When I’ve rented cars that had satellite radio, I’ve gravitated to the channel “Forties on 4”. And I’m amazed at how much I enjoy it. Reasons include:
It was the music of my mother’s youth/young adulthood, and she sang to herself a lot when I was a little kid. So I’m hearing lots of familiar but unidentified song snippets that had always been rattling around in my head.
I’m a musician myself. I play guitar. And over the years I’ve drifted away from electric guitars (even from acoustic guitars with pickups) which has drawn me into the almost-lost art of making the sound purely acoustically (well, alright, I play and sing through a mic, but that’s a major component of the art). And the forties was the last era where you had almost no electric instruments (save the occasional vibrophone or rhythmn guitar). This is very distinct from everything that came later: with the increasing popularity of the electric guitar, the invention of the Fender bass and the rock and roll revolution, pop music never really went unplugged again.
(What’s wrong with electric music? Well, nothing really. Except… Like most musicians, I will admit to some disappointment that karaoke and DJ’s have reduced the demand for live music. And it’s likely that electric instruments and amplification played a role in erasing the distinction between live bands and recordings. And the ‘karaoke mentality’ could have never taken hold in an era when you had to actually learn to sing or play for the song to sound remotely recognizable. It probably comes as a shock to kids today to learn that people used to be embarrassed if they sang or played poorly in front of a crowd).
It’s the most recent era of music that hasn’t been nostalgia-ed to death. The early 1970’s was the first heavy revival of generation-old pop music to young kids, with ‘Happy Days’, Sha-Na-Na and ‘Grease’. Every decade, merchants repeated this successful formula. I’m not sure why forties music wasn’t recycled like this, but I think part of it was that the prevailing culture was too different (imagine selling Glenn Miller records to a teenager the year Sgt Pepper came out!) Whatever the reason, the music of the forties is much fresher to me than anything that came after.
Possibly the most important reason: it’s maybe the last era when pop music wasn’t overwhelmingly created for non-adults. In the past, young people aspired to become adults more quickly than after adolescence as a concept took hold. Ever since, music merchants have realized that young people spend more freely on things like music, so they’ve adjusted their marketing accordingly. I don’t mean to lament too terribly the advent of music aimed at young people: heck, my biggest influences include the Beatles and Elvis Presley, plus lots of other youth-focused artists. But at my age, it’s no surprise that music created for grownups appeals to me more than stuff being created for kids.
Perhaps the best example of this is the song ‘Personality’. Written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke, a 1946 version recorded by Johnny Mercer and the Pied Pipers was the number one song for something like six weeks. (people born after about 1960 are more likely to remember it from the short parody ad snippet sung by Florence Henderson, “Wessonality”.) The lyrics contain loads of historical and literary allusions, to Madame Pompadour, DuBarry, Salome, et al. Can you imagine lyrics like that in a number-one song today? Even more delightful is the dialogue between Mercer and the sweetly saucy Pied Pipers. The whole song is luringly, yet eupemistically, describing a sophisticated couple who are definitely going to be getting it on, and soon. And the kids will have no idea what they’re talking about!
I’m often critical of the aphorism that we come to realize how smart our parents were when we grow up. My reason is that not everyone who has kids is smart or mentally sound, and many us of grow up to realize that our parents’ advice wasn’t always the best.
But on the music of the forties, I didn’t realize until recently how good my mom’s taste was.
That’s not entirely accurate. There was the short-lived “swing revival” during the late 90s but it mainly focused on the “jump blues” style of bandleaders like Louis Prima, Louis Jordan, and Cab Calloway as opposed to Glenn Miller’s sweeter and more sedate version of swing.
I guess I see a distinction between reviving music that’s around twenty years old, and reviving music from the distant past.
Cab Calloway and “hard blues” had been floating around and remixing through things like the Blues Brothers, but to most kids in the late 90’s, Glenn Miller sounded as far off as Robert Johnson’s records.
