Sue Thompson - Sad Movies: Singles & Albums Collection 1950-62 (2024)

Born in Missouri in 1925, Sue Thompson was performing at the age of seven, but it was not until after working at a defence plant in WWII and having a daughter in a failed marriage that she started singing professionally at the end of the 1940s. She met and married bandleader Dude Martin and made her first records with him in 1950, going on to develop a solo career in the early 1950s, although it took the best part of a decade to make an impact on the charts, having her first hit with “Sad Movies (Make Me Cry)” in 1961, her youthful image defying the fact that she was 36 years old by then. This 59 track 2-CD collection features the A and B sides of her singles on the Mercury, Decca, Columbia and Hickory labels from these years, and the tracks from her albums “Meet Sue Thompson” and “Two Of A Kind” not otherwise released on singles. It includes releases with Dude Martin’s Round-Up Gang and Hank Penny, whom she married after divorcing Martin. It features her Top 5 US hits “Sad Movies (Make Me Cry)” and “Norman” and her other chart entries from these years “Two Of A Kind”, “If The Boy Only Knew”, “Have A Good Time” and “James (Hold The Ladder Steady)”. She was a highly versatile performer, equally at home with the country-flavoured material where she started her career and to which she gravitated in later years, and the teen-styled pop with which she enjoyed her success, and this a fairly comprehensive overview of the first decade and more of her career.