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Nearly a decade after releasing its first Johnny Preston anthology, Running Bear, Bear Family compiled a companion volume, Charming Billy, to reissue Preston's stereo recordings. Charming Billy not only offers stereo versions of many songs that appear on Running Bear, but a number of unique recordings as well. The newly reissued songs include several covers of R&B songs, which is the style Preston personally identified with even though his producers pushed him toward a novelty-oriented rockabilly style. The arrangements and performances on these cuts are little different from his other pop-rockabilly crossover recordings, though. Bear Family usually releases complete recordings packages, but their two Preston collections, even in combination, fail to account for all of his hits, let alone all of his Mercury sides and unreleased recordings. Those interested in having all of Preston's chart hits in one place will find them on the two-disc anthology Feel So Fine: The Mercury Recordings 1959-1962, which contains all of Preston's commercially released Mercury cuts. ~ Greg Adams
