Love Letters / Feeling Good by Julie London (2009) - Romantic Jazz Vinyl Records for Date Nights & Relaxing Evenings

Like the other twofers in this series, the original liner notes are reproduced and I couldn't help but chuckle at some of the comments. Love letters, it says, is Julie's fifteenth album, except that it isn't because fifteen other albums are listed as already available. So I guess that made it her sixteenth, assuming none were omitted. Apart from that, the notes also say that the songs selected were all recent big hits. Really? Some of them were recent, but others had been hits several years before, or else my definition of recent is too narrow. But the liner notes to Feeling good are even more fun. The writer of the notes clearly didn't like the direction in which popular music was heading, being very disparaging about an English vocal quartet who he didn't name. I really don't see why anybody feels the need to disparage one artist in order to extol the virtues of another. I love Julie's music but I also love the music of the Beatles and Stones. There's room for all of them. Having disparaged mainstream pop, the writer goes on to suggest that Julie has made a modern vehicle out of Roger Miller's King of the road. But wait - Roger had his major international hit in 1965, the year in which Julie covered the song, so it couldn't be any more modern. So the writer alienated country fans to, but the music is great so I won't get upset at such inane comments.The first album, Love letters, does indeed contain a selection of songs that had been major American hits. The title track actually dates back to 1945, when Dick Haymes had a hit with it, but it was revived in the sixties, first by Ketty Lester, then by Elvis Presley. Both of those versions were bigger hits than the original version had been, so nobody could dispute that this song, at least, was a recent hit when Julie recorded this album. But I don't recall a sixties revival hit of Come on-a my house, which was a big hit in 1951 for Rosemary Clooney. Whether or not the tracks here were recent hits or not, Julie performs them all exactly as you would expect.The second album contains one song (Won't someone please belong to me) written by Julie's husband and another (Girl talk) co-written by him, so there is some original material here and it`s worth hearing. Elsewhere, there are plenty of covers, only some of which are famous. Personally, I'm not entirely convinced by Julie's so-called modern version of King of the road. It's certainly different and interesting in its way, but is it really appropriate? Another famous song that gets a major re-interpretation is Hello Dolly. Forget Louis Armstrong's version, or any other cover done with that arrangement. Julie turns the song into a slow ballad.While these albums contain the occasional surprise as I've explained, mostly what you get is Julie singing the kind of songs that her fans came to expect, in the style that they expect. And that's plenty good enough for me.