I also enjoy a lot of the older songs. I remember my Grandfather listening to that music everyday when he drove me to school. It always reminds me of him. But it is more than that, I think the main thing I like about the station that plays it here is that in all of the songs, someone actually sings. Who the hell wants to hear someone screaming and wailing and hootin and hollerin all the time? This is music to enjoy and relax by.
Also, I am oldncrinkly, according to my kids, but really I am a long ways from social security.
I too love that music, but I connect more with the songwriters than I do with the sound of the performances/recordings.
My mother was a big fan of old musicals, so I grew up with Rodgers and Hart/Hammerstein, Frank Loesser, Lerner and Loewe. As a kid, I rejected that music. When I was in high school, though, I started participating in the plays at school. The musicals were more fun and I found the music easy to connect to having been exposed to it while I was growing up.
Also when I was in high school, Sinéad O’Connor, of whom I was already a big fan, put out the album Am I Not Your Girl? on which she performs songs from that era (“Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered” “Why Don’t You Do Right?” “Love Letters” etc.). That immediately became one of my favorite albums.
Also released about this time (released earlier but I discovered it later), was the AIDS benefit compilation album Red Hot + Blue featuring songs all written by Cole Porter (or, that was the idea anyway). Now, only about half of this album is good- and the performances that suck, really suck. But the good stuff is gold. The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl collaborate on a wonderful mash-up of “Miss Otis Regrets”/“Just One of Those Things”. Sinéad O’Connor turns in a brilliant performance of “You Do Something to Me”. The Iggy Pop and Debbie Harry duet on “Did You Evah!” is one of the greatest things ever recorded. So, the good stuff was good enough that I could ignore the sucky stuff and I made a point of seeking out other recodings of Cole Porter songs. To this day he’s one of my favorite songwriters.
When I was in college, George Martin produced an album with harmonica player Larry Adler joined by a parade of guest vocalists called The Glory of Gershwin. With just a few exceptions, this album is quite good from start to finish (It made me wish the aforementioned Red Hot + Blue album had been produced in the same way). “Nice Work if You Can Get It”, vocals provided by Sting, remains my favorite recording of this song. Kate Bush doing “The Man I Love” is another highlight. To top it all off is an absolutely wonderful recording of “Rhapsody on Blue”.
So, during high school/college- a critical time period in expanding and enriching my music fandom- I dug into this stuff pretty enthusiastically and I’ve held onto it since.
MY PEOPLE! I agree with what y’all have said. Especially what the OP said about how we aspired to be adult, and how the lyrics of some of these songs presupposed an education and some knowledge of the world outside your age group. I find a lot of youth culture narrow, boring, unimaginative, and especially unoriginal. I like the wit, cleverness, subtlety, romance, and smooooothness in pop music of the 40’s (and 30’s, too).
The biggest difference is that they used REAL songwriters. These people knew how to write both words and music, And they actually rhymed things.
Also the singers sang well. You listen to Jo Stafford or Dinah Shore on a live broadcast and they sound nearly identical to their records. Shore says she made a record album in about 6 hours. And they didn’t splice. If they redid it, you started from the beginning.
If you get a chance to see David Bennett’s Benny Goodman tribute band, go see it. They kick some serious ass on Goodman’s hits, and Bennett, in addition to looking a bit like Goodman, is a master of the clarinet.
I remember that ad. I can’t say for certain I’ve heard the original song. (I think I have, but I’m not sure.)
Another example of an old song rewritten for advertising (and there are a lot of them!) is Pearly Shells, and old Hawaiian song whose English lyrics were written by Webley Edwards and Leon Pober after the war, and recorded by Burl Ives. I think most people know it as the melody from C&H Sugar. I only found out it was an actual song in the '90s when I purchased The Big Kahuna & The Copa Cat Pack’s Hawaiian Swing.
In the late-'80s/early-'90s I delivered The British Weekly and The L.A. Rock Review to pubs and venues in L.A. and Orange Counties. I’d tune into KCRW or KPCC and listen to The Swingin’ Years as I drove. Great show! I think it still plays on satellite radio.
