Della Reese

Della Reese

• Ceremony was on July 12, 1994

Television Star for Della Reese

Location: 7060 Hollywood Boulevard
https://www.google.com/maps/place/7060+Hollywood+Boulevard

Della

We have always admired Della Reese's singing and were enormously pleased when the opportunity came for us to bring her to RCA Victor. We began her Victor history with a single re-cording, Don't You Know, that underlined her warm, lyrical quality in ballads. In preparing her first album for us we felt that now Della's considerable capacities for swinging should be given freedom.

We decided on Neal Hefti as the arranger and conductor for these sessions because he has the range of experience and insight as well as the technical skills to provide exactly the right complement to Della's style.

Our role as A&R men is to arrange marriages-between a song and an artist, between an artist and an arranger. We wanted to take special care with Della's first Victor album, and accordingly we had at least half a dozen conferences with Neal before he even began to write.

Della was on the West Coast during some of the preparatory sessions. We'd arrange for her to be in a studio with a piano, call her, discuss the tunes and arrangements, and she in turn would send us tapes of her ideas.

What resulted, therefore, was an album in which the framework for each song has a distinctive character-the best possible that we felt could be devised both for the song and for Della's musical personality.

We want to make clear how much respect we have for Della's talent. She's young, has already accomplished so much, and has years to grow even more. We believe she will be one of the greats of show business, not just an artist with a few hits. In fact, we'll go on record as saying that Della Reese will be among the top ten popular entertainers in the next decade.

Della's career has been remarkably diversified. She was a member of the gospel group of the nonpareil Mahalia Jackson by the time she was thirteen and during her college years at Wayne University in Detroit, she formed her own gospel unit. "The Meditation Singers."

Della began to branch out into blues and pop music at the Flame Club in Detroit. She gathered more experience with Erskine Hawkins, and, more recently, as an increasingly successful headline performer in clubs, theaters. and on radio and TV. She's also been in films (Columbia's Let's Rock) and her reputation has become international.

We feel that now on RCA Victor, Della Reese's career will reach even more impressive levels. And we fully intend to select those songs and arrangers that will make it possible for the public to know all of Della Reese. She is unique in the popular field in that she can do so many things well. In this album you'll hear how warm she can be and how fully she can swing.

We suggest you pay special note to the way she uses words. It's very much like the way a musician uses an instrument. She bends, bites and projects the lyrics of a song in a way that no artist we know can do. We are delighted to have helped bring this album into being.
Hugo+ Luigi

Side 1

• The Lady Is a Tramp
• If I Could Be with You One Hour Tonight
• Let's Get Away from It All
• Thou Swell
• You're Driving Me Crazy
• Goody Goody

• And The Angels Sing
• Baby
• Won't You Please Come Home
• I'm Beginning to See The Light
• I'll Get By
• Blue Skies
• Someday (You'll Want Me to Want You)

On Strings of Blue

If you listen to Della Reese long enough, you will swear that she understands every emotion you have ever experienced - no matter who you are!

Very often, she seems to get ahold of your deepest feelings and you find them amplified ... intensified... as she articulates them in song.

The selections in this album are of a mood - blue-tinged... blues-tinged . .. but not really the blues. Every one is a love song in its way, the vibrant Della testifying eloquently on two tracks that there is even such a thing as a love song to a city. She indulges in soulful reveries, a vast string section soaring elegantly yet anchored firmly behind her by a strong beat and the unadorned truth of Kirk Stuart's piano and Howard Roberts' guitar. Some of her songs here are soliloquies; some are intimate communications to a lover; some surely are what we would have said if only we had had one more chance. Lee Magid, Della's manager and producer of the album, suggested the concept of the album to ABC's Bob Thiele, director of artists and repertoire. Thiele gave Magid the green light and suggested Sid Feller as arranger and conductor. The album features stunning melodic setting and instrumentation of lush strings (violins, violas, celli), set off by a contemporary rhythm section of Hollywood's finest musicians, featuring the guitar and piano as solo blues voices. Neither Feller nor Magid planned any gospel flavor but when Della got into some of the material, her fervor evolved the gospel sound that has pervaded a good part of her music since she was a youngster singing in church choirs. Although several of the pieces here have been performed quite successfully on record by other artists, Della Reese infuses every one with such personal new significance that past tense-type credit lines are superfluous. Sid Feller, well known for the inspired orchestrations he has written for Ray Charles, Matt Munro, Peggy Lee and Doris Day, arranged and conducted the music. "It was a first marriage for Della and me," he reports of the association. "I have listened to Della a lot but being with her in a recording studio is a revelation. She never needs more than one quick run-through of a number with the orchestra before she's ready for a perfect take. She knows how she feels about a song," Feller enthuses, "and she brings so much meaning to everything she approaches. I have never seen a singer improvise so creatively as Della does in the midst of recording. Her on-the-spot lyric changes are the kind of improvements composers wish they had thought of."

Side One

• On The South Side of Chicago
• I Had to Know My Way Around
• Mean to Me
• Something Cool
• I Heard You Cried Last Night
• Walking By The River

• I Don't Know Enough About You
• A House Is Not a Home
• Do I Worry
• The Show Must Go On
• Some of My Best Friends are The Blues
• I'm Coming Home Los Angeles