Movie Musicals On Record

Features

Description

This discography provides a comprehensive listing of the songs from motion picture musicals, and the singers who performed them on commercially available albums. Covering the period from The Jazz Singer in 1927 to Three Amigos in 1987, and including 666 albums and 6,500 song titles, the book is a companion volume to Lynch's Broadway on Record (Greenwood Press, 1987), arranged in a similar format.

While the scope is primarily American, albums of some foreign films that became popular in this country have been included. The entries are listed alphabetically by film title with the name of the company that produced it and the year it was first released. Remakes of musicial films are listed chronologically, and the original label and number are given, as well as information on the most recent reissue.

This thoroughly researched reference offers easy access to a wealth of information on the subject of recorded songs from motion picture musicals and assists the user in identifying many little-known facts, such as the names of the title-song singers, names of singers who dubbed the voices of the stars, and additional composers and lyricists where there were several contributors to the filM's score.

Also provided is a complete guide to recording availability and type, and major composer, lyricists, and musical conductor credits are given, with an alphabetical list of cast members who sing on the recording. An exhaustive source for students and scholars of film history, film music, and popular culture, this book will be a valuable addition to all university and public libraries.

Review: ?One way of bringing a successful stage musical show to a large audience is to create a film version of it. Richard Chigley Lynch observes this logical progression by creating this companion volume to his Broadway on Record (Greenwood, 1987). A total of 666 recordings of movie musicals are analyzed in entries that list record labels and numbers (with references to reissues and available compact discs), songwriters, musical directors, cast members, other performers (such as Marni Nixon, who provided Natalie Wood's singing voice in West Side Story but did not appear in the film), and musical numbers with their performers.

Occasional notes provide additional information of interest such as the availability of additional soundtrack cuts or the inclusion of spoken dialogue on the recording. The large number of entries make this book fairly complete. Lynch's working definition of a movie musical requires that musical numbers must actually be performed in the film and must in some way be concerned with the film's plot (Introduction).

It generally doesn't include films with fewer than three musical numbers, dance and opera films, short films, and foreign films that were not popular in America. Generally is the operative word here as Purple Rain, 10, and many Astaire/Rogers films are included, while Eddie and the Cruisers, Flashdance and Footloose were left out.

In addition to the basic discography, Lynch provides a chronology of films and indexes to performers and technicians (songwriters/musical directors). Claiming that an index to the 6,500 song titles would be unwieldy, the author refers us to Clive Hirschorn's The Hollywood Musical (Crown, 1981) and Nat Shapiro and Bruce Pollack'sPopular Music, 1920-1979 (Gale, 1985).

Richard Lewine and Alfred Simon's Songs of the Theater (H.=tW. Wilson, 1984) largely does the trick, too. None of these volumes quite duplicate the scope and content of Movie Musicals on Record, thus allowing Lynch's book to contribute uniquely to public and academic library performing arts reference literature.--Donald W.

Maxwell, Audio-visual Librarian, Carmel Clay Public Library, Carmel, Indiana.?-RQ