The looks and poise of a Vogue model and the mentholated singing voice – all these helped launch Polly Bergen on a career that began in the late `40s and still thrives today. TV audiences saw her being panel of that era”s number-one TV game show, To Tell the Truth. Onscreen in the classic thriller Cape Fear (1962), she played the terrified wife of a lawyer (Gregory Peck) stalked by a man he helped convict. A year later, Doris Day gave her a brutal Swedish massage in Move Over, Darling. In the 1980s she partnered Robert Mitchum in the hit TV mini-series The Winds Of War and its sequel War And Remembrance.

But it was singing that had made her famous. This CD contains almost every side she cut before 1957, when she burst into prominence with an Emmy-winning TV portrayal of the legendary torch singer Helen Morgan. Earlier on, Bergen had recorded a scattered pile of hillbilly tunes (the by-product of her birth in Tennessee), novelty kitsch, and a fine first album of torch songs, heard here in its entirety.

In 1955 she made a ten-inch LP of intimate club material, Little Girl Blue. The small ensemble gives the album a floating, inebriated midnight feel; untied to tempo, Bergen pores over words, her heart on her sleeve. ”When The World Was Young,” a then-new French chanson with English words by Johnny Mercer, typifies the three-act story-songs she favoured; portraying a jaded, world-weary sophisticate, Bergen sings with tearful eyes and full-tilt drama.

Additional Details

Label: Sepia Records

Genre: Adult Contemporary/MOR

Release Date: 05/08/07

UPC: 5055122110934