Ebb Tide
Your All-Time Favorite Songs
(as chosen by the members of the RCA Victor Record Club)
The Rainbow Sound of Bianco
His Harp and Orchestra
RCA CPM-110
1964
Your All-Time Favorite Songs
The Rainbow Sound Of Bianco
His Harp and Orchestra
Recored in Webster Hall, New York City
Recording Engineer: Ernie Oelrich
RCA CSP 110
1964
From the back cover: In planning this special recording, the RCA Victor Record Club recently asked a large number of its members to name their all-time favorite songs. The twelve songs receiving the highest number of votes are included in this all-request record. A Thanksgiving 1964 television spectacular on NBC, sponsored by Mohawk Carpet Mills and Futorian Furniture, was based upon the same great tunes. YOUR ALL - TIME FAVORITE SONGS is another in the series of RCA Victor Record Club Specials, recordings specially made for the Club and available only to Club members. In this album, Bianco, with his flair for flowing melody, weaves these all-time favorites into shining patterns of sound, and the orchestral settings by Charles Grean and Norman Beatty provide a soft-textured background for the harp's glistening sonorities.
The harp is generally pictured as an air-borne instrument, carried aloft by barefoot angels. In reality, there's nothing like a harp to put the listener on a cloud. No other instrument rivals its power to suggest winged flights of fancy and the airy transports of romance. Small wonder that the harp of Bianco remains so popular. Its "Rainbow Sound" projects the subtle magic inherent in popular music.
Surprisingly, the biggest vote getter in this poll of favorites turned out to be a French song, Autumn Leaves by Jacques Prevert, which took the U.S. by storm back in 1955 after Johnny Mercer had fitted English lyrics to its sweetly melancholy tune.
Another surprise: Hoagy Carmichael's Stardust, a romantic stand-by since the thirties, tied for second place in popularity with a newcomer from the movies – Moon River, written by Henry Mancini for the sound track of "Breakfast at Tiffany's." That track, incidentally, won an Academy Award for Mancini, and Moon River shows every sign of being adopted into America's folk song tradition.
Senior member by a good margin in this group of favorites is Greensleeves. Nobody knows the exact date of its origin, but it's been around in England for at least 500 years. Strange to think that a song already well known in Shakespeare's time -before the Pilgrims landed in America – still ranks high on the popularity charts. This clearly sets a durability record, as it should. For Greensleeves is without doubt one of the greatest melodies in the entire realm of music.
Broadway musicals have contributed a large share to this assembly of enduring favorites. Cole Porter's Begin the Beguine from "Jubilee" goes all the way back to 1935, and if you're getting a little grey around the edges, Jerome Kern's Smoke Gets in Your Eyes from "Roberta" will bring back memories of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Another memento from that period is Kurt Weill's wistful September Song, first sung by aging matinee idol Walter Huston in the 1938 show "Knickerbocker Holiday."
The period immediately following World War II produced a whole series of outstanding musicals that left a fair number of favorites in their wake. Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Carousel" was a standout in 1945, with You'll Never Walk Alone as the most deeply moving song in its resplendent score. Four years later, R & H came up with "South Pacific" – an all-time classic of the musical stage – in which island planter Ezio Pinza wooed Navy nurse Mary Martin with Some Enchanted Evening.
Among the remaining songs on this disc, Love Is a Many – Splendored Thing originated as Sammy Fain's soundtrack theme for a movie of the mid-fifties, but neither stage nor screen can claim credit for Robert Maxwell's Ebb Tide (1953) and Peter De Rose's perennial Deep Purple. They came into being simply for their own sake-as songs.
It is curious how well the more recent additions to the all- time repertoire of favorites blend with the older songs. Perhaps it is because all these timeless melodies have one quality in common: they somehow seem to go on long after they're ended. Perhaps that's what makes them your favorites. – FRANCIS TRAUN
Autumn Leaves
Moon River
Begin The Beguine
September Song
You'll Never Walk Alone
Love Is A Many Splendored Thing
Stardust
Greensleeves
Some Enchanted Evening
Ebb Tide
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
Deep Purple
