Lee Wiley - The RCA Victor Recordings

If you asked me to choose my favorite Lee Wiley records, her various circa 1940 songbooks would be the winners. But these 1956-57 discs would not be far behind.

Today's post includes all the 26 songs she recorded for RCA Victor during those years. The singer was for the most part in prime form; it is regrettable that she made no more records for 15 years thereafter - and those were disappointments.

The Victors include two complete albums and part of another:

• West of the Moon with Ralph Burns, from 1956

• A Touch of the Blues with Billy Butterfield, from 1957

• Two songs from a 1956 jazz miscellany issued under the name of TV host Dave Garroway. (The LP is included in full. It also has contributions from Barbara Carroll, Deane Kincaide, Helen Ward, Tito Puente and Peanuts Hucko.)

I've added a bonus EP, issued to promote a 1963 fictionalized television drama based on incidents in Wiley's life.

All items are from my collection. We'll start with the complete LPs, then circle back to the Garroway collection and the EP. 

West of the Moon

Wiley is in mostly commanding form throughout West of the Moon. She is surprisingly compatible with modernist arranger-conductor Ralph Burns, whose charts support her well - although I can't help but note that she seemed more attuned to the collective improvisations of the groups that backed her on the songbooks.

And in fact, she starts off with a song beloved of those throwback groups - "You're a Sweetheart," which I was intrigued to learn she had not recorded before. To me, Burns' repetitive arrangement is a disappointment, but the vocal is excellent.

Lee moves on unexpectedly to Kurt Weill's "This Is New," where she sounds uncomfortable with the melody line; a shame, it's a magnificent song from the score by Weill and Ira Gershwin for Lady in the Dark.

She's in more compatible territory with the bouncy "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby," a movie song from 1938 by Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer. There are good solos by Billy Butterfield and Peanuts Hucko.

Lee does the highly sophisticated "Who Can I Turn To?" soulfully, an apt tribute to a 1941 piece by Alec Wilder and William Engvick. It is the first song they wrote together.

Burns wrote a lovely chart for Richard Whiting's "My Ideal," and Wiley graces it by including the wonderfully contrasting verse. This would be near perfection except that Lee was not in prime voice.

She is great, however, in "Can't Get Out of This Mood," which Frank Loesser and Jimmy McHugh wrote for Ginny Simms and the 1942 film Seven Days' Leave. But be sure to hear Sarah Vaughan's 1950 Columbia recording.

Ralph Burns and Lee Wiley

"East of the Sun (and West of the Moon)" was the biggest hit for short-lived songwriter Brooks Bowman, who composed it for a Princeton show. Burns' gentle arrangement is just right for this song, which is usually done as a rhythm number.

Lee reached back to the 1920s for the Sammy Fain-Irving Kahal "I Left My Sugar Standing in the Rain," almost never heard these days. She includes the verse, which I'm not sure I've heard otherwise. The song has contrived lyrics, but a memorable melody. The singer is near ideal, and the backing is sympathetic. There's a notable solo by Lou McGarity on trombone.

"Moonstruck" is a high quality song written for Bing to warble in 1933's College Humor, but forgotten these days. It is characteristic Crosby material from the time - but Lee is persuasive as well. The arrangement for the Arthur Johnston-Sam Coslow song is subtly done.

Like "This Is New," "Limehouse Blues" was introduced by Gertrude Lawrence. She performed it with Jack Buchanan in the 1921 West End revue A to Z. It's a fascinating song, although wildly dated, and Burns can't resist including the usual chinoiserie. The song is set up beautifully by the seldom-performed verse.

Wiley and Burns also use the verse to good effect in "As Time Goes By" - again, it leads into the the famous chorus very well.

The LP is rounded off by a return to a Dixieland-type arrangement on Fats Waller-Andy Razaf's perennial "Keepin' Out of Mischief Now," an upbeat end to the proceedings.

The recording captures Wiley's voice truthfully, but the engineers did swaddle the band in too much reverb.

LINK to West of the Moon

A Touch of the Blues

I will admit to preferring the second album, A Touch of the Blues, on all counts - the arrangements by Al Cohn and Bill Finegan, Wiley's singing, the material and the quality of the sound.

Most of the songs are not standards, but are all the more welcome because of it. The first three selections date from as long ago as 1909.

Al Cohn

"The Memphis Blues" is a W.C. Handy song with lyrics by George Norton that is seldom if ever heard these days. Lee and the swinging Al Cohn chart make an strong argument for it.

