The Great American Composers: Jimmy McHugh

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There is a good news/bad news element to Columbia House's Jimmy McHugh volume in its Great American Composers series of 42-track double-CDs. The good news is that, unlike many of the other volumes, this one is dominated by recordings made around the time the songs were introduced (in movies, stage musicals, and nightclub revues), in some cases by the artists who introduced them and/or had the most successful hits with them. Sequenced in roughly chronological order, the set traces McHugh's career in performances by such sympathetic performers as Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Connie Boswell, Alice Faye, Mildred Bailey, and the orchestras of Gene Krupa, Kay Kyser, and Harry James. Only at the end of the album are we subjected to '60s pop revivals, which means that we get a sense of what McHugh's hits sounded like not long after they were written. The bad news is that so much of the album is given over to McHugh songs that have been forgotten. That's not the compilers' fault, of course; it happens that, while McHugh wrote many successful songs in the '30s and '40s, many of them have not proven memorable. On the other hand, there are many McHugh songs that should have been included. Their omission may not be the compilers' fault, either, since they can only use what they find in the Columbia catalog. But it means that the album is full of material that will be unfamiliar even to those who remember the interwar period, songs heard only in the many mediocre films for which McHugh wrote. But there are also many gems, and some of the revivals are excellent. So, this is not the ideal McHugh collection, but it seems to have been a reasonable effort given what the compilers had to work with, and it presents many significant performances of some of McHugh's best and best-known compositions.