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Painted Smiles Records was a small record label, based in New York City and run by Ben Bagley, which operated from the 1970s to the 1990s. It is best known for its Revisited series of recordings of little-known songs by well-known songwriters.
During Ben Bagley's long stay in a hospital while recovering from tuberculosis, his best friend Arthur Siegel brought him tapes of little-known songs by great Broadway songwriters. Bagley was inspired to produce his own recordings of such songs, initially for existing record labels. In 1971, he founded his own label, Painted Smiles Records. [1] Painted Smiles released cast recordings of Bagley's own revues and of historical and contemporary Broadway musicals, and many collections of those little-known songs.
Most Painted Smiles recordings, most titled ... Revisited, were anthologies of the lesser-known songs of the top Broadway musical composers and lyricists from the 1920s through the 1940s, including Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Noël Coward, DeSylva, Brown and Henderson, Vernon Duke, George and Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein II, Yip Harburg, Jerome Kern, Alan Jay Lerner, Frank Loesser, Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Arthur Schwartz, Kurt Weill and Vincent Youmans.
The Revisited albums shared a distinctive design. Their covers displayed bright watercolors by Harvey Schmidt (better known as a composer) of showgirls in improbable and sometimes surreal costumes, often naked or nearly so above or even below the waist, on white backgrounds. [2] [notes 1] Their backs were crammed with Bagley's detailed, witty, gossipy and occasionally ribald liner notes, bylined "by Ben Bagley (who is incurably insane)", and small photographs of the performers.
The Revisited series featured performances by some of the leading Broadway performers of the day (Kaye Ballard, Richard Chamberlain, Barbara Cook, Dorothy Loudon, Ann Miller, Estelle Parsons, Anthony Perkins, Alice Playten, Chita Rivera, Elaine Stritch, Gloria Swanson, Tommy Tune), cabaret and jazz singers (Ann Hampton Callaway, Cab Calloway, Blossom Dearie, Mary Cleere Haran, Bobby Short) and many great theatre and film actors and other personalities not generally known for their singing ability, among them Ellen Burstyn, Martin Charnin, Phyllis Diller, Sheldon Harnick, Laurence Harvey, Katharine Hepburn, Rex Reed, Joan Rivers and Jerry Stiller.
Playbill called Bagley's liner notes for the Revisited albums "odd and iconoclastic" and the albums themselves "hardly scholarly and sometimes downright unpleasant to listen to (note the antic, drowsy, caffeinated, tinny arrangements and uneven voices — a festival of sharps and flats)". However, "the discs are nonetheless embraced by fans hungry to explore old, mothballed material by extraordinary songwriters". [3]
In its first decades Painted Smiles released its recordings on vinyl. In the 1980s it began releasing CDs, and re-released many of its earlier recordings on CD (distributed by its division Battery Records). Many Painted Smiles releases have been re-released, with improved sound, by Kritzerland Records. [4] [5]
Painted Smiles' first logo ("Suck Lips"), used on the labels (not the jackets) of its LPs, was a pair of lipsticked lips suggestively encircling the spindle hole. Its second logo ("Serpent Siren"), used on CDs, was a nude woman, standing, holding a snake's head and tail to form a capital P, with the rest of the label's name in cursive. Both logos were designed by Jerome Hill, [6] who had put up the money to start the label. [7]
Titles of Bagley's revues and the Revisited series are prefixed with Bagley's name, but in a smaller font and different case indicating that it is not part of the title proper.
 | This list of songs or music-related items is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (August 2025) |
Except where noted, partial citations are taken from the list of releases on the back cover of E.Y. Harburg Revisited. [8]
All CDs released by Jackson Heights, NY: Painted Smiles Records.