Three Songs from The Four Aces

For share #2 of this early holiday season, I am pleased to present three songs from The Four Aces.

I would be even more pleased if I were presenting five songs from The Four Aces, or even four. Here's the story behind this share. I remember having a few Christmas 45s growing up in the late 60's, in addition to the four LPs, one of which was Bing Crosby - big surprise :-) Two of the 45s I played as a young child were "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" by Brenda Lee and "Jingle Bell Rock" by Bobby Helms. These were original release 45s of those songs. So a few months ago I decided to look through the old 45s in my basement and see if those records had survived. No trace of them, but I did find an original 7 inch, 5 song EP by the Four Aces, released in 1956, eight years older than me. So, this record has been hauled around with my stuff for many years, and has been in the family for 54 years now. Time for a resurrection...

Cut ahead to now. I cleaned up the record as much as possible with the materials on hand, but succeeded in getting only three songs transferred to digital. The other two were not salvagable from the record.

The bad - there is still a lot of noise in the rips. I didn't want to noise-remove too much and ruin the music that is there, so there is still a lot of surface noise. The good, though, is that the remarkable vocal parts of the Four Aces seem to float above the white noise. You can still appreciate their beautiful interpretations of these three songs. Unfortunately, "Silent Night" and "O Little town of Bethlehem" remain unripped.

Please enjoy The Four Aces, and rest assured that future shares will be cleaner. This one has sentimental value to me, so I hope you all enjoy the music.