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 4-hour version please come to centuriesofsound.com to stream, or patreon.com/centuriesofsound for downloads 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.

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This is the fourth wartime mix, but it's the first without an often jarring disconnect between music and history. The USA's entry into the war at the close of 1941 may not have had an immediate impact upon the course of the conflict, but the impact on popular culture — and particularly on recorded music — is unmistakable. It isn't just the rough-hewn comedy of Spike Jones and Carson Robinson, or the rapidly produced propaganda films, it seems to be knitted into the fabric of American culture. Characters in songs are either heading off to war or waiting for their man to return, radio serials are awash with Nazi spies, and variety shows now function primarily as drives for war bonds.

At the cinema — still of course the gold standard for culture — this is equally evident. 'Casablanca,' as timeless as it may seem, sits very snugly in this particular moment. The city itself was taken by the Allies as part of Operation Torch in November 1942, just around the time the film was first premiered, so when it went on general release in 1943 the setting was already an historical one. Hitchcock's 'Saboteur' is ostensibly a domestic spy drama along the lines of 'The 39 Steps' and 'North By Northwest,' but with the added context of the war this is shifted into a battle between tyranny and democracy, with speeches written by Dorothy Parker and a climactic final battle on the torch of the Statue of Liberty. The top-grossing film of the year was Mrs Miniver, a subdued yet powerful drama about the effects of the war on a rural English housewife, which once again presented a moral of freedom under threat.

The main business of Centuries of Sound is music, of course, and the effect of these shifts on music is profound, and not always in a particularly positive way. In 1941 we heard the first stirrings of rhythm & blues and bebop, in 1942 the former has a few very notable examples (Louis Jordan and Nat King Cole) but is nevertheless diminished, the latter has disappeared almost entirely. Was this a result of wartime censorship, or of conscription of musicians? A greater cause may be the strike by The American Federation of Musicians, which began on August 1st, after a summer of negotiations around royalty payments broke down. This left almost half the year with hardly any professional musicians — and certainly no big bands — recording anywhere in the USA. As we get into 1943 we will hear how musicians managed to circumvent rules to continue performing, and how this changed the course of popular music.

So these four-and-a-bit hours of sound are a little different to the last few mixes, more integrated in feel, but with more in the way of sound collage and re-appropriated radio (the many hours of recordings I trawled for these clips may partially explain the delay in getting this one out.) It also includes nine minutes of a John Cage radio play, a ten-minute 'Casablanca' montage, the best-selling single of all time (possibly) and a load of other things which I am already forgetting. It has been something of a monster to make, but I think it all fits together.

TRACK LIST

0:00:00 Wilhelm Furtwängler And The Berlin Philharmonic - Beethoven Symphony No. 9 (Excerpt)

0:37:01 Bernard Herrmann - Fantasia

1:03:38 Ella Mae Morse & Freddie Slack - The Thrill Is Gone

1:39:01 The Andrews Sisters - Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree

2:13:27 Spike Jones & His City Slickers - Yankee Doodler

2:38:58 Hoagy Carmichael - Stardust

3:06:47 Lionel Hampton - In The Bag

3:33:58 The Merry Macs - Jingle Jangle Jingle

3:53:54 Ed Plumb - Wintery Winds

More time travel to the earliest days of recorded sound with James Errington, this time joined by Cambridge 105’s own Dave Hammond. This time we go back to 1909 to hear novelty songs about moon-orbiting aeroplanes and juvenile smoking, wildly unpredictable vaudeville routines, “authentic” black music from the deep south played by a former plantation owner, and, not to be missed, the theme tune from the snooker.

Centuries of Sound is an independent podcast without any advertising, and it’s only with the support of my patrons that the show can survive. To download full mixes, get early access to the radio podcast, and a get host of other benefits for $5 (or local equivalent) per month (and yearly payment is also now available) please come to https://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 nearly 5-hour version please come to centuriesofsound.com to stream, or patreon.com/centuriesofsound for downloads 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.

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The man in the middle of this picture is my grandfather. Like most young British men in the year 1941, he was serving in the armed forces. In his case that meant the merchant navy, and the Atlantic convoys during the Battle of The Atlantic. The golden rule of the navy, he would later say, was never to volunteer, but breaking this rule to volunteer for "special work" turned out to be one of the best decisions he ever made. Sent on a goodwill trip to New York and New Jersey shortly after the Pearl Harbor attacks had drawn America into the war, the sailors were surprised to find themselves treated as heroes. Then one memorable night at Radio City Music Hall, they were invited on to the stage by the new singer with Tommy Dorsey's band, a man so popular that teenage girls ("Bobby soxers" as they would then be called) in the audience screamed as he sang, one Francis Albert Sinatra.

