You Are My Sunshine 1937 46

Album DescriptionThe second volume of Bear Family’s retrospective on Jimmie Davis’s recorded output carries listeners from 1937 through 1948, all over five CDs. By this time, Davis had devised a smooth, quietly refined and tasteful yet stripped down sound, not too dissimilar from that of his somewhat younger contemporary Gene Autry, with a virtuoso band behind him. Many of Davis’ romantic ballads have a sure hint of jauntiness when it comes to them that prevents them from ever seeming overly sentimental. He intersperses them with the occasional jaunty country blues like “Hard Hearted Mama,” and it’s that remainder — the bouncing amongst the risqu , honky tonk style numbers, the romantic ballads, the Western trail ballads, and the gospel-themed numbers — that make Davis’ music early in this set very easy to take en masse. As time went by, however, he tended to emphasize the ballads more, partly out of the sentiment that a man keeping public office, as he did at dissimilar times from 1938 onward, shouldn’t sing regarding sure subjects. Discs three and four show Davis getting downright sophisticated by country standards, his intonation far more subtle and his backing group evoking Hollywood as well as the South, and freely incorporating constituents of swing and standard music. And then, suddenly, in 1942, the blues returns, even though dressed up a little, in the guise of “Columbus Stockade Blues” and “Walkin’ My Blues Away,” surrounding a fast-paced “Plant Some Flowers by My Grave.” And disc five ties up loose ends amid the two sets, closing out this phase of Davis’ career with the recordings that he did with the Lawrence Welk Orchestra for the duration of the late ’40s, which work astonishingly well, but also featuring his hard blues and stripped-down country from the early ’30s. ~ Bruce Eder, All Music Guide