A few years later (in terms of both recording dates and my first acquaintance) came another highlights album. People tend to think of this as the “original cast” album, and it was so billed. But, though it presents several of the original cast members, including Anne Brown (Bess), Todd Duncan,(Porgy), Edward Matthews (Jake), the Eva Jessye Choir, and is again conducted by Smallens (with the “Decca Symphony Orchestra”), it is “original” only to the 1942 Broadway revival, at the Majestic Theatre. The soprano and baritone leads again take over most everyone’s music, and in this case that’s regrettable. For although Elzy, Harriett Jackson (Clara), and Warren Coleman (Crown) were in the revival the album is based on, and Avon Long (Sportin’ Life) is actually on the album for “There’s A Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York,” all their other songs (“Summertime,” “My Man’s Gone Now,” “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” and even Crown’s part in the “Oh, What You Want Wid Bess?” scene are sung by Brown and Duncan. It’s not that they don’t sing them well enough; it’s that we’re missing the more accurate picture we might have had of the opera and its early performers. Still, this recording was most valuable for the presence of the original leads and of several sequences not included in the Victor set. ^(I)It was rendered nearly unlistenable in its LP re-release (my 78s still sound fine); I have not heard it on CD.

In 1951, Columbia released the first full-length recording of Porgy and Bess. It included more music than had yet been heard onstage or on records. Its stars were two fine New York City Opera singers, Lawrence Winters and Camilla Williams, and with them several of Porgy‘s old-timers (Edward Matthews, Helen Dowdy, and J. Rosamond Johnson, who also trained the chorus), as well as Long, now allowed his full role. For listeners who, like me, had yet to experience the work in the theatre, this gave us our first picture of its scope, of the communal life in which those of the principals were embedded, and it’s a performance that has worn well. Like the ’42 album, this one was worsened in re-release (one of those twin-channelings of monaural originals). But that was corrected by its inclusion in the excellent Sony Masterworks Collection on CD.