Who says anything by Julie Andrews is essential? My personal prejudices aside, we have to examine what her "essential" tracks might be and how they are presented on this collection of 13 songs. First, if you were a person in an anonymous record store, if they even had a Julie Andrews section you'd be out of luck unless you were an aficionado because this set has literally no information on it other than a song listing and songwriting credits. And there isn't any on the inside either. If you knew what you were doing, you might look at its price, see that it's cheap, and look at other comps to see if they had the same material and cost more money; some of these tracks would be there no doubt: "Come Rain or Come Shine," "Out of This World," "So in Love," "Nobody Does It Better," and more. But a lot of them wouldn't be. So then you'd go to /http://www.amazon.com} or /http://www.cdnow.com} and look it up and find that they have no product reviews or further information so you'd be out of luck there. And that's how this disc feels -- half of it hits, the other half who cares. If you are an Andrews fan or aficionado you have all this already anyway, so why bother?