A Touch Of Rome

They Say...

Review by William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide

In the mid-'50s, Heritage Records brought several Broadway songwriters into the recording studio to make albums of their compositions, perhaps none more often than Harold Rome. Rome first made a 10" album of songs from his current show, Fanny, playing piano and singing with accompaniment by bassist Jack Messing and drummer Herb Harris in 1954. Then he returned alone to cut songs from some of his early shows, such as Pins and Needles and Call Me Mister, for another 10" album called A Touch of Rome. In 1956, he came back with Harris, guitarist Allan Hanlon, and bassists Milt Hinton and Al Harris to do a 12" LP called Rome-antics that featured songs from shows to which he had contributed in the late '40s and early '50s, notably Wish You Were Here. In the 1970s, DRG Records acquired the Heritage Records catalog and combined the three Rome albums into the 1980 Touch of Rome compilation. The songs are assembled in the chronological order of the shows from which they come, beginning with Pins and Needles and ending with Fanny. Some of the songs became hits outside the theater and are therefore more familiar: "Sunday in the Park," "Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones," "South America Take It Away," "Wish You Were Here." But the delights of the collection are the clever tunes from shows that flopped or never got to Broadway, such as the two numbers from the short-lived 1950 revue Alive and Kicking, "Cry Baby" and "French With Tears." The latter is written in what might be called "Franglish," a hilarious combination of French and English. Rome, who frequently wrote for revues, could be extremely witty in such songs as "Military Life (The Jerk Song)" from Call Me Mister and "The Money Song" from That's the Ticket. Listeners encountering his own versions of these songs for the first time on this compilation are bound to be reminded of one of his followers, Randy Newman, though Rome has a better and more expressive singing voice.