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Forty tracks. Forty years. One song per year.

Episode 4 of 40 Years of Schoolin’ moves from 1950 to 1989 along less obvious routes — Cajun laments, Western swing, early avant-jazz, hi-fi futurism, teenage garage noise, folk pushed to breaking point, dub mutations, post-punk machinery and late-’80s DIY misbehaviour.

These are not canonical histories or greatest-hits shortcuts. Some of these records were widely heard; many barely travelled beyond their region, label, or moment. Taken together, they trace how music kept mutating anyway — through accident, obsession, cheap tape, stubborn belief and the occasional wrong turn that turned out to be right.

One year at a time.

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Forty tracks. Forty years. One song per year, reshuffled again.

Episode 3 moves from 1950 to 1989 by way of honky-tonk confessionals, jump-blues swagger, tape-loop miracles, devotional electronics, dub as architecture, and pop that accidentally invents the future. Some records were global hits, others barely escaped the room they were recorded in — but all of them say something about where music was, and where it was heading.

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Episode 2 keeps the music bicycle moving — forty songs, one for each year, 1950 to 1989.

This time it’s everything from Baltimore doo-wop to Ethiopian accordion soul, Cajun-surf hybrids to Scottish nutter pop.

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Welcome to the first episode of 40 Years of Schoolin’, a journey through four decades of recorded sound — one song for every year from 1950 to 1989.

This isn’t a history lesson; it’s a wandering path through the strange, brilliant corners of 20th-century music — the hits, the misses, and the forgotten experiments that shaped what came next. Each track tells a small story: from Boston jazz clubs and Navajo chants to Jamaican riddims, Parisian poets, and Sheffield dream-pop.

Hosted and narrated by Ben Cornish, this opening chapter starts quietly with Charlie Mariano’s cool jazz “Sweet and Lovely” and ends in New Orleans with the Neville Brothers’ soul-shaking take on “With God on Our Side.” Along the way there are detours through Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s space blues, Betty Wright’s teenage funk, Breton harp mysticism, anarchist punk, and the birth of synthpop.

You’ll hear context, trivia, and the occasional unsolicited opinion — but the music always leads.
 For those who prefer the uninterrupted musical version, a companion Mixcloud edition features all forty tracks back-to-back, without narration.

40 songs. 40 years. One strange, sprawling story of recorded sound.

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