Patsy Cline - Birth Of A Country Legend (1996)

This is going to be an unusual post. It's a review of a very good, country music CD with a sociological perspective, and I believe it's worth reading even if you're not interested in Patsy Cline or country music. What's under discussion here is one of the seemingly endless, posthumous releases of Cline's recorded work, but this disc, Birth of a Country Legend , is unique. It's a rare, live CD featuring seventeen songs Cline sang on her visits to Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts . For those of you who are too young to have grown up with him, Godfrey was one of early television's legendary pioneers, and his importance cannot be overstated. In the 1950s, along with Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, Milton Berle, Sid Caeser, Steve Allen, and others, he helped make the young, popular medium the primary source of home entertainment. Godfrey's talk and variety series was a ratings juggernaut due to his downho...