Forty-two songs cut between November 1940 and August 1946, and the perfect companion to Bear Family's It's Magic box set – anyone who's been even tempted to own that will have to get this more modestly priced precursor to that material. Day's period singing with Les Brown is, today, regarded with a degree of love and affection reserved for Ella Fitzgerald's era with Chick Webb, or Frank Sinatra's work with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey. Yet Sony Music's own releases devoted to Doris Day and Les Brown spread the music around to several different CDs, and suffered from sound that, today, seems substandard. These newly remastered tracks, offered in chronological order, including one previously unissued song ("Are You Still in Love with Me"), not only display a far richer, warmer sound, but have been presented with the kind of care that is normally reserved for the best parts of a label's catalog – which these sides definitely are. Day's voice during this period (she was 16 when she cut her first sides with Brown) was an astonishingly expressive instrument.

I Have Dreamed (1961). "The mood of these songs is dreamy," writes annotator Pete Martin, thus defining the theme of Doris Day's second LP of 1961. As usual, someone - Day herself, her conductor, a Columbia Records A&R person - had chosen a theme for her album and picked a group of songs, most of them interwar standards that derived from stage musicals or movies. Dreaminess was a concept familiar to any band singer of the 1940s, and Day was such a singer, so she certainly knew her way around "I'll Buy That Dream," even if the hit versions of the 1945 song were by such competitors as Helen Forrest (with Dick Haymes) and Kitty Kallen (as vocalist with Harry James' band)…

This 2012 collection of 69 songs on three discs is truly awesome! All songs were mastered from the original Columbia recordings and sound great. Since this collection spans her career (recordings from the 40's, 50's and 60's), a special kudos must go out to the unlisted balance engineer; a very smooth and even run! Classic track after classic track, like The Very Thought Of You (1950), Dream A Little Dream Of Me (1957), Sentimental Journey (1945), It's Magic (1948) and Happy Talk (1961) to name a few. The first eight tracks on Disc #3 are from her great film role, "Calamity Jane," in which she overwhelmed Howard Keel, who was nobody's idea of a second fiddle.

One of the premier postwar vocalists and actresses, with a strikingly pure voice that sums up American music's glamorous era. Doris Day packed four careers into one lifetime, two each in music and movies. The pity is that all most people remember are her movies, from Teacher's Pet (1957) onward, as the quintessential all-American girl, cast opposite such icons of masculinity as Clark Gable and Rock Hudson. She also transposed this following to television at the end of the '60s with a situation comedy that lasted into the early '70s. If most people remember her as a singer, it's usually for such pop hits as "Secret Love" and her Oscar-winning "Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)," which became her signature tune. But before all of that, from 1939 until the end of the '40s, Doris Day was one of the hottest, sultriest swing-band vocalists in music…

The songs heard on The Love Album first came to light nearly 30 years after their recording, but they should never have lingered in the vaults so long; what's more, if an LP had appeared on schedule, it would have easily remained Doris Day's finest album of the '60s. But neither her commercial fortunes nor the market for Tin Pan Alley songs (even standards) appeared particularly bright in 1967. Day had just broken with her record label Columbia, and was producing herself for the first time; and most of her contemporaries were either fighting the tide of pop culture or only keeping their head above water by covering new standards such as "Sunny" or "The Windmills of Your Mind." Day chose instead to sing a collection of songs whose cumulative age was something like 350 years old (although the chestnut "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" had been revived by Elvis Presley only a few years earlier)…