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1949 Part One – The 7″ Mix

2024 has been the year of my 45th birthday (yes, still so young, I know) and the number has set me thinking about the importance of the 45RPM 7” single in my life. I’ve been playing them as long as I can remember, receiving packages of remaindered singles in the 1980s, buying a few every week at Magpie Records in Worcester in the mid-90, traveling with me in a big stripy box as I moved around, and now there they sit on my shelves still, though I don’t have a functioning stereo system now. My LPs, undoubtedly worth more, were left in the locked room of a friend in Southampton nearly 20 years ago and never recovered, it’s annoying, but not something I lose sleep about, the singles are much more important. Beside all the memories, there’s something about the format that seems kind of perfect. Small enough to comfortably carry around, each side just containing a few minutes of music, there’s something at once unfussy and potentially extravagant about both form and content. Singles like the one you see in the picture here often have larger holes, indicating their use in a jukebox, this little disc adaptable enough to be used as a replicable part in any number of mass produced machines. And that of course means b-sides, a chance for the act to try out something new without the risk of a negative reaction, and in many cases the disc would be flipped by a dj, and the b-side could be the hit that changed everything.

In short, the 7” vinyl single is one of the most important inventions of the 21st century, and it all started in 1949, when RCA released their new format, replacing the larger, more brittle shellac discs with a new compound – polyvinyl chloride. As when most new formats are introduced, RCA were engaged in a war with a competitor, Columbia’s 12” vinyl LP – only in this case the two formats had very different niches, and could (after a couple of years) be played by the same equipment, so both survived.

The original 7” single wasn’t in exactly the standard form we know today. The larger, jukebox-sized hole in the centre came as standard, as did coloured vinyl. The idea was that each genre would have its own colour, with red for pop music, green for country, yellow for children’s records, and a confusion of other shades for jazz, R&B, classical and so on. As should be clear to anyone listening to this mix, the differences between these genres were particularly muddy in 1949, and the idea was soon dropped.

The change was not, of course, immediate. Most of the music in this mix was still issued on 78RPM shellac discs, and they would continue to be manufactured all the way through the 50s, and in some countries even into the 70s. But the time was certainly ripe for a cheap, portable, harder to shatter format, and even if rock and roll had not already begun in all but name, early 1950s pop music would also suit it well. We are three years away from the introduction of the UK singles chart, and the 7” record’s abilities and limitations would do a great deal to set the parameters of popular music as we know it.

Track list

Intro

(Clip from interview with Johnny St. Cyr)

January

(Clip from 1949 Year In Review)

February

(Clip from 1949 The Year in Review Headlines)

March

(Clip from NBC TV News)

April

(Clip from Review of News From The Year 1949)

May

(Clip from Reviewing The Year 1949)

June

(Clip from 1949 The Year in Review Headlines)

Outro

(Clip from Suspense)