Hitmakers, Volume II (Various Artists) (1971): Just because rhythm & blues and rock & roll were ruling the record charts didn’t mean that older styles of music had gone away. Zenith Electronics, a leading manufacturer of radios and television sets in the mid-20th Century, released a series of albums featuring top vocalists of the day. This is their second album, Hitmakers, Volume II and presents Robert Goulet, Doris Day, Barbra Streisand, Johnny Mathis, and Andy Williams. Like Contact: Sounds of Mod, the five singers have a song apiece in the same order on each side of Hitmakers, Volume II. The question remains as to whether these are the actual “hits”, or are simply renditions of well-known songs by “hitmakers”. “Moon River” is Andy Williams’ signature song, although it was never released as a single, amazingly enough; the song first appeared on his hit album from 1962, Moon River and Other Great Movie Themes. Williams has performed “Moon River” innumerable times since then, so determining whether or not this is the 1962 version of the song is nearly impossible. “On the Street Where You Live” comes from the Broadway musical My Fair Lady and was actually a hit song several times, with Andy Williams having a #3 hit with that song in 1964. “Sentimental Journey” was Doris Day’s first #1 hit song, in 1945, when she was the vocalist with Les Brown and His Band of Renown. According to the album’s liner notes, this is a new version of the song. “Getting to Know You”, from the 1951 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I, appeared on Doris Day’s 1964 album, With a Smile and a Song. “Real Live Girl” evidently was a hit and appears on Robert Goulet’s 1969 album, Robert Goulet’s Greatest Hits; while “The Nearness of You” does not, but the song is on Goulet’s 1962 album Sincerely Yours. I have an album by Doris Day and Robert Goulet called Annie Get Your Gun, consisting of songs taken from that Broadway musical. Although it is not actually a Broadcast cast album, it is packaged as though it were. In his later years, Robert Goulet made numerous film and television appearances contrary to type, such as a rude party guest in Beetlejuice (1988) and the villain in Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991). Compared to the other four vocalists on this album, Barbra Streisand was still relatively new on the scene in 1971; her debut album, the Grammy-winning The Barbara Streisand Album came out in 1963. Besides her numerous appearances on film, Barbra Streisand has had 11 albums reach #1 on the Billboard album charts, more than any other woman. Barbra Streisand had a #2 hit on the Adult Contemporary chart with “He Touched Me” (a different song from the gospel classic) and #17 with “My Man”, both in 1965. Johnny Mathis has one of the richest voices of any American vocalist and, to date, has released a total of 73 albums. “Everything’s Coming up Roses” (from the Broadway musical Gypsy) appears on Mathis’s 1960 double album The Rhythms and Ballads of Broadway. Remarkably, the jazz standard “Stella by Starlight” was part of the soundtrack for the 1944 horror film The Uninvited; the movie was a favorite of my mother. Johnny Mathis included “Stella by Starlight” on his 1962 album Rapture, although neither of these songs was apparently released by Mathis as a single.
