The term 'music depreciation' is an interesting enough play on words in and of itself. Spike Jones and His Orchestra may well have coined the term in the course of their various irreverent, but brilliant send-ups of popular--and traditional--music over the years. Their aim being to both knock some of the most revered classics off their pedestals a notch or two, while at the same time deconstructing some of the most popular classics and contemporary music to their basic common denominators: beat and meter, dynamics, and harmony. Spike Jones, while ostensibly clowning with famous music, was brilliant at breaking down those three key essentials to illustrate what made truly great music great. Kay Kyser had also been a proponent of musical deconstruction. Over the course of their combined forty years of influence in musical entertainment, they both helped to fire the imaginations of countless music enthusiasts into looking at music, its structure and composition in a far different light. As mentioned above, The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street often went to great lengths to illustrate these very points. It was the popular success of The Chamber Music Society . . . that inspired the Don Lee-Mutual network to create a similar program that began airing in the Winter of 1944. Called Music Depreciation, it aired a format very similar to the long-running Chamber Music Society series, but in an even more abbreviated and light-hearted tone. And in a nod to the era, the overarching theme of most broadcasts was Swing Music of the era. The program was in all likelihood the brainchild of Ruben Gaines, a poet, writer and radio broadcaster with a flair for irony and music education. His previous Meet the Band series over Don Lee equally sought to shed light on not only the history of music, but its proponents as well. Gaines assembled the team for Music Depreciation comprised of the brilliant and versatile composer and arranger, Frank De Vol, and Les Paul and his Trio.