I guess I must have got this in 2000 or 2001 — three CDs for £9.99, which was still a bit of a bargain then. I'm sure it must have been Stephin Merritt's influence, leading to a realisation that I'd neglected a whole chunk of popular music history, and now I was going to have make up for this omission.
Obviously these are are recordings that have been widely licensed at low cost, and therefore, though you're getting Paul Robeson, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland and Billie Holliday singing, you're unlikely to be getting their best versions. This perceived low quality put me off listening to these CDs very much, but hearing them again after the likes of Charley Patton I realise the quality isn't that bad.
Merritt most frequently gets compared to Cole Porter, and you can kind of see why because perhaps the first thing new listeners to Merritt hear is the humorous tricksiness of some of the rhymes, which also seems to be a trait of Porter's. Merritt apparently doesn't much like the comparison, while accepting that it's just a way of saying "good lyricist", and prefers Berlin (and especially Stephen Sondheim). I can kind of see why that is too, because it seems to my very untutored ear that there's an extra degree of musicality to the way Berlin writes words. Another way of saying that would be that you can see how good Porter's words are on the page, while Berlin's rely more on being harnessed to the music for their full effect. But I'm completely bluffing here, and happy to be corrected.
For more on songs like this, I recommend Russell Davies' radio show on a Sunday night. A month or two back he went into an extended monologue on the meaning of "cunning cottage" in the Gershwin's I've Got a Crush on You. Apparently "cunning" can also mean something like small and cosy. I like that attention to detail.
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