Dean Martin - Welcome To My World (2014) [Hi-Res]

By mid-1967, it seemed as if the soft rock, country-pop musical style that arranger Ernie Freeman and producer Jimmy Bowen had developed for Dean Martin on the number one hit "Everybody Loves Somebody" three years earlier finally had run its course. Martin kept making records in the same style, but sales began to fall off. Then something odd happened. Reprise, his record label, looked back to the 1965 album Dean Martin Hits Again and found a particularly slavish version of the formula in a cover of the 1936 song "In the Chapel in the Moonlight." Belatedly released as a single in the summer of 1967, it became a Top 40 hit and topped the easy listening charts, Martin's biggest hit in two years. Suddenly, the formula didn't seem moribund anymore, especially after a newly recorded single, "Little Ole Wine Drinker, Me" (which touched on Martin's image as a boozer), followed it into the Top 40. Reprise quickly assembled an album and named it after "Chapel"'s B-side, a 1965 recording of "Welcome to My World" that had appeared previously on (Remember Me) I'm the One Who Loves You. Producer Jimmy Bowen commissioned Martin versions of a couple of old country hits that had recently been made into pop hits by Martin imitators Engelbert Humperdinck ("Release Me") and Tom Jones ("The Green, Green Grass of Home"). Martin aced them, naturally, despite some bizarre electric piano playing on the former. Welcome to My World may have been another of Reprise's mix-and-match Martin LPs, but it was a successful one, restoring a measure of his commercial clout. ~ William Ruhlmann