"From the Land of the Sky-Blue Water" is another case. One of Charles Wakefield Cadman's Indianist works, it's a period piece that should have been left in the period. Wiley was of Native American descent, but the material is not suited to her.

When I first saw the title "The Ace in the Hole," I thought of the Cole Porter song that Mary Jane Walsh introduced in Let's Face It. But this is an earlier piece, and an interesting one at that. James Dempsey and George Mitchell were the authors.

Bill Finegan

Louis Armstrong was the fellow behind "Someday You'll Be Sorry," a good tune not often heard. Bill Finegan's arrangement is entirely supportive. Most enjoyable, with Lee at ease.

"My Melancholy Baby" is certainly well known. Dating back to 1912, it was written by Ernie Burnett and George A. Norton (although Ben Light claimed he was the composer). By the time Wiley recorded it, the piece had become something of a punch line because of its use in the 1954 version of A Star Is Born, where a drunken heckler yells for Judy Garland to "sing Melancholy Baby." (Ex-vaudeville trouper William Frawley - Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy - claimed to have introduced the number. For the curious, his recording has appeared here.) As often on these records, Wiley graces the song by including the verse.

Billy Butterfield

She does not do so, however, for "A Hundred Years from Today," although the composition does have a beautiful introduction by trumpeter Billy Butterfield, who leads the band on the LP. This fine song is the handiwork of Victor Young (Lee's early mentor), Ned Washington and Joe Young.

I really enjoy Benny Carter's "Blues in My Heart," which suits Wiley perfectly. Finegan's sparse arrangement is tailored to the subject matter. Butterfield has a striking obbligato.

"Maybe You'll Be There" is one of Rube Bloom's best songs, with a sensitive lyric by Sammy Gallop. Cohn provides a simple arrangement. The present recording is good, but it will not make you forget Sinatra's recording of the same year, made with Gordon Jenkins.

"Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea," a celebrated number by Arlen and Koehler, is nicely done. This cut is marred by the strangely pinched sound of the muted trumpets.

Frank Loesser and Jule Styne were eminent musicians, but "I Don't Want to Walk Without You" was most effective in its period as a war song. Wiley doesn't seem all that involved.

"Make Believe" is one of the last songs I would have identified with Lee; it's a soaring, quasi-operetta piece that is one of Kern's greatest creations. She does pull it off, but she, Cohn and Butterfield never seem completely happy with the material.

The title song is another matter altogether. "A Touch of the Blues" is a lost gem from Eddie Wilcox, the pianist of the Jimmy Lunceford band, with words by Don George. A good Cohn arrangement, too.

The sound is generally very good, widely spaced early stereo.

LINK to A Touch of the Blues

Dave Garroway Presents the Wide, Wide World of Jazz

The name of this 1956 various artists LP, Dave Garroway Presents the Wide, Wide World of Jazz, was suggested by Garroway being the host of a television show called Wide, Wide World. And the songs do all relate to world locales.

The title is misleading, though, in that it presents a narrow view of jazz, with the exception of Tito Puente's presence. The other artists were from the vocal, Dixieland, swing and piano trio subgenres, and the same musicians play on most of the selections.

Lee Wiley was allotted two of the numbers, both accompanied by Deane Kincaide's Dixieland Band, which also performed two other songs sans vocal.

Deane Kincaide

"Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?", a late example of the longing-for-the-South genre that was so common in the first half of the 20th century, is an excellent song, here in a knowing performance by Wiley and Kincaide's forces. The piece comes from 1946, Louis Alter and Eddie DeLange.

We're back in the South for "Stars Fell on Alabama," a 1934 composition by Mitchell Parish and Frank Perkins. Lee is mostly relaxed and effective, although she strains to hit the highest notes. I do enjoy the arrangement, presumably by Kincaide. The vocalist is at her best in these surroundings, I think.

A few words about the other performers and songs:

Deane Kincaide's Dixieland Band - Kincaide's band has lively outings with Jelly Roll Morton's "Chicago Breakdown" and "Kansas City Stomp." Note that the "Dixieland Band" includes Billy Butterfield, Cutty Cutshall, Peanuts Hucko and Lou Stein, who also are in Hucko's Swing Band, discussed next.

Peanuts Hucko

Peanuts Hucko's Swing Band - I don't mean to imply that Hucko's band is bad - far from it. They have spirited outings with the Gus Kahn-Isham Jones "Spain" and Frank Loesser's "Wonderful Copenhagen" (written for the Danny Kaye film of Hans Christian Anderson). I enjoy this band, and may work up a post devoted to the LP that it recorded with Helen Ward.

