When I was 9 or 10 my dad bought a set of “greatest hits” records from a company apparently called Plaza House. Greatest Hits of the 30s, Greatest Hits of the 40s, and a double album Greatest Hits of the 50s/60s.
I’ll give credit where it’s due — that was my introduction to the “Hut Sut Song” and “Istanbul not Constantinople”, and also the first time for me to hear Artie Shaw’s version of “Begin the Beguine”.
But I have a bone to pick with them. It’s specific to the 30s hits album.
Note the presence of Nat King Cole’s beautiful recording of “Stardust”. This was where I first heard that performance as well, and I spent decades praising it to people and emphasizing that he did that way back at the start of his career. I mean, he’s mostly thought of as a performer from the 40s and 50s, but he did this incredible song back in the 1930s!
Except that he did nothing of the sort. If you google up ‘when did Nat King Cole record Stardust’ you’ll be informed that he did it in 1957.
So, hey, Plaza House, thanks a shitload for misleading me and setting me up to look stupid!
Well, the Andrews Sisters didn’t record I’ll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time until 1940 and The Hut-Sut Song wasn’t even written until 1941. I guess the 30s was just a more liberal decade - it included all decades.
If I may add to your fire, “Stardust” was written and composed in 1927 by Hoagy Carmicheal and Mitchell Parish so it’s not even a song from the 1930s. I also noticed the collection was from 1971, so I’m guessing record companies played much faster and looser with their oldies collections than they did later. From my experience, I’ve noticed a lot more care was put into the collections released by Rhino.
I think it comes down to what the consumer wants. If the consumer wants Nat King Cole playing “Stardust,” then the consumer isn’t going to nitpick about the year it was recorded.
Reader’s Digest did a lot of this kind of thing. It also released record collections, like “Hits of the Big Band Era,” which my parents had. My parents didn’t care about years, they just cared that they could once again hear their favourites from back in the day, on an LP (which their hi-fi could play, as opposed to their 78s, which it couldn’t).
If that’s what the consumer wants, in spite of the fact that it may not actually be as described on the record jacket, then let the consumer have it.
I have gone down the rabbit hole, and while I can’t figure out Plaza Records (including not locating any incorporation records), I did find this article “LPs Via Airwaves Making $$ Splash” talking about the explosion of repackaging in the early 70s.
I mean, I assume whoever did the packaging of this one was either (as many have said) uncaring of actual year, or they just saw the copyright date and thought that was it.
My guess is that the people at Plaza House looked up somewhere a list of the songs that were played most on radio in the U.S. during the 1930s (as in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i5v4OT3E2Y , but of course they didn’t use that video, since it’s only existed since 2024). They then looked up what was the best version of each of those songs that had been recorded up to the year 1971. They then put those best versions together to make the album. The Plaza House album wouldn’t be about the copyright or recording date. Many of the songs commonly played on radio in the 1930s were copyrighted and recorded before 1930. Alternately, they may have done some research to figure out what songs were commonly played by orchestras in the 1930s and chose the best versions up to 1971 of those songs.
For what it’s worth, if I were to put together a YouTube video of the best songs of the 1930s, using the best versions ever made in my opinion of those songs up until now, I wouldn’t have chosen the Judy Garland version of “Over the Rainbow”. I would have chosen, as you know if you’ve read many of my posts, the Eva Cassidy version, which was recorded in 1996. For that matter, I think that it’s the best performance of any song ever done. Also, if appears from some searching I’ve done that, although Cole didn’t record and release the song “Stardust” until 1957, he had known about the song for a long time before that. He was just reluctant to release a version since so many other singers already had. Furthermore, from my searches, it appears that now more than 1,500 versions of the song have been recorded.