Sorry, had to change computers…
To elaborate: I suggest going with the Elvis Presley collection above because then you don’t have to pay more money buying Sunrise (all the early pre-RCA stuff, which to many ears is the most essential stuff, as it’s considered the beginning of the popular knowledge/acceptance of rock and roll) and then shelling out for his first and second Golden Records packages. You might be better served by going the other route, if you aren’t interested in Elvis’ Sun-era stuff, but you’ll also be missing a lot of context for the decade in the process. All these individual albums, singles collections, soundtracks, etc. are absorbed in the box set I listed before, so unless you’re obsessed with having stereo remixes of the songs or something, you’ll basically have everything.
Buddy Holly is the wellspring for The Beatles, The Hollies, The Rolling Stones and many others. This double-disc anthology is probably the best hit-single-and-essential-album-cut collection available, and will probably save a lot of money on unnecessary full-length albums.
Pretty much everything you must have by Fats Domino is available on this compact disc. I have the box set, but the cuts on this single disc seem to be the ones I hit most frequently.
Little Richard is another necessity, and I’d say this has all you need without any fluff…it’s a very fat-free disc, with not a clunker in the bunch.
For Jerry Lee Lewis, I’d go to this one and not worry too much. The bigger box sets are pretty good and informative, but if you want to touch on the stuff that most listeners would know, this is all you need.
I’ve got a soft spot for The Platters, and this covers the basics in fine form.
When it comes down to individual one-hit wonders and lesser lights, you’ll need to go the compilation route with multiple artists, I’d say. Good collections of this music are plentiful, so it’s simply a matter of picking the listings you like. I tend to stick to major-label anthologies, or recordings on Original Sound or Rhino.
I would avoid K-Tel collections like the plague, as they invariably will have stereo re-recordings of the music with maybe one member of the original group present. Similarly, as a general rule, if you see collections that seem too good to be true for too little money, you’ll be very sad you didn’t spend the couple extra bucks to have the right versions of the songs.
Just my two cents, and I hope this is of some help…
