Twenty-three-year-old
Tony Bennett recorded and released his first single for Columbia Records, "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams" (with its B-side, "I Wanna Be Loved"), in April 1950. From then until the end of 1956, he recorded 87 tracks released contemporaneously on 35 Columbia singles and two LPs,
Cloud 7 (February 7, 1955) and
Tony (January 14, 1957), not counting compilations. On January 1, 2007,
Bennett's 1956 recordings joined those from previous years in entering the public domain in Europe, where copyright extends only 50 years. The British label Proper Records took advantage of that to release
Young Tony, a four-CD box set largely devoted to
Bennett's 1950-1956 recordings, containing 82 selections with a running time of about three hours and 54 minutes, a length that might have been contained (though just barely) on three discs. The collection, arranged chronologically by recording date, includes all of
Bennett's Columbia recordings from April 17, 1950, to September 24, 1954, except "Let's Make Love," from that first recording session. But having featured nearly all of
Bennett's first 26 singles, the set then excludes most of his 45s from 1955 and 1956, employing only the A-side of the last of them, "Just in Time," the song from the Broadway musical Bells Are Ringing that reached number 46 in the Billboard singles chart. That means other chart entries "Can You Find It in Your Heart," "From the Candy Store on the Corner to the Chapel on the Hill," "Happiness Street (Corner Sunshine Square)," and "The Autumn Waltz" are missing. All the tracks from
Cloud 7 and
Tony are included, however, as are three tracks, "While the Music Plays On," "Darn That Dream," and "I Can't Believe That You're in Love with Me," that were recorded in 1954 but not issued until years later. Proper concludes the set by adding in some non-Columbia material: a low-fidelity version of "In the Middle of an Island" (a
Bennett hit in 1957) with special lyrics sung on television on The Nat King Cole Show in December 1956 and the contents of the frequently licensed Roulette Records LP
Strike Up the Band, a collaboration with
Count Basie & His Orchestra recorded in November 1958.