The first Godfather movie takes place during the late 1940s.
We don’t think of them as being examples of late 1940’s music, but many classic Christmas songs are from that era:
“The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)” (1946)
“Here Comes Santa Claus” (1947)
“Sleigh Ride” (1948)
“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (1948)
“Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer ” (1949)
Well, I do. Christmas as an American holiday of cosy secular family consumerism was cemented in the public consciousness then. Although it took a little while before the whole greed machine was fully operable.
It’s certainly the most wonderful time of the year for the Gene Autry estate.
Sure, but Glenn Miller died in 1944 when his plane disappeared. Basie had to temporarily disband in 1948, and shut the big band down in the early '50s.
Big band music suffered during the war due to the recording ban of '42-'44 and because so many musicians were drafted. After the war they had a hard time getting resetablished.
I was all set to come in here and post about the seminal album Kind of Blue coming out in 1949 and sounding like something from at least 10 years later, then found out the album, while mostly recorded in 1949, wasn’t released till 1957.
I do not think that is correct. Kind of Blue was recorded in March and April 1959.
Are you thinking of Birth of the Cool?
Duh! Of course I am! Swear to God, this is not stone ignorance, just morning fuzziness.
I was interrupted, so I cut this post short. Ellington’s band, from its high-water mark in the early '40s, saw Jimmy Blanton die, Ben Webster and Rex Stewart depart, and the band struggle to break even. Supposedly dance halls had to pay a new tax, so smaller groups were more economical.
Randall plays fast and loose with the facts here. “Sleigh Ride” is indeed from 1948 as noted above, with lyrics added in 1950. “Winter Wonderland” was an instrumental hit in 1934, with lyrics added in the 1940s. The “Fifties” are mostly songs from 1950-1952.
The whole notion of special music for Christmas was very much a post-WWII “bring us back to normal and romanticize the time when we were young and innocent” obsession.
Yes, I’m sure boomers heard these songs incessantly when they were young. What else would be played? Nobody was writing hot new Christmas songs because that period of nostalgia was over. Brian Wilson did write a couple of Christmas songs that were, of course, terrific. Nobody plays them.
So the blame for all those songs goes to the previous generations. They were the “us” who needed nostalgia. Boomers didn’t invent Columbus Day either; it was just drilled into our heads. Same thing.
My understanding from listening to Andrew Hickey (The History of Rock in 500 Songs) is that the tradition of hit Christmas songs every year persists in the UK. In the US it mostly ended by the mid-1960s.
The Democrats had a joke at the time–
“Have you heard about the new Eisenhower doll? You wind it up, and it does nothing for 8 years.”
Actually, the word “teenager” did not exist until about 1949.
check out the google ngram
The two movies that come to my mind that were made in and also set in the post-WWII period up to 1949 are The Best Years of our Lives (1946), which has been mentioned above, and The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947), which hasn’t. The latter is the source of the classic “You remind me of a man” routine.
More specifically, the word was created by the market researcher Mark Abrams. Of course, it’s just an accident of English that the syllable “teen” is in the words for 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19 and no other words (less than 100). This isn’t true in most languages. Abrams was trying to distinguish the ages of adolescents (13 - 25) from those younger and older. He thought this group began to be important as consumers starting in the early 1940s and continuing until the early 1950s.
In some sense adolescents as a separate group for many purposes didn’t really come about until about that time. Before then, a large percentage of people didn’t graduate from or even attend high school. Mostly this was true of poorer people. For them, when you reached adolescence you got a job. It was only in the early 1940s to the early 1950s that a large enough percentage of them were considered no longer really children but not yet adults that they could have a separate culture. With increasing numbers of them being in high school and college during those years, it became possible to think of them separately:
The teenage slang in A Clockwork Orange is called “Nadsat” because it’s the equivalent Russian suffix: trinadsat’ (13), chetyrnadsat’ (14), pyatnadsat’ (15), and so on.
Children aged odinnadsat’ (11) and dvenadsat’ (12) aren’t considered teens, though. (So far as I know.)
So Russian isn’t quite the same because the two syllables “nadsat” are in 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19. And of course the slang in A Clockwork Orange isn’t that of Russians but of British people imitating Russians. The word for teenager in Russian is actually pronounced “podrostok”.
Yes, it’s British slang derived from Russian. Just like “droogs” (friends), “horrorshow” (good), “groodies” (tits), and the other borrowings in the book.
Oddly enough, I once asked one of my all-Russian EFL classes if they got the derivation of “Nadsat.” (We were discussing the novel.) They had no clue.
Of course, a Russian would never refer to a teen(ager) as a nadsat’.
Nitpick: the word was spelled teen-ager before that. Ngrams clearly shows it used earlier and more often until 1960. You’d occasionally also find teen age, with no hyphen.
Nitpick: what Abrams did was create a marketing class he called the Teenaged Consumer. That was in 1959. Very late in the game.
Teens had been known and referred to as a class for decades earlier. WWII, when the lack of parental supervision caused by soldiers and working parents started creating serious problems, caused both serious study and programs to occupy their time.
Here’s another Ngram, putting teen into the mix. Teen starts rising almost vertically in the war years.
Click on teen 1824-1954 below and graph and you get this result. You have to be careful with Google Book dates for magazines, but books are usually petty solid.
1936
Adolescence; a Study in the Teen Years
1938
Modern Pantomime Entertainments: For Teen Agers, Adults, and Grammar Grades
1944
Teen Age Centers: BIrd’s-eye VIew
1946
Teen-Age Companion [part of the The Teen-Age LIbrary
1947
Teen Canteens
1948
Teen-age Football Stories
More tellingly, a comic named Harold Teen started in 1919, specifically to chronicle the teen experience, already being recognized as something new and separate.
Harold Teen was just like most of his generation. He used teenage slang — in fact, Harold originated quite a few then-popular expressions, such as “Yowsah”, “Fan mah brow” and “pitch a li’l woo”, as well as the occasional more enduring term, like “pantywaist”. He also helped popularize quite a few fashion statements of the time, such as bell-bottom pants and yellow raincoats (which became identified with Dick Tracy, another Tribune star, a generation later). He had a girlfriend, Lillums Lovewell; a pal called Shadow (no relation); and what we now call a “communication gap” with his parents. He hung out at a soda fountain called The Sugar Bowl, run by Pop Jenks, whose “Gedunk Sundaes” drew so much interest, Ed eventually had to make up a recipe for them. Long before Archie was ever heard of, Harold Teen was known to one and all as America’s Typical Teenager.
The Archie comic, BTW, started in 1941.