Best known for his film score The Big Country, Jerome Moross also wrote Broadway musicals, ballets and concert works, all in a distinctively American vein, tonal and melodic, as well as drawing on folk-tunes and popular songs of his day. This collection combines Moross’s ballet, Frankie and Johnny – the first truly “American” ballet in form, content and creative personnel – with world première recordings of the cantata Those Everlasting Blues and the dance-cantata Willie The Weeper. According to the composer the idea of the latter work was “to so mix the singing and dancing that you didn’t know where the singers began or where the dancers ended”.