At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. The download here is a placeholder to appear on the podcast feed. For the full 3-hour version either see below for the Mixcloud player, or come to patreon.com/centuriesofsound for the podcast version and a host of other bonus materials for just $5 per month.

Mixcloud player with full mix – or listen on the Mixcloud website.

It will be spring soon –

And I, whose childhood

Is a forgotten boredom,

Feel like a child

Who comes on a scene

Of adult reconciling,

And can understand nothing

But the unusual laughter,

And starts to be happy.

As we saw in part one, the middle of a century is a time for looking back as well as looking forward, nostalgia for the unremembered past of previous generations mingled with excitement at progress both technical and social. The flipside of this is a lack of concern with what’s popular now. The music business tends to jump on bandwagons whenever it can, but in 1950 there isn’t a clear bandwagon to jump on, so musicians seem more than ever to be given the leeway to mess around to find out what the next thing might be.

The story of the last few years has been the rise of rhythm and blues / jump blues, but as we turn the decade it seems to be in a lull. Of course, we know this will not last – in January 1950 Sam Philips opened his Memphis Recording Service studio, initially in order to bring R&B artists to a mainstream (i.e. white) audience. In 1951 the studio would record “Rocket ‘88”, in 1952 Philips would found Sun Records, and in 1953 they would make the first recordings of Elvis Presley.

In New York, meanwhile, Charlie Parker’s trumpet player had decided to branch out on his own after attending discussions and jam sessions at Gil Evans’ place on 55th Street. Through 1949 and 1950 he got some of these likeminded people together to record a series of sides for Capitol. Sadly, the record company had very little idea what to do with this music, first releasing two 78RPM singles, then an EP in 1954. By 1957 Miles Davis had become famous enough that Capitol finally put out all of the tracks bar one, under the name “Birth of The Cool.” Was ‘Cool Jazz’ a real genre at this point? Would it ever be a proper genre? Hard to say, but if it has a foundational text, this is it.

If you were to pinpoint a single genre to represent the year, however, it would probably be pop music, currently in a Hollywood musical-influenced style with no pretentions to be anything more than a commercially successful novelty. However winsomely cheesy the taste of the public might be, jobbing songwriters were ready to cater for them, in a way reminiscent of the Tin Pan Alley days of 50 years prior. “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake” – one of the best-selling records of the year – is a great example, an almost sickeningly twee song with a title in the third conditional, written by three men – middle-aged veteran songwriter Al Hoffman, Broadway writer Bob Merrill and comedy musician Al Trace – and performed by TV and radio star Eileen Barton. Within a decade this sort of thing will in theory be all in the past, but in reality will have been supplanted by a similar, if more sophisticated operation around The Brill Building.

Tracklist

0:00:00 Fumio Hayasaka – Clip from Rashomon OST

At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. The download here is a placeholder to appear on the podcast feed. For the full 3-hour version either see below for the Mixcloud player, or come to patreon.com/centuriesofsound for the podcast version and a host of other bonus materials for just $5 per month.

Mixcloud player with full mix – or listen on the Mixcloud website.

The mid-point of the 20th century feels superficially like its fulcrum. The first half has been an upward struggle (two world wars, a great depression, a devastating pandemic) but also a tale of progress – we have gone from racist parlour songs recorded on cylinders to cool jazz LPs and proto rock & roll singles. Now it’s a smooth ride downhill through the 50s, 60s, 70s, and so on. Culture will become more free and less imposing, the cold war will gradually cool down and end, we will see Fukuyama’s end of history. Of course, for most of you, who lived through the last half of the 20th century, that will immediately ring false. It’s so reductive that it’s essentially nonsense, the joys and the horrors of the late 20th do not form a pattern easy enough to sum up in a page, let alone a paragraph. And so (this is my point, sorry) goes for the first half. Listening through these mixes I hope you’ve been able to feel how society and how art has shifted, not as a smooth process but as a tortuous web being pulled in many directions at once, and any simple narrative is in essence a lie.

So if I were to say “something is in the air in 1950” or talk about the “zeitgeist”, you should know that this is probably nothing more than apophenia  – “the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things” – but this is how it is with every story anyway, you pick up a feeling and go with it.

