Speaking of Love / With Love from Hollywood

DRG Records is to be commended for unearthing the two albums Shirley Jones and Jack Cassidy made for Columbia Records in the 1950s and reissuing them on a single CD. Jones, then known as the star of the film versions of Oklahoma! and Carousel, not as the mother in The Partridge Family, and Cassidy, then known as a veteran musical comedy performer who had been appearing on Broadway since his teens, not as the father of David Cassidy, had married in 1956. In 1957, they recorded Speaking of Love, a collection of songs from operettas like Maytime and New Moon, written by the likes of Rudolf Friml, Sigmund Romberg, and Victor Herbert. Jones' pure soprano and Cassidy's dramatic tenor, along with their romantic chemistry, made them an ideal choice to try to bring such material up to date for the '50s, and they still bring it alive 45 years later. They followed in 1959 with an album's worth of movie songs, With Love From Hollywood, this time taking on Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, and Cole Porter. Here the approach was a little lower-brow, but no less enjoyable. The albums languished out of print in Columbia's vaults for decades until DRG dug them out, giving them their first CD release and, in the case of With Love From Hollywood, a previously unheard stereo version. Musical theater fans deserve to rediscover Jones as a top interpreter of show tunes and to realize how good a singer the largely forgotten Cassidy was.