Star Spangled Rhythm: Voices of Broadway and Hollywood.

The Smithsonian Collection is back with another of its superb starter sets of the great Broadway and Hollywood musicals, and again it's almost impossible to resist. Star Spangled Rhythm is a flight on gossamer wings that lifts off from George M. Cohan's classic 1903 "I Want to Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune" and lands smoothly with Harold Prince's revival of Jerome Kern's Show Boat 91 years later. Anybody who still wonders why this most American of popular art forms retains its power to be guile will know the answer after listening to these four compact discs.

Collectors will probably already own most of the post-1950 show albums. But represented here is the only musical of the past few decades missing from the current compact-disc catalog: Jerome Moross and John Latouche's haunting 1954 masterpiece, The Golden Apple. There are rarer pickings in the earlier recordings, some lifted directly from movie sound tracks. It's not easy to locate Bing Crosby's promotional radio rendering of "Buckin' the Wind" from the 1933 movie Too Much Harmony. And for those with the stomach for it, Shirley Temple is here, chirping her way through "Animal Crackers in My Soup" (1935). Judy Garland brings heart to two songs from Pigskin Parade (1936), and Smithsonian producers Dwight Blocker Bowers and Amy Henderson merit praise for identifying Adriana Caselotti, the enduring voice of Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. They probably whistled while they worked, and listeners may do the same.