So what is the story this time? In a sense 1950 is a particularly unremarkable year for music. Jazz is stalled somewhere between bebop and post-bop. Rhythm & blues or jump blues seems to be finally winding down from the frenetic energy it had in ’48 and ’49, much as rock & roll would wind down in the early 60s. Outside of Hank Williams, Western swing seems to be taking a bit of a breather too. Even Hollywood musicals seem to be largely spinning their wheels after their golden age, but before Singin’ In The Rain led their revival a couple of years later. But sometimes you need a bit of calm to show the lay of the land around you, and you know what? There’s really something special going on here.

This may still have been a duller than usual mix if it hadn’t been for the work of Michael Daddino’s project “1950: The Bomb in the Heart of the Century” originally from 1950. A playlist, initially on Spotify, but most recently on Mixcloud, it’s a lot more detailed and a lot longer than a Centuries of Sound mix, and demonstrates a good deal more work – I try to get these things out in a month, not that I have really met that goal of late, and naturally my research phase can only go so far. So instead of reinventing everything, I have used the flow of this mix (and around 50% of the music selections) as a framework, and have built everything else around it.

The bomb in the title is not merely a metaphor. 1950 does seem to be the year that the Cold War really set in, especially in terms of the nuclear arms race. The USSR conducted their first nuclear test in 1949, and not long after President Truman announced the plan to develop the hydrogen bomb, which would be ready in 1952. Being confronted by the enormity of this so soon after the end of the war must have felt like whiplash, and the prospect of mutually assured destruction before the foretold 2000 years must have been terrifying to many. A couple of selections here discuss this directly. Others were still excited about this new technology. The cover image for this mix comes from the case of the “Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory” – an experimental kit briefly on sale to children in 1950 which contained genuine radioactive material, a cloud chamber and a Geiger counter. For the makers, they seem to be presenting the new decade as an exciting new phase of technological progress.

Tracklist

(Clip from BBC at Lime Grove)

At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. The download here is a placeholder to appear on the podcast feed. For the full 3-hour version either see below for the Mixcloud player, or come to patreon.com/centuriesofsound for the podcast version and a host of other bonus materials for just $5 per month.

Mixcloud player with full mix – or listen on the Mixcloud website.

At the end of 2024 I suddenly found myself immersed in new music again, and while putting together a list of favourites, I thought – why not make a mix? So here it is, very little in the way of speech clips, essentially this is just three hours of pop(ish) music, which eventually I’ll come back round to.

Hope you enjoy it, and 1950 is up next, no worries.

Tracklist

Support Centuries of Sound and access a treasure trove of bonuses at http://patreon.com/centuriesofsound

At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. As it’s the festive season I’ve decided to use the new function on Patreon to do a couple of membership offers. Firstly I’m offering a 10% discount on all tiers, monthly and annual, just go to patreon.com/centuriesofsound and sign up with the promo code 8AA78 – Secondly, if you buy a gift membership for anyone ($5 p/m tier, annual) then I will give you a CD version of the mixes for the year of their birth (only pre-1950/1972/1989)– so cut up into CD-sized chunks each with its own artwork. For gift memberships – patreon.com/centuriesofsound/gift – then send me a message either on Patreon or by emailing james (at) centuriesofsound.com, I will get those to you within three days.

Happy Holidays everyone, here is your new Christmas mix, this one covering the shorter period of 1955-1961. I have been cutting it dangerously close because there was simply so much to pick from, this being the peak period for famous records, as far as the US is concerned at least (though you will notice a few of them missing – the aim here is to make a good mix, not to tick off all the boxes, and certain favourites are, in my opinion, just a little too annoying.) I found this to be quite an odd era, there are rock & roll Christmas records of course, but there were a lot of religious records too, recorded in luxurious high-fidelity as presents for audiophiles, and some truly great jazz records which happened to have a festive theme. So, there are roughly three movements here – a half hour of pop and novelty records, a half hour of a very religious Christmas, and a little under half an hour of cool jazz – if any of these are not your cup of tea, I’ve labelled them below, so you can skip to the part you need.