Helen Ward

Helen Ward - Hucko's band backs ex-Goodman, James and Hal McIntyre singer Ward on two numbers: Louis Alter's "Manhattan Serenade" and the Gershwins' "A Foggy Day." Ward was a characterful singer whom I enjoy, although her intonation and control here were not impeccable.

Tito Puente

Tito Puente - It's good that Victor included Tito Puente under the jazz rubric, because he did profess to produce "jazz with a Latin touch," had just produced an LP called Puente Goes Jazz, and employed many jazz musicians, including Bernie Glow and Dave Schildkraut on this date. The songs are "Flying Down to Rio" by Youmans and Kahn and arranger Chico O'Farrill's "Havana After Dark."

Barbara Carroll

Barbara Carroll - The fluent pianist and her trio do well with "California, Here I Come" and Carroll's own "Paris Without You." She made several LPs for Victor in this period.

Most of these songs were otherwise unreleased, to my knowledge. "Flying Down to Rio" does appear on Puente's 1957 Night Beat LP, and "A Foggy Day" can also be found on Peanuts Hucko's With a Little Bit of Swing, released in 1958.

The sound is excellent on this LP.

LINK to Dave Garroway Presents the Wide, Wide World of Jazz

Something About Lee Wiley

Events in Wiley's life were the subject of the 1963 television drama Something About Lee Wiley, an episode in the NBC anthology series Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre.

Piper Laurie played Wiley, with Joy Bryan dubbing her singing voice. I haven't seen the show, but it apparently deals with the time Lee fell from a horse and was temporarily blinded, and with her acrimonious marriage to pianist Jess Stacy.

Chrysler put out a promotional EP for the program. Rather than including songs from the episode, it contains two numbers from the West of the Moon LP - "East of the Sun" and "Can't Get Out of This Mood" - contrasted with two of Lee's earliest sides, both made as a band singer with Leo Reisman - "(Got the) South in My Soul" from 1931 and "Time on My Hands" from 1932.

LINK to Something About Lee Wiley

Lee Wiley Sings Harold Arlen

Here is the third in our exploration of the composer songbooks recorded by the great Lee Wiley from 1939-43. The earlier posts were devoted to Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart. The R&H article provides background on the singer.

This time, Wiley does wonders for Harold Arlen, a distinctive composer whose songs are suited to her vocal manner.

Lee Wiley Sings Songs by Harold Arlen dates from 1943 and was issued by the Schirmer label, in succession to the Liberty Music Shop (Gershwin and Cole Porter) and Rabson's (R&H). 

Along with the Schirmer album, for this collection I've added five other Wiley recordings of Arlen, dating from both earlier and slightly later in her career.

Wiley's Cole Porter recordings will be next in this series.

Shirmer's Lee Wiley Sings Songs by Harold Arlen

As with the previous songbooks, for the Harold Arlen album the vocalist is accompanied by a group of like-minded musicians, led in this case by guitarist Eddie Condon.

Eddie Condon

The album starts off with a jaunty version of "Down with Love," with a intensely swinging Billy Butterfield trumpet obbligato that plays off Wiley's vocal perfectly. She is in excellent voice here, and the session is notably well recorded. A strong opener.

Billy Butterfield

"Down with Love" comes from the 1937 musical Hooray for What, where Arlen worked with his frequent partner, lyricist Yip Harburg. Introducing the song was Jack Whiting, June Clyde and Vivian Vance.

The contrasting next number is "Stormy Weather," which was premiered by Ethel Waters and Duke Ellington in the 1933 Cotton Club Parade revue, but could have been written for Wiley. Her combination of weariness and wistfulness is ideal for the song. Butterfield is again a standout. Ted Koehler wrote the famous lyrics for this one.

Ernie Caceres

Lee sings the verse for many songs, including "I've Got the World on a String." Her vocal quality and presentation do wonders for the song. The clarinet soloist here is the versatile Ernie Caceres, who was at the time the baritone saxophonist in the Glenn Miller band. The song, again with Koehler lyrics, dates from the 1932 Cotton Club Parade.

"Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" is another celebrated number with a relatively unfamiliar verse, which sets off the chorus nicely. It comes from a 1931 Cotton Club show, again with words by Koehler. Ernie Caceres is featured.

Bobby Hackett

For the second set of four songs, the band is augmented by three trombones, with Billy Butterfield succeeded by Bobby Hackett, who also wrote the arrangements for the first two songs. The busy pianist you hear is Dave Bowman.