I like a lot of music from the 30s and 40s. I’ve always known I liked some of it, but I didn’t really start seeking it out until recently–inspired by a video game, oddly enough. (Fallout 3 has an in-game radio station that plays a few songs from that era, and I started collecting music to expand its playlist.)
I’m a complete sucker for Louis Armstrong and for the Andrews Sisters, among others. The Andrews Sisters’ recording of “Bei Mir Bistu Shein”/“Bei Mir Bist Du Schön” is one of my favorite songs.
One of my favorite childhood memories is my mother listening to a little AM radio in the kitchen, and singing along with the music. Her station was “standards,” mostly from the '30s and '40s. To this day, this is my favorite pop music, though I include songs from the '20s through the '60s.
Lately, it’s hard to avoid all the accolades heaped on Whitney Houston as “The Greatest Singer In The Known Universe.” Frankly, I find her singing unnecessarily rococo, and quite annoying. I doubt whether her fans have ever hear anything previous to the '80s.
It’s great to see a thread like this. I sometimes feel like I’m the only person who actually likes pre-rock & roll music. My favorites are the “standards” of the 30s-50s, and I have a lot of compilations of Cole Porter / George Gershwin songs, as well as several CDs by Sinatra and Crosby.
Maybe part of what I like about them is that people who were good writers wrote the songs, and people with good voices did the singing. These days, it seems like if you don’t do both the singing and writing, you’re a no-talent loser, so everyone tries to do both. And there are a lot of singers today who I think have good voices but can’t write for shit, and a lot of people who write good songs but have lousy voices. Not that someone can’t do both, but I just think that not everyone should.
i grew up with big band music. i knew who artie shaw was before i knew who the beatles were. in fact, my first gig out of college was at a 40s radio station.
i was hired to be the news director/deejay, but i got the job because i knew the music.
I got a Glenn Miller LP for Christmas when I was 5. My sister got a Tommy Dorsey LP. She cast it aside for the Beatles, so I took it. I still have them both. Though most of my regular listening is the '20s and '30s, my shelves have plenty of Benny Goodman and Harry James.
That’s a good point made above about the separation and specializations of songwriting and performing. Songwriters back then seemed to focus solely on writing songs or enduring quality. Today’s singer/songwriters are saddled with the need to establish a ‘brand’, which can be limiting. Master guitarist Merle Travis (who was also a master songwriter) liked to use the term, “tunesmith”.
And this goes hand in hand with performers who specialized in performing, with the result that they could sing anything and make it their own. Ella Fitgerald once sang the Beatles’ “Can’t Buy Me Love”, and while she didn’t deviate from the melody one note, it was still in her inimitable style.
And I hate to say this, because no one loves the Beatles more than I do: but I think they did help usher in this change. Because they were such great songwriters and performers, they made it look like anyone could do it. A piano player I know says semi-seriously that he detests Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, because it always makes him feel like he can crank out beautiful melodies at will, and he hates the disappointment of sitting down at the piano afterward.
Yeah, I never knew how cool music of the pre-rock era could be until listening to Galaxy News Radio. Some of those songs are just awesome. Shame the game only has the first half of Butcher Pete, though.
I’m a big fan of the Ink Spots – they’ve had a rather odd revival over the last several years due to being used in TV commercials. I’m also a Big Band fan. I have maybe 50 or 60 Jo Stafford songs, and similar numbers of Crosby and Sinatra tunes.
I love Patsy Cline’s music over just about anything else. She was on the trailing edge of that era of music, but her style was in the heart of it. And she produced so much and died so young – a real tragedy. My absolute favorite song of hers is “Just Out of Reach (of My Two Open Arms)” – an incredibly lush duet with Willie Nelson. I’m still trying to figure out if they actually recorded together, or were put together in a studio many years later. They were both in the business in Nashville at the same time, so it’s possible it was a genuine duet, but I can’t find anything to confirm that.
I also love the Ink Spots, though I’m far better versed in the Mills Brothers. I saw the Ink Spots about 10 years ago at Cain Park in Cleveland Heights and, while of course all of the original members are gone, the members we heard had incredible provenance and the four of them had about 150 total years of time in the group.
