Andy Williams Sings The Hits (Passport)

 

Picture: C     Sound: C     Extras: D     Music: C+

 

 

Andy Williams may seem a million miles from music today, but his hits ran from before the Rock years to the early 1970s.  Some of the clips in this Andy Williams Sings The Hits set may even come from his old early 1960s variety show, but wherever they come from, the songs are:

 

1)     You Do Something To Me

2)     Our Town

3)     Just Sittin’ & Rockin’

4)     Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling (Williams Brothers)

5)     Day In Day Out

6)     I’ve Grown Accustomed To Your Face (from My Fair Lady)

7)     Just In Time (with Adolph Green & Betty Comden)

8)     Look For The Silver Lining

9)     Bossa Nova Medley (with Antonio Carlos Jobim)

10)  The Bilbao Song (from the 1929 German musical Happy End)

11)  Straight Down The Middle

12)  Medley with Patti Page

13)  In The Still Of the Night

14)  When You’re Smiling

15)  Danny Boy

 

 

Of course, track #5 is not the David Bowie hit, while track #8 is used often on Turner Classic Movies, his performance or not.  Track 9 includes The Girl From Ipanema, which Jobim wrote, though did not have a hit on.  Track 10 was written by Kurt Weill, but Johnny Mercer wrote new lyrics for what would be a 1961 hit for Williams.  Remarkably, many of the songs here are still with us, and like it or not, Williams actually did a better job singing them than he would get credit for today.  Sure, he is not Mr. Soul, but to his credit he never tried to be any kind of singer he was not.  He loved music and the fan who took him from the 1940s until his retirement got that.  Plastic as he may now seem to some people, at least he had talent and knew good music.  That has to account for something.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo