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Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Also becoming a veteran of the genre of television Westerns, Bruce Broughton provides a modest score for The Ballad of Lucy Whipple. It's a long cry from his days of Silverado, however Broughton did compose an impressive Emmy nominated score for the Western True Women four years ago that remains one of the better television scores in recent times. For The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, Broughton takes the genre back to its bare roots, emphasizing only those instruments that would have been heard in the 1850 western towns. Namely a fiddle, cello, tin whistle, guitar, percussion, and baritone horn perform the music at the forefront. For the darker, more menacing moments in the film, such as tracks seven and eleven, Broughton employs a moderately sized orchestra to provide a better base for these soloists. The two main themes for the film are unimposing, and not particularly memorable. Instead, the functionality of the score comes from Broughton's precise instrumentation, creating a believable atmosphere for the period. The most effective cues are arguably those which are also the most unlistenable, with rambling guitars, fiddle, and percussion filling the air with the more robust sentiments of the wild west. As stereotypical as this precise representation by Broughton may be on album, the score is still above and beyond what you might expect for another CBS television film. The album is relatively short (35 minutes of music for a two hour film), but is long enough to contain adequate music to round itself out well. The sound quality (mixing) is merely average, with an intimate recording quality that remains somewhat muted where it could otherwise use a crisp edge. Broughton has slipped into a very comfortable position as a leading television score composer, though his recent projects have tended to fit him into an ethnic or period role, as furthered by his ethnically dominated score for Jeremiah, also on an Intrada label album. With Lost in Space representing Broughton's only large-scale, mainstream film score in the past five years, one must wonder if Silverado was a one-time fluke. Broughton runs the risk of getting stuck in a rut producing good television scores for films that don't ultimately deserve his talents. ***
"The Ballad of Lucy Whipple is a story of a recently widowed mother who, with her three children, decided to go to California and stake out a new life for her and her family. It is a Gold Rush story, and for this reason, some music from the time has been incorporated into the score, notably Sweet Betsy From Pike and Seeing the Elephant. The featured instruments in the score are all instruments that could have been found and played in a gold mining camp: fiddle, cello, tin whistle, guitar, percussion and baritone horn. There are two main original themes: the theme for Lucy, the teenager who rebels against the idea of living in a town with no social comforts or immediate means of self-improvement, and the theme for her brother Butte, a boy who tried to learn 50 different names for liquor. The score is at times stark, sentimental, thoughtful, light-hearted, tragic, aggressive and simple, reflecting many of the qualities of life among the Forty Niners."
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