"Fun to Be Fooled" is a strikingly good song that is not heard often enough. It comes from the 1934 revue Life Begins at 8:40, where Frances Williams introduced the number. Yip Harburg and Ira Gershwin were the lyricists.

The earliest song in the set is "You Said It," from the 1931 college musical of the same name, with book and lyrics by Jack Yellen. It has an ecstatic element that is well suited to Lee's vocal quality.

"Let's Fall in Love" is another Ted Koehler collaboration from a 1933 film of the same name. Ann Sothern sang it on screen. This is another favorite song of mine, and Wiley does it well. She does not include the distinctive verse, though.

One of the least known songs in the Schirmer set is the final one, "Moanin' in the Mornin'," another number from Hooray for What, sung on Broadway by Vivian Vance. It's an extraordinary piece, one of the most attractive songs in Arlen's catalog. Wiley is superlative; Hackett too is memorable in this fine composition.

Harold Arlen

More Arlen Songs

We have five additional Arlen songs that Lee recorded both before and after the Schirmer album, starting relatively early in her career. The first song comes from a 1933 Dorsey Brothers date that remained unissued until decades later, when it turned up on a Epic LP set devoted to 1930s recordings.

The young Dorseys

The song is "I Got a Right to Sing the Blues," from a 1932 Earl Carroll Vanities. It is very much suited to Lee's talents and temperament. She is in splendid voice and already a full formed artist at age 24. The obbligato is by Bunny Berigan. I've also included an alternate take that has appeared on bootlegs over the years, but it doesn't differ markedly from the Epic release.

During the 1940s, Eddie Condon promoted a variety of jazz concerts, at times with Lee as vocalist. A second version of "Down with Love" is taken from a March 31, 1945 date at the Ritz Theater in New York. It uses the same arrangement as the Shirmer recording, and even the same trumpeter - Billy Butterfield. Unsurprisingly, it's just as good a performance.

Jess Stacy

A few months later, Lee was in the Victor studios with her erstwhile husband, pianist Jess Stacy, and a relatively large ensemble. The subject was one of Arlen's most familiar songs, "It's Only a Paper Moon." That number was written for the 1932 play The Great Magoo, where it was known as "If You Believed in Me." The next year, it was interpolated into the screen version of the musical Take a Chance. A number of artists recorded it at the time, including Paul Whiteman.

In 1944, Nat Cole revived it and had some success, which apparently stimulated other recordings, perhaps including the Stacy-Wiley session. The easygoing arrangement features Stacy's idiosyncratic pianism, followed by Wiley's equally idiosyncratic singing. In truth, Russ Case's chart is not all that suited to either pianist or vocalist, but it's well played even so.

Dick Jurgens

Finally, we have a second version of "Stormy Weather," taken from a 1948 aircheck of the Dick Jurgens band. This large ensemble is very good indeed - and Lee is too - but she is best in a small group setting.

These selections for this post are taken from Internet Archive needle drops and my own collection, cleaned up for listening. The sound is generally splendid.

LINK to Lee Wiley Sings Harold Arlen

Harold Arlen Sings Harold Arlen

Harold Arlen himself was a singer who began making records in the 1920s and was still at it in the 1960s. As a performer, he was sly, witty and attuned to conveying the meaning of the lyrics. He had everything but a great voice, but even so is fun to hear. I've gathered 13 of his 1930s recordings in a new post on my other blog.

Stuart Foster - A Fine, But Forgotten SInger

The subject of today's post, Stuart Foster (1918-68), is a former big-band vocalist who was not even that well known during his heyday, and recorded only sporadically under his own name. He was featured, however, on records by bandleaders as diverse as Guy Lombardo and Gordon Jenkins, and had a long career as a studio singer. Foster was much more talented than his reputation would suggest, as I hope you will agree after sampling his output.

Foster had a strong voice, even throughout his range, excellent diction and superior intonation. While a forthright singer, he also was sensitive to words.

For this post, I've combined 12 single sides that he made with assorted bandleaders from 1944 to 1953, together with a 1954 EP issued under his own name. These provide a good overview of his accomplishments.

Early Career and Singles

Foster's first professional gig was as a singer for the Ina Ray Hutton band, starting in 1940. When Hutton disbanded in 1944, he joined Guy Lombardo. Our playlist starts with two Lombardo singles. "The Trolley Song" comes from Meet Me in St. Louis; in that movie, Judy Garland's ride was exhilarating, while Lombardo's band just lumbers along, as was its habit. Foster does fine, though.

