Alice Faye - You'll Never Know

First rate record of Alice Faye

Alice Faye, while not well known today, was a very very famous singer in the thirties. She made her name on radio in 1933, then transferred to films in 1934 and by 1940, she was the top female box office star in America. While her voice was untrained and natural, she may have been the first white singer to popularise the husky contralto. At the height of her film career, song writers like Irving Berlin and Harry Warren wrote specifically for her and her picture on the cover of sheet music was an almost guarantee of volume sales.

This CD contains all but one of her commercial recordings from 1933 to 1937, plus a few tracks lifted from films from 1939 to 1943, after she stopped recording commercially. Among the latter is Faye's exquisite rendition of "I'll see you in my Dreams", actually cut from the film "Rose of Washington Square", released in 1939.

You will be able to follow Faye's emergence from "a radio singer with the band" in the early more obscure songs to the centre attraction, a singer for whom specific songs were tailored, backed by the first rate arrangements and sound of the 20th Century Fox orchestra. You will also know when the CD switches from studio recordings to soundtrack material because the latter have a vitality lacking from most of the former.

Faye's voice is always warm and deep but by 1943, it was burnished and her rendition of "You'll Never Know", her signature song and an Oscar winner, is inimmitable. This is a great value CD. February 17, 2006

Long-awaited CD release of rare Alice Faye Recordings

In the span of her career under contract to 20 Century-Fox, Alice Faye made only twenty commercial recordings from her films, between 1934 and 1937. One of them, "I Feel a Song Coming In" (1935) regrettably seems to have been lost forever, for it was never issued and the original masters have been destroyed. All other nineteen have been released only once on LP vinyl discs by Columbia Records, in collector's edition albums of the "Hall of Fame Series" in the early 70's. Alice's fans have ever since eagerly awaited a CD release of those rare recordings. The long wait comes finally to a happy ending with this fine British-import album by ASV-Living Era. It contains all of the aforementioned 19 songs, plus two 1933 tracks with the Rudy Vallee orchestra, issued prior to her film debut. These are all studio recordings of fairly good quality, considering they are over sixty years old. A few of these songs have been released in 1997 in a Czech-made (!) 2-CD set titled "Got Music On My Mind" (...), but like all tracks in that set, they have been transferred directly from the movie soundtracks and not from the original studio recordings. (The CD by ASV-Living Era also includes, as a bonus, five tracks similarly extracted from the soundracks of her later 1939-1943 movies, including "You'll Never Know" [1943], her best-remembered hit today, after which the album was titled). While the studio recordings are not exactly what you hear in the movie (the songs are usually differently arranged and performed with a different orchestra), they have the advantage of often presenting a superior sound quality, and free from dialogue or other noises found in the soundtrack. For that reason, too, this new album is a very welcome release that no true fan of Alice Faye's should do without. If the album deserves a word of criticism, it's only for the liner notes, which are not only too brief and superficial (as usual), but also misinforming: it begins calling Alice "a key figure of the glamorous 1930's Technicolor musical". (Technicolor musicals of the 30's starring Alice Faye??!! Name a few, please!) November 18, 2001

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