Frank was at this point already, suddenly, the biggest singing star in the USA, topping polls in Billboard and DownBeat magazines, and selling huge amounts of records. Listening to his recordings from this time can instantly tell you why. As much as any singer embarking on an imperial phase, his performances seem not just to be technically and artistically brilliant, but to be utterly effortless, as if he just woke up one morning singing like that. Naturally there was more to his popularity than his voice though. Sinatra would later say that he represented "…the boy in every corner drugstore, the boy who'd gone off drafted to the war" to young women. To many young men, however, this jarred with the fact that he never served himself, despite being the right age. Rumours circulated that Sinatra or unnamed underworld connections had paid a bribe to keep him out of the army, but when files were eventually released it transpired that he was deemed unfit for service for being "not acceptable material from a psychiatric viewpoint" and "emotionally unstable" — quite a contrast to the self-assured artist we think we know.

Sinatra was not, of course, the most exciting musician working in 1941. Not by a long shot. The ridiculous running length of this mix isn't (I hope) down to sloppiness on my part, it's because there's simply too much to fit in here, even after the hour-long Pearl Harbour montage was cut out. 1941 isn't often held up as one of the best years for music, there aren't that many hits here for example, but coming at it chronologically it's obvious that a great bursting and unchaining of creativity is underway. Much of this is from the same people we've heard a great deal from in the last few years. Musicians from Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and Jay McShann's bands would jam together through the night at Minton's Playhouse in New York, playing around with complex harmonies, syncopation, chord substitutions. It was music by and for musicians, not intended for the public, and it's only by the most amazing luck that a single recording, heavily excerpted here, survives. Charlie Christian, electric guitarist in the Benny Goodman Orchestra, here shows himself a good few decades ahead of the curve with solos that seem to invent new genres every minute. Sadly he would be dead before 1942 was out, at the age of 25, but the music he birthed would live on, as "bebop." Also prefiguring rock and roll we have astonishing jump blues from Lucky Millinder, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Louis Jordan and Nat King Cole, and from the West coast we have that strange mix of cowboy country and swing jazz then called "Western Swing." And let's not even get started on the explosion of Samba music in Brasil. Even strike action helped out here (as it would very much not do in the following years) - ASCAP (The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) spent most of 1941 in a dispute with radio broadcasters over royalties. As their clients were almost exclusively the white songwriting establishment, the beneficiaries were those of a different race or class, who could now get their songs played on the radio, which then led to more demand for these records to be made.

Musicians in 1941 - no, people in 1941 - were not waiting around for the war to start. They were not putting their lives on hold for the duration. They were playing some of the most original and exciting music we've heard so far. In a half-decade of unimaginable horrors, the dampening down of this spark doesn't rank very high on the list of crimes, but still, it will be a long few years before we can pick up where we left off.

Track list

0:00:00 Kunaisho Shikiburyô Gagakuka - Taishikichô Chôshi

0:30:12 Billie Holiday - Solitude

1:02:04 Arthur Askey - Thanks For Dropping In Mr Hess

1:30:31 Duke Ellington - Take The 'A' Train

2:01:01 Margaret Eaves With Joe Loss & His Orchestra - ''V'' Stands For Victory

2:32:13 Carl Stalling - Stalling Self-Parody

3:04:43 Xavier Cugat - Eco

3:31:43 Pete Johnson - Death Ray Boogie

4:01:50 Artie Shaw And His Orchestra - Frenesi

At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound - I make these on my own, in my spare time. To support my work and help the show survive, please consider signing up at patreon.com/centuriesofsound where you can also get full show downloads and a host of other bonus stuff 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.

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At 7:48am on December 7th 1941, the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii was attacked by 353 Japanese aircraft, launched from six aircraft carriers, precipitating the entrance of the United States into the Second World War.

Major news stories had been covered on the radio before, of course, and radio recordings had been made for more than a decade. Nevertheless, this is by far the most contemporary material available for a breaking news story. Edited down from nearly twenty hours of original recordings, this sound collage presents these events as they occurred from the perspective of a radio listener that day.

Generally I layer music over speech clips, but in this case I have included only music as it was broadcast on that day. The sound quality is therefore unavoidably a lot worse than you may be used to, and the audio is presented without a tracklist.

This episode was partially inspired by Awful Grace Podcast's Again The Never Came, a sound collage from 9/11, an astonishing bit of audio which I would recommend, but with a warning that it includes phone calls from the Twin Towers, which frankly anyone will find distressing.

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Another adventure into the history of recorded music with James Errington, this time joined by veteran BBC presenter & producer Tony Barnfield to listen to and talk about the sounds of 1908, right at the heart of the era when music hall and vaudeville dominated music on either side of the Atlantic.

Centuries of Sound is an independent podcast without any advertising, and it’s only with the support of my patrons that the show can survive. To download full mixes, get early access to the radio podcast, and a get host of other benefits for $5 (or local equivalent) per month (and yearly payment is also now available) please come to https://patreon.com/centuriesofsound

At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. The download here is only for two sections of the mix. For the full 4-hour version please come to centuriesofsound.com to stream, or patreon.com/centuriesofsound for downloads 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.

