Ethel Merman Albums (5)
'The Ethel Merman Disco Album'
Release Date 1/1/1979
Tracks 7
Label A&M
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
The idea is, of course, absurd. By the end of the 1970s, everyone, it seemed, was adding a disco beat and trying to cash in on the current -- and temporary -- fad. But Ethel Merman? The seventy or so Broadway diva was 20 years past her last big success on the Great White Way and, you'd have thought, ready for retirement. Yet she agreed to sing some of her best-known songs in disco arrangements by the estimable Peter Matz (the man who, for example, helped Barbra Streisand put together her first albums). The result sounds pretty much like you'd expect. Matz creates fairly typical disco tracks, and Merman sings the way she always does, sounding like she has nothing to do with the background at all. Actually, she sounds good for a 70-year-old, and the record is good for a laugh. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
In the early 1970s, Ethel Merman, in her 60s and retired from the Broadway stage, made a series of albums for Decca Records in London, backed by the London Festival Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Stanley Black. First, there was Merman Sings Merman, on which she re-recorded a collection of songs she had introduced in her musicals. Then, there was a new studio-cast recording of her biggest stage success, Annie Get Your Gun. Last up is Ethel's Ridin' High. On this album, having largely exhausted the major songs from her shows, she did a few more, but devoted most of the album to her renditions of other people's hits, again drawing most of them from stage musicals. "Gee, But It's Good to Be Here" came from her 1956 show Happy Hunting; "Some People" (heard in a medley with "People" from Funny Girl) was drawn from her 1959 show Gypsy; and the title song came from 1936's Red, Hot and Blue! "Whispering" was the 1920s Paul Whiteman hit, and Ira and George Gershwin's "Someone to Watch Over Me" was another '20s artifact. Otherwise, the songs were from '60s musicals. Merman's clarion voice and commanding manner were made for songs like "The Impossible Dream" (the dream didn't even sound unlikely, much less impossible, in her hands) and "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever." She was less convincing on Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley's "What Kind of Fool Am I," if only because she clearly didn't consider herself any kind of fool, but she did better with the same writers' "Nothing Can Stop Me Now!," which was more her sort of sentiment. And she was surprisingly good with "Sunrise, Sunset" from Fiddler on the Roof. It all made you wish she had made more independent records during her career instead of sticking largely to her own stage hits, especially given that this would turn out to be the last album on which she sang songs new to her repertoire. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
In the early '60s, following three decades of creating characters in Broadway musicals, Ethel Merman accepted an engagement at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas that was billed as her world-premiere nightclub appearance, a claim that conveniently forgot her nightclub work in New York in the late '20s and early '30s. But the Merman, now in her early fifties, who came out on-stage at the Flamingo was a different performer from the one who had sung in clubs in her early twenties. Merman had had the opportunity to introduce standards by many of the greatest Broadway composers, notably George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Irving Berlin, and necessarily her show featured that material heavily. But an act had been written for her, one guesses by Roger Edens, who wrote the opening song, a special number called "Just a Lady With a Song" that commented on her career. Edens, an MGM veteran, had been fashioning Judy Garland's act for years, and he did an efficient job with Merman. The heart of the act, naturally, was a big medley combining songs from such shows as Call Me Madam, Annie Get Your Gun, Anything Goes, and Gypsy. But there was also a version of "A Lot of Livin' to Do" from Bye Bye Birdie (one show in which Merman had not appeared) that was full of new lyrics mentioning everyone from John Glenn to Fabian. And even after the medley, Merman's catalog was deep enough to have left room for "Blow, Gabriel, Blow" and "There's No Business Like Show Business." In a sense, her career had been filled with showstoppers, and putting them all in one nightclub act was almost too much to take. But her voice remained powerful, and the show was a good summation of her work. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
