"[3] Assessing Murphy's recorded legacy from Muse Records in his book A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers, Will Friedwald writes that one point the four Muse anthologies issued by Joel Dorn make "immediately is the astonishing range and scope, not to mention sheer size, of the singer's seventies and eighties output.

Other than Helen Merrill and Sheila Jordan (neither of whom is quite as consistently interesting as Murphy), no other pure jazz singer was so prolific in these years".

[7] Friedwald goes on to say the releases reveal, "his output has been so consistently excellent—that so many of these records deserve to be regarded, in retrospect, as classics of the jazz vocal genre—and that even his occasional missteps are instructive".

[7] Will Friedwald assigns the release 5 stars in Stereo Review[5] and says the release "summarizes the nineteen albums and twenty two years Murphy spent with Muse records; it's a gloriously varied program with sources of inspiration ranging from Antonio Carlos Jobim to Nat King Cole to Jack Kerouac.

"[5] In the Washington Post Mike Joyce said, "The affinity he's developed over the years for Brazilian music is documented here, along with his penchant for the writings of Jack Kerouac and his gift for taking a jazz instrumental, such as Freddie Hubbard's "Red Clay," and equipping it with his own wonderfully compatible vocalese lyrics".