MP3 preview download | Patreon | Apple | Mixcloud | Spotify | Castbox | Stitcher | RSS

This section of the mix is a sound collage of original broadcasts and recordings from 1940. The spoken word sections largely concern the war, the music is mainly stereo recordings made by Leopold Stokowski for the Disney movie Fantasia. This is a departure from the largely music-centric format you may be used to, I hope it is of interest.

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This compilation of Christmas recordings spans the early years of electronic recording, the explosion of radio, sound films and newsreel, the end of the roaring thirties and the great depression.

I’m presenting this in two formats — a mix, which is on my main feed at centuriesofsound.com and as a compilation, which is only available to patrons. Join my patreon at patreon.com/centuriesofsound and get a load of bonus content like this, as well as helping this site to survive in these very difficult times.

Here is the tracklist, the same for both versions.

00:00 The Savoy Orpheans - Radio Christmas (1926)

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 4-hour version please come to centuriesofsound.com to stream, or patreon.com/centuriesofsound for downloads 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.

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One of the reasons this project started was a musical vacuum. In 2012 I was living in a place where nobody cared much for music of any sort - at best it would be tolerated as a background noise, and generally being noticeable meant being "noisy" and I would be asked to turn it off, or usually not even asked. Soon the headphones were on every day, and sounds became something entirely personal and unsharable. The act of immersion is ultimately a personal one, there is nothing communal about it, so how then to evoke the experience of a single, very traumatic year with a collection of music which most people living through it would not have heard?

The best-selling hit songs of 1940 are not in this mix, either they were recorded in 1939 or they are altogether too lugubrious to be worthy of inclusion. Even if they were all here, the figures that loom largest here - Churchill, Hitler, FDR, Mussolini - would not have cared for them either, and it wouldn't be until the 1960s that there would be a world leader who appeared to be in any way touch with popular culture (you may be surprised to hear his voice appear in this mix) - no, these people only listened to real music, that is "classical" music, and it was fitting therefore that the historical events caused by their actions (I mean, of course, The War) would be accompanied by wordless orchestral sounds. It is fortunate then that this is also the year Disney released Fantasia.

You most likely know Fantasia as a ground-breaking animated film, which is a fair description. From our point of view, however, it is more notable for its sound design, for which the word "revolutionary" seems entirely inadequate. Conductor Leopold Stokowski, already noted for his pioneering recording work, led the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Academy of Music Concert Hall in Philadelphia in performing a series of pieces. Thirty three microphones were placed around the orchestra, with eight optical recording machines recording. Six channels recorded different sections of the orchestra, while the seventh recorded a mixture of the first six, and the eighth captured the overall sound from a distance. The result is not just the first properly realised stereo recording, it is music recorded with a vibrancy which would genuinely not be equaled in decades. Cinemas were, of course, not ready for this sort of sound, and the film was only initially shown on a limited number of screens which could be properly adapted for the purpose. Wider distribution was hampered also by the running time (over two hours) and the impossibility of distributing anything in Europe in 1940. The result was a financial loss, and reruns were heavily edited, with a more easily usable, but much less special, mono soundtrack. So the astonishing sound we have here was heard by surprisingly few people.

As far as a comment upon the war goes, the violence of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring fits better than any new music written in 1940, but this mix is not without contemporary musical comment on current - or at least recent - events. Most notably, this is the year Alan Lomax sat down with Woody Guthrie and had him expound at length about the horrors of the dust bowl. The resultant recordings formed the basis of his 1940 collection Dust Bowl Ballads, an evocation of a time and place of a sort we haven't really had before. This is also the year of John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, Ed Murrow's London After Dark and Hitchcock's Rebecca, lending the mix an unvarnished cinéma vérité feel, from time to time. The War Effort and the artifice of propaganda, at least from an American perspective, would not begin until 1942, and we have other troubles in 1941.

And yes, there is also a lot going on in jazz and rhythm and blues this year, but let's talk more about that next time.

Tracklist

0:00:00 Leopold Stokowski - Toccata And Fugue In D Minor

(Clip from H.G. Wells and Orson Welles interview. Radio KTSA San Antonio on October 28, 1940)

(Clip from BBC - It's That Man Again - Tommy Handley)

2:50:07 Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys - Bob Wills Special

(Clip from John F Kennedy's First Recorded Interview - 1940 on KROC AM in Rochester, MN)

At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. This is one of the four hours in the full version of Centuries of Sound 1939

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An hour-long soundscape of the first five months of the second world war.

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Audio historian DJ James Errington takes you on another time travel adventure, this time to hear some original sounds from 1907, including some wonderful stuff from Enrico Caruso, a few original vaudeville routines and some very premature Christmas cheer.

Centuries of Sound is an independent podcast without any advertising, and it’s only with the support of my patrons that the show can survive. To download full mixes, get early access to the radio podcast, and a get host of other benefits for $5 (or local equivalent) per month, please come to https://patreon.com/centuriesofsound