There will also be a radio version of this show (featuring my son Theo) broadcast on Cambridge Radio (formerly Cambridge 105) on Sunday 22nd December at 19:00 GMT, you can listen by following this link at the right time – https://consoles.radioplayer.cloud/8261297/index.html

I hope you all have a great break, whatever you are celebrating around now, or even if you are celebrating at all. 2024 has been yet another tough year for many, and I hope this is an enjoyable way to finish it.

Part One

0:00:00 Daphne Oram – Winters Journey (Intro) (1956)

Part Two

(Clip from Christmas in Bethlehem – 1961)

Part Three

0:59:52 Laurence Welk – I’ll Be Home For Christmas (1961)

At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. The download here is only for the first hour of the mix. For the full 3-hour version either see below for the Mixcloud player, or come to patreon.com/centuriesofsound for the podcast version and a host of other bonus materials for just $5 per month. As it’s the festive season I’ve decided to use the new function on Patreon to do a couple of membership offers. Firstly I’m offering a 10% discount on all tiers, monthly and annual, just go to patreon.com/centuriesofsound and sign up with the promo code 8AA78 – Secondly, if you buy a gift membership for anyone ($5 p/m tier, annual) then I will give you a CD version of the mixes for the year of their birth (only pre-1950/1972/1989)– so cut up into CD-sized chunks each with its own artwork. For gift memberships – patreon.com/centuriesofsound/gift – then send me a message either on Patreon or by emailing james (at) centuriesofsound.com, I will get those to you within three days.

Mixcloud player with full mix – or listen on the Mixcloud website.

1949 Part Two – The 12″ Mix

How do you listen to recorded music? I feel like every phase of my life has a different answer here – the record player at home, a Walkman, a Discman, the stereo system I had when I went to university, the mp3 player that went around Asia with me, then years of phones, laptops, Bluetooth speakers, headphones, car stereos. Sometimes I would listen privately, sometimes on speakers, sometimes it would be in the background, sometimes it would have my full attention. These days it seems like, aside from the car radio, all my listening is private, streamed from computer or phone, and something feels missing. Centuries of Sound started when I was in an environment where nobody wanted to listen to music so I had to retreat into this private experience, and have I ever emerged from that? Only through sharing with you, really.

Putting on a longer piece of music, sitting down and just experiencing it – that’s just something I don’t have time for any more. It is something I miss, but it’s also something I can live without. When end of year polls come around, this is why I focus on the tracks. I like things bite-sized, not because I have a short attention span, more because there’s so much out there and only so much time I can spend with it. And yet, this thing, what is it but very long-form listening?

Putting on an LP seems like such a fundamental part of music listening for so many people, it seems odd to note that as we approach the middle of the 20th century, it’s only now that this is really becoming an option. If you were listening to a record before 1949, it was probably a 10” shellac disc with not much more than three and a half minutes of music per side, and unless you had an elaborate disc-changing machine, that’s how long you had before you had to get up and change the record. There were “albums” though, and had been for quite a while. The earliest I can find is a 1907 recording of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s 1892 opera “I Pagliacci,” starring Puerto Rican tenor Antonio Paoli, and supervised in its production by the composer himself. But these were “albums” as in a “photograph album” or a “stamp album” – a large book of separate discs. Frank Sinatra’s first album, 1946’s “The Voice of Frank Sinatra” is in this format, eight songs across four discs.

When Columbia introduced the 33? rpm 12” vinyl LP in late 1948, the focus was naturally on what it could do that shellac records couldn’t. With around 26 minutes per side, the initial focus was naturally on classical music – and of course it helped that buyers of classical music had more money and a taste for better quality recordings – LPs had “microgroove technology” that allowed for higher fidelity. Next followed Broadway shows, the more respectable kinds of jazz, and more sophisticated pop music – Frank again. What did not appear at first was the music made by and listened to by poor black people (R&B) or poor white people (country) – neither were the right sort of market. Of course, as we will be seeing in a decade and a half, their descendants would lean into the LP so much that, well, you know.

