From Radio Entertainment to Columbia Records

As I wrote at the beginning of this week, soprano Eileen Farrell began her career as a radio entertainer in 1940 on the CBS Radio network. She established a presence successful enough to keep her listeners satisfied with classical selections as well as popular songs. That success led to her first recording session for the Columbia label, which resulted in her accounts of four familiar Irish songs. She was backed by a “house orchestra” conducted by Charles Lichter, delivering clear vocal accounts against a string ensemble that never seemed to get beyond the syrupy.

Cover for the first vinyl release of I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues! (from the Amazon.com Web page for this album)

With that background it should be no surprise that, as a recording artist for Columbia, Farrell would not confine herself to the classical repertoire. Indeed, her first album, initially released on 78s on January 13, 1947, was entitled I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues! (exclamation mark included). The album title is a “polished” version of a song that Harold Arlen wrote for the 1932 Broadway show Earl Carroll’s Vanities entitled “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues.” 1932 was also the year of its first recording, which was also the first solo recording by Ethel Merman.

Sadly, I have not had the opportunity to listen to that original recording. However, I doubt that anyone would challenge the proposition that Farrell was no Merman, which is just as true as the fact that Merman was no Farrell. The point is that, while Farrell could bring expressive clarity to just about anything she sang, vocalists like Merman, Billie Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald each knew how to apply an indelible stamp of personality to any song they delivered, regardless of how it was arranged. Farrell, on the other hand, seems to have been motivated primarily by “fidelity to the text,” even when that “text” is an arrangement that gives little attention to the origins of the song or how it was first sung.

I am doing my best to avoid lapsing into those venomous attacks on “middle-brow” taste that could be found in the jazz articles written by Amiri Baraka (appearing in Down Beat under the name LeRoi Jones). One of Baraka’s targets was Columbia Records; and the accounts of how that business treated Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus borders on the heartbreaking. The fact is that, through her radio work, Farrell developed a talent for pleasing those middle-brow listeners; and, to be fair, that talent served her just as well on her “popular” Columbia albums as her more serious training served her on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House.

That “popular” side can be found on five of the CDs in the sixteen-CD box set of all of Farrell’s American Columbia recording sessions. When I began my writing project for this collection at the beginning of this month, I promised that I would not ignore the pop side of Farrell’s recording legacy. Having tried to do so as fairly as possible, I can only fall back on a quotation that has more sources than I could possible enumerate:

People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.