The decade of Perry Como recordings that is covered in this album is the heart of one of the most fabulous careers in show business annals. These performances run from the rising Como of May 1945 ( If I Loved You ) to the settled, assured star heard in "Chincherinchee", recorded in September 1956. The others, spread across the years between these two dates, include some of the most enduring tunes in the repertory of popular songs sung by the man who has made a career of relaxation.

Perry had just come into his own when he made the first of these records. After six years as a vocalist with Ted Weems' band, Perry had been on the verge of going back to barbering in 1942, when he was offered a sustaining radio show of his own at $100 a week. He took it. The next year he made his first record for RCA, Goodbye Sue, and in 1945, he got his first million copy seller, 'Till the End of Time.

The knowing way in which Perry has picked his songs since then is exemplified by this cannily mixed program of evergreen standards and warmly melodic show tunes, of the well-established older songs and discerningly selected newer ones.

All of the numbers on Side One, for example, originated in the tuneful Twenties; yet they remain eternally fresh, particularly when they are given the soothing Como treatment. Al Jolson had a hand in writing Me and My Shadow but for the better part of thirty years this has been Ted Lewis' song, an unquenchable part of his routine which has given him an opportunity for some gentle kidding of his highly stylized gestures and mannerisms.

Without a Song and More Than You Know were both written by Vincent Youmans for a 1929 musical, "Great Day." This was long before the day of complete recordings of musicals with their original casts.  The stars who headed the cast of "Great Day" may well be unfamiliar to today's record collectors—they included Mayo Methot, who preceded Lauren Bacall as Mrs. Humphrey Bogart; Allan Pryor, son of a military band leader whose fame once ranked second only to that of the illustrious John Phillip Sousa; Walter Kelly, a monologist, who was better known as "The Virginia Judge"; and the comedy team of Miller and Lyles. However, Without a Song and More Than You Know were both immediate successes on record—Without a Song as a vehicle by which Paul Whitman could show off the "straight" singing potential of the young scat singer with his Rhythm Boys, Bing Crosby; More Than You Know as a frame for Helen Morgan's delicate, tragedy-edged voice.

Two years earlier, the prolific Irving Berlin had produced one of the most joyous songs ever written, Blue Skies. He had every reason to let his joy spill over into his song: he had recently married Ellin Mackay, heiress to the Postal Telegraph fortune (a notably happy and long lasting marriage), he was in the midst of one of the most fruitful periods of his long career as a songwriter, and he was well on his way to building a vast personal fortune from his songs. He was also blissfully unaware that the impending market crash of 1929 would all but wipe out both his fortune and that of his wealthy father-in-law.

Aside from Sweet Adeline, no other songs ever written capture the happily wistful, far-ago feeling of the wee small hours as completely as the two with which Perry closes his first side: My Melancholy Baby and Girl of My Dreams. As long as men have memories and as long as there are women to be remembered, the nostalgic longing in these two songs will be warm and alive.

For Side Two, Perry leans toward more recent times, leavened by the oldest song in the collection, Oh, How I Miss You Tonight, and Fats Waller's quarter-of-a-century-old cry of happy resignation, I've Got a Feeling I'm Falling. The two show tunes in this group come from the middle 1940s. They Say It's Wonderful was written by the indefatigable (and unceasingly successful) Irving Berlin for "Annie Get Your Gun" in 1946. Ethel Merman and Ray Middleton sang it in the original Broadway production but Perry makes it on his own here. If I Loved You, from Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1945 show, "Carousel," was also originally a duet, this time between John Raitt and Jan Clayton, and again Como calmly delivers the whole thing himself.