If you want to chat as listen, you can join the conversation on discord here – https://discord.gg/5a7f6wqjcJ

Track list

Intro

(Clip from Dragnet)

July

(Clip from The Shadow)

August

(Clip from The Hitchhiker)

September

0:58:09 Sidney Bechet – September Song

October

(Clip from The Third Man)

November

1:50:07 Ivory Joe Hunter – I Almost Lost My Mind

December

(Clip from Sir Alfred Munnings’ valedictory speech at The Royal Academy of Art)

Ending

(Clip from Reviewing The Year 1949)

At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. The download here is only for the first hour of the mix. For the full 3-hour version either see below for the Mixcloud player, or come to patreon.com/centuriesofsound for the podcast version and a host of other bonus materials for just $5 per month. This show would not be possible without my supporters on there, so please consider signing up or sharing this with someone who may be interested.

Mixcloud player with full mix – or listen on the Mixcloud website.

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)

This Centuries of Sound mix comes courtesy of my supporters at patreon.com/centuriesofsound – join them for as little as $5 per month and get a full archive and a host of bonus material.

Tracks

0:00:00 Jeff Alexander & Alfred Hitchcock – Music to Be Murdered By (1958)

This time James Errington is joined by John Ashlin to explore the music of 1916. While Europe lies devastated in the midst of the darkest year of the first world war, America is hotting up, with the birth of jazz and blues music imminent, while the old world of Vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley is struggling to adapt.

Support Centuries of Sound and access a treasure trove of bonuses at http://patreon.com/centuriesofsound

At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. The download here is only for the first hour of the mix. For the full 3-hour version either see below for the Mixcloud player, or come to patreon.com/centuriesofsound for the podcast version and a host of other bonus materials for just $5 per month. This show would not be possible without my supporters on there, so please consider signing up or sharing this with someone who may be interested.

Mixcloud player with full mix – or listen on the Mixcloud website.

1948 Part Two – Move

In part one we saw how tape technology was transforming the sound of the world in 1948. In part two we’ll take a cue from another new development – the long playing record. When I first heard that the LP had been less than twenty years old when Sgt Pepper was released – or just eleven years old when Kind of Blue was released, it seemed hard to believe. I was so accustomed to thinking of music as naturally fitting in this format – two sides of around 20-25 minutes each. But until now, nobody was experiencing music like that. There were “albums” it’s true – there had been since the Edwardian age – but these were “albums” in the “photo album” sense. Booklets of perhaps eight double-sided shellac discs, with sides numbered under the assumption that they would be played as a stack on top of a record player (side one matched with side eight maybe.) These cumbersome things were meant for classical music, and not anything as disposable as jazz. But jazz was one step ahead already. By now of course we have this wave of Be Bop artists, often playing improvised music for hours on end, also very much unsuited to a short side of shellac.

Columbia’s new long playing discs (and RCA Victor’s new 7” singles) do not make up a substantial proportion of this mix, but where last time everything was a tape cut up, this time we’re more in the realm of the sometimes meandering, sometimes slow groove building world made possible by this new medium. This is less of a mix to pay attention to, and more a mix to sit back and enjoy. Which is the way forward? We’ll just have to see. The decade is almost over, we’ve come a long way, but there’s one last shock for us before we reach the heart of the century.

Support the show at http://patreon.com/centuriesofsound

Tracklist

Intro

(Clip from Naked City)

Part One – Rock

(Clip from interview with Frank Sinatra)

Part Two – Move

0:21:23 Crown Price Waterford – Move Your Hand, Baby

Part Three – Mist

0:35:07 Pee Wee King – Bull Fiddle Boogie

Part Four – Size

(Clip from Top Tunes of 1948)

Part Five – Twist

(Clip from interview with Vera Hall)

Part Six – Run

(Clip of Edward R Murrow)

Part Seven – Rope

(Clip from Bicycle Thieves)

Part Eight – Hate

(Clip from Bertrand Russell / Fr Frederick Copleston debate on existence of God)

Part Nine – Love

1:54:39 The Orioles – It’s Too Soon To Know

Part Ten – Mirth

(Clip from Hamlet (Gielgud – BBC Radio))

Part Eleven – Stew

(Clip from The Jack Benny Program)

Ending

(Clip from Top Tunes of 1948)