Released by Special Arrangement with Turner Classic Movies Music

The Hollywood western gasped its last breaths in the late 1960s with revisionist classics with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Wild Bunch. In 1971 Blake Edwards wrote and directed a Hollywood "anti-western" if there ever was one: Wild Rovers, in which William Holden and Ryan O'Neal play a pair of down-and-out cowhands who rob a bank and make a run for Mexico.

Although Edwards had a longstanding relationship with Henry Mancini (Peter Gunn, The Pink Panther), he turned to Jerry Goldsmith for Wild Rovers, having been impressed with Goldsmith's ability to score character in Patton (1970, FSMCD Vol. 2, No. 2). Edwards sought an Aaron Coplandesque effort which would treat authentic cowboy songs in the symphonic idiom, and Goldsmith responded with a theme-and-variations approach which even utilizes the same folk song elements ("Goodbye Old Paint") as Copland's ballet, Billy the Kid.

The result is a melodic and pleasing score that ranks as one of Goldsmith's finest in the Americana idiom. The cues range from authentically "folksy" to fully symphonic and "Coplandesque"; like Patton, the score is brief and focused on its almost monothematic personality, but not without modernistic action cues—such as "Cattle vs. Sheep," for the death of Karl Malden's rancher.

Previous LP and CD releases of Wild Rovers have been a London re-recording, with two songs performed by Ellen Smith (actually Ellen Goldsmith, the composer's daughter). This definitive CD features the the complete, Los Angeles-recorded underscore (never before released), including the unused title song performed by Sheb Wooley; followed by the complete London album recording (including the "Friendly Advice" track from the 1986 MCA LP, resequenced as Goldsmith intended); and then two bonus tracks of source music vocals from the film—all in stereo.