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1947 Part Two – Boptamism

A baby boom – a notable increase in babies born – may indicate many socio-economic factors at play, but most of these factors are refractions of hope. Hope that there will be a good world for your children to become adults in, hope that you will be able to provide everything they need, hope that the path of your new family will not be littered with traps and nasty surprises. As I write this in 2024, birth rates in western countries have been in decline for decades, but in 1947 we were just on the spike of the “baby boom” which was so notable it gave its name to a generation. Is this then a time of hope? Will this mix sound optimistic and hopeful?

There was an idea at one point that these mixes would provide some sort of historical narrative into the years in question. Was it an idea that I had, or was it thrust on me by the war? It’s truthfully hard to say, I was already arranging things (not music) month by month back in 1939, maybe it’s a habit I’ve slipped into. In any case the arrangement has now become fairly meaningless (with a couple of exceptions I’ll come to in a moment), just a way to break up years into more manageable chunks or chapters, for example October is fairly bop-heavy and December is winding down for the Christmas section.

That’s the second exception in this mix, the first is the independence of India and Pakistan, a large public event with newsreels and speeches to sample, but whose ramifications wouldn’t be as easy to capture. In China the civil war turned a corner, with the Nationalists increasingly looking doomed. Communists also officially took power in Poland. The spread of communism triggered The Truman Doctrine, as good a date as any for the start of The Cold War. Is any of this evident from this mix? Well no, not at all. This of course does not mean that these things are unimportant, it just means that they haven’t yet impacted the cultural record, or at least my cultural record.

The people – the musicians – here were interested in exploring their art, they were interested in entertaining, they were interested in making people dance, they were interested in making something new. All art is in some sense political, and their stretching out in this freedom to create and share tells you something about their mood. The prospect of nuclear war, even of the Korean War, were not yet in the air. So to answer my own question, yes, we are still in the brief window of hope, but we can grasp this from the absence. There are other things to write about than existential dread.

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Tracklist

0:00:00 George Melachrino Strings – Serenade (Drigo)

July

0:04:24 Danny Kaye – Manic Depressive Presents

August

(Clip from India Breaks Free – British Pathe)

September

(Clip from Fibber McGee & Molly)

October

(Clip from It’s That Man Again)

November

(Clip from British Movietone Review of the Year)

December

(Clip from Odd Man Out)

Ending

3:00:21 Miles Davis – Out Of Nowhere