"Poor Little Rhode Island" is a Cahn and Styne song from another 1944 film, the Kay Kyser vehicle Carolina Blues. Foster is again encumbered by the clunky Lombardo Trio, but the song is a good one. It presumably was the inspiration for the slightly later "Rhode Island Is Famous for You" (from Dietz and Schwartz' Inside U.S.A., which can be found here).

We'll skip over Foster's 1944-48 residency with Tommy Dorsey, which has been covered in reissues of Dorsey's records, and move on to 1949, when the singer joined Russ Case in the M-G-M studio for three songs. The first, "A Thousand Violins," comes from the Bob Hope film The Great Lover. It was among the many songs that Livingston and Evans contributed to the movies of the time.

I can't say much about the pop tune "All Year 'Round," but "Mad About You" is a Victor Young-Ned Washington song written, appropriately enough, for Gun Crazy. Sinatra also recorded this number; Foster's interpretation is not inferior.

The following year, M-G-M had Foster join another dance maestro, Shep Fields, for a go at "Today, Tomorrow and Forever." By this time, Fields had ceded his "rippling rhythm" bubble-machine gimmick to Lawrence Welk, so this is not a bad outing, if hardly a swinger. Foster is excellent, as you should be able to discerned through the coos of his backing choir.

In 1951, mood-music maven Hugo Winterhalter brought Foster on board for four songs recorded for RCA Victor. The first is a Cy Coben compose-by-numbers piece called "The Seven Wonders of the World." The vocalist shines against Winterhalter's lush background.

Bob Hilliard and Sammy Fain wrote "Alice in Wonderland" for the movie of the same name. It's a lovely song, and is one of Foster's best records.

The vocalist's final two items for Winterhalter are in the semi-folk vein that was popular following the Weavers' big 1950 hit, "Goodnight, Irene." Frank Loesser wrote "Wave to Me, My Lady" back in 1946 for the country market, where it became a number three hit for Elton Britt. Foster is entirely convincing in this song - as he is on the flip side, "Across the Wide Missouri." The latter is a folk song usually called "Shenandoah," although here the songwriting team of Ervin Drake and Jimmy Shirl have attached their names to it. This effort is probably a cover of the Weavers-Terry Gilkyson record.

Foster was very well matched with the trumpet and big band of Billy Butterfield for "Baby Won't You Say You Love Me." Josef Myrow and Mack Gordon wrote the song for Betty Grable's Wabash Avenue, which improbably co-starred Victor Mature.

The final single is from 1953, and is one of Foster's best. "Secret Love" was written for Doris Day to sing in Calamity Jane, and it would be hard to top her legendary performance, but Foster comes close, aided by Gordon Jenkins' backing.

The Camden EP

The final batch of Foster performances are from a late 1954 EP that RCA issued on its Camden budget label. "Today's Hits" was a catch-all title that the company used for extended-play cover versions of the then-popular tunes. These were presumably RCA's method for counteracting the cheapo labels that had tried to succeed in the low-price niche.

We've had three such EPs on the blog before: 1955 and 1956 entries from another big-band fugitive, Bob Carroll, plus a Gisele MacKenzie disc that also dates from 1955.

Foster's EP starts with "I Need You Now," little remembered today but a number one hit for Eddie Fisher in 1954. "Count Your Blessings," in contrast, is a beloved evergreen introduced by Bing Crosby in White Christmas. I can't imagine anyone being unhappy with Foster's sensitive cover.

"Papa Loves Mambo" was a major hit for Perry Como. Foster's version shows off his fine sense of rhythm. The song "Teach Me Tonight" entered the charts several times in the early 50s; the song's appearance here was probably inspired by the Janet Brace or Jo Stafford recordings, or both.

The anonymous backing on the EP is by a small combo or combos.

I hope this has been a good introduction to a talented artist. The singles were remastered from lossless needle drops on Internet Archive. The EP is from my collection.

Also featuring Foster, I also have two Camden LPs from 1957 with the hits of the day, along with two albums of Broadway show tunes done by producer-arranger Dick Jacobs for Coral late in the 1950s. I may share these at a later date.

Billboard ad, January 1, 1955

Early and Rare Capitol Singles from Margaret Whiting

When the great vocalist Margaret Whiting died five years ago, I devoted two posts to Capitol singles that had not heretofore been re-released in any form. Those records were drawn from old store stock 45s dating from 1949-56, and I promised a follow-up post devoted to my collection of her earlier Capitol 78s.

