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Released August 27, 2002

This excellent compilation from Spain is both more and less than its title suggests. Since its selections run only through 1946, it could hardly present Lena Horne's complete RCA Victor masters; the singer made her last recordings for RCA in 1976. What it does contain is the whole of Horne's first stint at RCA, 1941-1945. On the other hand, there is more here than just her solo RCA recordings and her 1946 tracks for the tiny Black & White label. Also included are her appearances as the featured singer with the orchestras of Noble Sissle, Charlie Barnet, Artie Shaw, and Teddy Wilson, as well as Horne's vocals with the Dixieland Jazz Group, the resident band on the NBC radio show The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street. In total, the 44 tracks spread across two CDs and, running two hours and fifteen minutes, present all of Horne's known recordings from 1936 to 1946. (In 2002, RCA uncovered three previously unknown Horne tracks from 1944 and put them on the Bluebird compilation The Young Star.) By placing these recordings in chronological order, the set traces her development from a pleasant but relatively undistinguished band singer of 18 to a 29-year-old veteran who had made her mark on records and in the movies. She is frequently given blues material to perform, and while she manages with it, her real strength is in the jazz- and blues-influenced show tunes of George Gershwin ("The Man I Love," "How Long Has This Been Going On?," "My Man's Gone Now") and Harold Arlen ("Stormy Weather," "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," "One for My Baby [And One More for the Road]," "As Long as I Live"), though she also has a way with the sophisticated lyrics of Cole Porter ("At Long Last Love") and Lorenz Hart ("Where or When," "Glad to Be Unhappy," "Little Girl Blue"). U.S. retrospectives on Horne tend to be brief samplers; this collection presents her early work as a comprehensive whole, and it does so with good annotations and sound. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide

TRACKS

1. That's What Love Did to Me
2. I Take to You
3. Good-For-Nothin' Joe
4. The Captain and His Men
5. You're My Thrill
6. Haunted Town
7. St. Louis Blues
8. Careless Love
9. Aunt Hagar's Blues
10. Beale Street Blues
11. Love Me a Little Little
12. Don't Take Your Love From Me
13. Out of Nowhere
14. Prisoner of Love
15. Stormy Weather
16. What Is This Thing Called Love?
17. Ill Wind
18. The Man I Love
19. Where or When
20. I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues
21. Mad About the Boy
22. Moanin' Low

DISC 2

23. I Didn't Know About You
24. One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)
25. As Long as I Live
26. I Ain't Got Nothin' but the Blues
27. How Long Has This Been Going On?
28. Whispering
29. Just Squeeze Me (But Don't Tease Me)
30. You Go to My Head
31. Glad to Be Unhappy
32. Old Fashioned Love
33. Little Girl Blue
34. At Long Last Love
35. More Than You Know
36. Blue Prelude
37. Hesitating Blues
38. Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen
39. It's a Rainy Day
40. Beale Street Blues
41. Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child
42. Frankie and Johnny, Pts. 1-2
43. My Man's Gone Now
44. I Can't Give You Anything but Love

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