Sarah Vaughan's Snowbound: Songs for a Snowy Day

The weather has been unusually cold in northwest Tennessee as of late, and in the city of Martin, the snowfall we had a few days ago has caused campus to close and classes to be canceled at the university, to the great joy, I suppose, of the whole student body. The landscape all around our house is uncharacteristically white, and the cold temperatures have made me want to dust off my copy of one of Sarah Vaughan's most underrated concept albums: Snowbound, cut for Roulette Records in 1963 and boasting some beautiful lush, moody string arrangements by Don Costa. Of course, the winter season has occasionally been the subject of some noteworthy albums, such as Dean Martin's A Winter Romance, which also includes some Christmas songs as part of its wintry theme. And then there are Yuletide albums that also include tunes about the winter, such as June Christy's This Time of Year. But the concept behind Snowbound is slightly different. Here we have a record that uses a snowy day as a setting to bring together a group of well-chosen songs about love lost and found, about longing and reminiscing, and about joy and despair, all of them enveloped in a warm, dreamy atmosphere that invites us to sit by the fire and gaze at the snow-covered world outside. In short. the perfect soundtrack for days like these.

As Will Friedwald rightly observes in his Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers, the thirteen albums that Sarah Vaughan released on Roulette between 1960 and 1963 (yes, that is really about three LPs a year!) must be counted among the high points in her career:

Her output [for Roulette] . . . was massive both in quality and quantity. . . . If almost any other singer had done thirteen albums of this caliber in her entire career, we would have to assess her as a major artist. . . . Yet with Vaughan, it's just a drop in the bucket in the context of her total catalogue. (492)

This was a period in her career when Vaughan was paying as much attention to her jazz albums as to her adult pop projects, and needless to say, Snowbound belongs to the latter group. The title track, which opens the LP, is one of the coziest, dreamiest tunes in the whole disc, and it sets the scene and the tone for the intermingling of songs that deal with all different facets of love, from the excitement of its discovery ("I Hadn't Anyone Till You," "Stella by Starlight," "Oh, You Crazy Moon") to the grief caused by its loss ("What's Good About Goodbye?", "Glad to Be Unhappy"). Vaughan and Costa also select one of George and Ira Gershwin's lesser-known compositions, "Blah, Blah, Blah," as well as one of Johnny Mercer's most evocative lyrics, "I Remember You," with its clever internal rhymes set to a haunting melody by Victor Schertzinger. The album, which also features two songs by Sammy Cahn usually associated with Frank Sinatra, "Look to Your Heart" and "I Fall in Love Too Easily," closes on a high note with Vaughan's pensive, soothing treatment of the ballad "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most," whose lyrics announce the coming of the spring while at the same time offering a word of warning about the dangers of a deceitful spring romance.

Arranger Don Costa

In spite of the undeniable quality of Vaughan's vocal performances and of Costa's tasteful arrangements, Snowbound is, as John Bush puts it in his review for the Allmusic website, "an overlooked gem from Sarah Vaughan's Roulette years." That is actually putting it mild, if we bear in mind that, other than on the essential—and rather expensive—eight-CD box set The Complete Sarah Vaughan Roulette Sessions (Mosaic Records), this album can only be found in CD format on an out-of-print British two-fer that couples it with 1964's The Lonely Hours. Owing to the sheer size of Vaughan's recorded output throughout her long career, it is perhaps not very surprising that this lovely album remains hard to find. Yet it is a notable void in her always impressive catalog that we wish some reissue company would see fit to fill—especially when snowy days like these come around!