainly on Broadway, in such shows as The Golden Apple and Take Me Along. She also appeared in opera - she was reportedly the understudy for the title role in the first production of Marc Blitzstein's Regina - and was in a number of films and television shows.

The album's best known titles are probably Frank Loesser's "My Time of Day," Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Loneliness of Evening" and Rodgers and Hart's "He Was Too Good to Me." Here are the songs, composers and sources of the songs on the LP:

1. I Got Love (Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields), film I Dream Too Much
2. He Was Too Good to Me (Rodgers and Hart), cut from Simple Simon
3. Somebody from Somewhere (George and Ira Gershwin), film Delicious
4. My Yellow Flower (Jerome Moross and John Latouche), from Ballet Ballads
5. My Time of Day (Frank Loesser), from Guys and Dolls
6. Loneliness of Evening (Rodgers and Hammerstein), cut from South Pacific
7. My Love Is a Wanderer (Bart Howard), from John Murray Anderson's Almanac
8. Winter of My Discontent (Alec Wilder)
9. One More Spring (J. Strauss and Edward Eager) from Waltz Down the Aisle
10. I Know Where I'm Going (traditional)
11. Just Like a Man (Vernon Duke and Ogden Nash), from Sweet Bye and Bye (closed on the road; song was re-used in Two's Company)
12. The Party's Over Now (Noël Coward), from Words and Music

The arrangements are by Bolin's husband, pianist Milton Kaye. They mainly consist of a wind obbligato, rhythm, and an occasional guitar or harp. Vanguard did an excellent job of recording the songs. As I mentioned, this comes from lossy originals. As usual with such sources, there is some loss of detail and definition, but the result is nonetheless pleasing.

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