Decca Records had the original Broadway cast album for the 1946 musical Annie Get Your Gun, starring
Ethel Merman and Ray Middleton; MGM Records put out the soundtrack album for the 1950 film version of the show starring
Betty Hutton and
Howard Keel, and Capitol Records released the soundtrack to the 1957 TV broadcast starring
Mary Martin and John Raitt. But Columbia Records did not have its own version of
Irving Berlin's classic score until company president Goddard Lieberson put two of his contract artists,
Doris Day and
Robert Goulet, in a recording studio in 1963. Actually, it was two studios:
Day was in Los Angeles with her regular producer, Irving Townsend, while
Goulet was in New York with his producer Jim Foglesong. Before either of the stars made an appearance on the disc, however, the album already had made an impression on the listener different from its predecessors. For one thing, it was the first recording of the score in stereo. (The LP was issued in both stereo and mono formats.) For another, as became apparent from the new "Overture" that led things off, there were sprightly new orchestrations from Phil Lang, replacing the old ones by
Robert Russell Bennett. And the second track was a song from the show that had been dropped from all previous recordings, "Colonel Buffalo Bill," sung by Leonard Stokes and a chorus. Soon, however,
Goulet and
Day were justifying their top billing. It might have been expected that
Day, who had a familiarity with Western tomboys, having played Calamity Jane onscreen and sung the Sammy Fain/Paul Francis Webster score, which was basically a pale imitation of that for Annie Get Your Gun, would have been more at home than
Goulet, who was more accustomed to playing Sir Lancelot in Camelot. The opposite was the case.
Day, singing the bowdlerized lyrics to songs like "Doin' What Comes Natur'lly" that had been introduced for the movie version, essentially phoned in her performance, doing her best on ballads like "They Say It's Wonderful," but giving little believable characterization to her Annie Oakley, while
Goulet not only seemed perfectly cast as rival sharpshooter Frank Butler, but also found nuances to songs like "I'm a Bad, Bad Man" that his predecessors had missed. By the end, the listener longed to see him play the role on-stage, just with a different co-star. [Harmony also relased the CD.] ~ William Ruhlmann