Irene Dunne in Improved Sound

Last October I presented this 78-rpm album of Irene Dunne singing six Jerome Kern songs, plus an additional single as a bonus, thus representing seven of the eight sides that Dunne recorded commercially.

I'm now proud to present these recordings in much improved sound. I had planned this to be the first in a series of posts that would mark the one-year anniversary of this blog next month. I've moved up the timing because I won't be able to record anything new for a while because of an illness in my family. For the time being I will be presenting some additional reposts in improved sound and some 12-inch soundtrack LPs from the 1950s that I had transferred for some collector friends.

For more about the Dunne-Kern post, please see the original October post. This is one of the favorite things I have presented on this blog, so I hope you enjoy it, or enjoy it again.

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Irene Dunne Sings Kern

I've very excited about this post. It contains seven of the eight commercial sides that Irene Dunne recorded. Six are from the 1941 Decca 78 album depicted above, with one from an LP reissue of a 1935 Brunswick record. Unfortunately I haven't been able to locate the flip side of the latter record. I don't believe the Decca sides have been reissued.

The repertoire consists entirely of the music of Jerome Kern, notable because Dunne was one of the stars of the 1930s film versions of Roberta and Show Boat.

These days, Dunne is mostly remembered as the wonderfully funny lead in such screwball comedies as the Awful Truth, ironic because she started out as a singer and somewhat reluctantly veered into comic roles, at which she excelled. Also ironic because her persona remains compelling to us in those roles, even after 70 years, but as an interpreter of Jerome Kern, styles have moved on so drastically that it is easy to find her singing style unconvincing, even stilted - which is the last thing you would call her comic acting style.

As with all styles whose time has passed, you have to give up your preconceptions of how this music ought to sound and remember that this is the way (or at least one way) that Kern expected it to sound.

The accompaniments are by Victor Young on the Kern songs above, by Nat Shilkret on the final song.

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