New Pop Records

As a girl, France's Queen Marie Antoinette took music lessons from Composer Christoph Gluck, may have tried her hand at composing herself. One little number, Chanson de Marie Antoinette, based on a melody supposedly by the Queen, has long been part of the standard vocal repertory. Last week, revarnished and renamed My Heart Cries for You, the Chanson had become 1951's first big hit. Its sprightly tempo had been slowed by Conductor-Composer Percy Faith to a lazy waltz, and its elegant tale of pastoral courtship changed to a monotonous lover's lament.* Result: the song is a favorite with crooners, hillbilly specialists and barroom baritones. Six of its eleven recorded versions (including those by Guy Mitchell, Dinah Shore and Jimmy Wakely) are listed on Billboard and Variety popularity charts.

Adapter Faith thinks he knows why Marie Antoinette's old song has done so well. Analyzing dozens of such popular favorites as The Last Roundup and Don't Fence Me In, he has concluded that "practically all of them are made up of the same three chords: tonic, dominant and subdominant. People like to hear those chords whether they know what they are or not. The little French tune had the chords. The rest was easy."

Other new pop records:

Bobby Hackett Jazz Session (Columbia; 2 sides LP). One of the best of the trumpeters blows his sweet and hot way through such standbys as A Room with a View and Royal Garden Blues.

Guys and Dolls (Decca; 2 sides LP). With no topnotch singers and some out & out croakers, this original-cast recording of the Broadway hit still manages to be great fun.

A Treasury of Immortal Performances (Victor; 6 vols. 45 r.p.m.). To match Caruso, Paderewski and Kreisler in its classical Treasury series, Victor has combed its old jazz and pop files, reissued such collector's items as Fats Waller's Honeysuckle Rose, Bunny Berigan's In a Mist, Benny Goodman's Goodbye.

If (Perry Como; Victor, 45 r.p.m.). Como gives his usual relaxed treatment to a climbing new ballad (no kin to Kipling's If) that sounds a little like the old wedding favorite, Because.

You Go to My Head (Tallulah Bankhead;. Columbia). For her debut as a pop singer, Tallulah has borrowed Marlene Dietrich's sub-basement baritone and German accent with results that will please curio collectors if not musicians.

* Sample: My heart cries for you, Sighs for you, Dies for you . . .

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