But soon thereafter that stack of shellac suffered water damage, and I never got around to cleaning up the remnants and seeing if they were still viable as subjects for transfer.

There things stood until recently, when reader punkinblue9 wrote to ask if I had four Capitol singles featuring the young Whiting that have never been reissued – “When You Make Love to Me,” “What Am I Gonna Do About You?”, “What Did I Do?” and “Dreamer with a Penny.” It so happens that they all could be found in my pile of soggy 78s, so I took it upon myself to see if the subjects could be scrubbed clean enough to derive acceptable transfers.

I was surprised to find that the results are more than listenable, thus this post containing the four songs requested, along with 10 more early and less-often-heard sides from Maggie’s Capitol oeuvre.

Whiting was among the first artists signed to that label, beginning her tenure in 1942. She was not even 18 years old when she first went before the Capitol mics, but she sounds remarkably assured from the beginning.

The first several songs in this set show her in the subsidiary role of band singer, with the records attributed to bandleaders Billy Butterfield and Freddie Slack, and Whiting credited in small type. As with many such big band records, the songs are in a danceable tempo and, at least with the earlier Butterfield sides, Maggie only comes in after one or more band choruses.

The first item is from a 1942 session in which Butterfield reaches back to 1930 for the DeSylva, Brown and Henderson song “Without Love.” You can detect the influence of Mildred Bailey in the 17-year-old Whiting’s singing here, but from then on, she was her own person.

The next song is “Silver Wings in the Moonlight,” a 1943 effort made popular by the wonderful Anne Shelton, whom I must feature here some day. Whiting sings the contrived lyrics backed by an out-of-tune Freddie Slack band. Sorry about the peak distortion, which was present on both of my copies of the 78.

Slack was better with rhythm songs, and moves on to a sort-of boogie woogie with the Don Raye-Gene de Paul product, “Ain't That Just Like a Man.” Whiting is fine, but Slack did this kind of thing better with Ella Mae Morse.

We return to Butterfield for the Cahn-Styne “There Goes That Song Again,” in a lumpy two-beat rendition dating from 1944. Maggie’s solo has to fight for attention with Johnny Guarnieri’s busy piano figuration.

A good version of “Someone to Watch Over Me” comes from Butterfield's Gershwin album, which otherwise did not make use of Whiting’s talents.

The singer moves up to equal billing with arranger Paul Weston for his 1945 version of Berlin's “How Deep Is the Ocean,” rendered in the hybrid big-band-with-strings style that was becoming popular, particularly behind singers. Maggie is supremely confident singing over Weston's gorgeous arrangement.

“Along With Me” (a beautiful post-wartime song from Harold Rome's Call Me Mister, which you can find on this blog here) has an uncharacteristically lush backing by former Miller arranger Jerry Gray. “When You Make Love to Me” is also in the hyper-romantic vein of the day, with Maggie backed by swirling strings, woodwinds and muted brass.

The balance of the sides were arranged by Capitol staffer Frank De Vol, a former big band hand comfortable in many styles.

“Beware My Heart” is a good but formulaic song from Sam Coslow. “What Am I Gonna Do About You?” is a lesser-known Cahn-Styne movie song from 1947’s Ladies Man.

“What Did I Do?” is a minor-key semi-blues from Josef Myrow, of all people, which Whiting does well. It came from film When My Baby Smiles at Me, and the small span of the melody may have been suited to stars Betty Grable and Dan Dailey, neither of whom had much range. The flip is the standard “Heat Wave.” On this one, the Capitol censors changed the words in Irving Berlin's couplet "She started a heat wave / By letting her seat wave" to "letting her feet wave," which doesn't quite work with the subsequent exclamation that “She certainly can can-can!”

“Dreamer with a Penny” posits the questionable premise that it’s better to be a dreamer than be rich with a worried mind, a common Depression-era conceit that was presumably comforting to the destitute. Nonetheless, it's a fine song by Lester Lee and Allan Roberts introduced in the 1949 revue All for Love, and especially well handled by Whiting. On the flip, De Vol could have breathed more life into “Forever and Ever,” a lugubrious hymn-like waltz.

The sound on these 78 is very good, with minimal surface noise.

For a bonus Whiting selection, you are invited to visit my singles blog for the story behind her 1951 tribute to longtime cowboy star Hopalong Cassidy, including a cameo by Hoppy himself, together with the theme music from the silver-haired cowpoke’s television show.