Songs From St. Louis Blues/Looking Back

This entry in mail-order firm Collectors' Choice Music's series of reissues of Nat King Cole's Capitol Records catalog combines two oddities from Cole's LP discography on a single CD. The first 12 tracks present his treatments of songs written by or associated with W.C. Handy, recorded in conjunction with Cole's starring role in the 1958 Handy film biography St. Louis Blues. The movie, a fictionalized telling of the blues composer and publisher's life, was not well received and, although it occasionally turns up on television, had not been issued on a home video in any format as of half-a-century after its theatrical release, presumably due to the resistance of the Handy publishing interests, the Cole estate, or some combination of the two. The concurrently released album actually is not a soundtrack recording and, in fact, has little to do with the movie. It presents Cole's performances of some of Handy's best-known compositions ("Beale Street Blues," "Memphis Blues," the title song) in '50s arrangements by Nelson Riddle. Cole isn't a blues singer, and Riddle isn't a blues arranger, but then Handy's version of the blues was not as bluesy as the music got later anyway. These are hardly definitive interpretations of these much performed songs, but they are enjoyable, particularly for Cole fans. The second LP contained on the CD is a late hits compilation, in fact a posthumous one. Cole died in February 1965, and six months later Capitol released Looking Back, a collection of tracks from the late '50s previously released only on singles and EPs. That would have made it, if a minor Cole best-of, nevertheless welcome to fans and collectors. But the three songs that had been the biggest hits among the selections, "Looking Back," "Send for Me," and "If I May" (all Top Ten records), were not the original recordings. Instead, they were the re-recordings Cole had done for his album The Nat King Cole Story in 1961. As if that weren't bad enough, the recordings had had new guitar and percussion tracks overdubbed to give the music more of a contemporary sound, circa 1965. The result of course was a travesty that did not reflect Cole's musical taste, even on material that was not among his best work to begin with. Happily, Collectors' Choice has seen fit to strip off the overdubs on this reissue, although it still includes the three re-recordings. ~ William Ruhlmann|