Archive for the '100 Great American Recordings Of The 1940s.' Category

100 Great American Recordings Of The 1940s, Epilogue.

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Epilogue: That Ribbon Of Highway


If you have kept faithful count, you know that we have made our way through only ninety-nine recordings. There is one straggler still on the road, journeying with us to the rising sun.

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100 Great American Recordings Of The 1940s, Act III, Sc. 7.

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Scene Seven: Que Le Arde

The inner dialectic of American history is in stark black and white; Kodachrome has not yet reached our deepest instincts.

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100 Great American Recordings Of The 1940s, Act III Sc. 6.

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

Scene Six: Hold Back The Dawn

And breaks the dam, and the deluge comes, sweeping all before its path, the world we knew and the world we thought we knew, together drowned in the same all-consuming torrent of noise, noise noise boiling up from the underground, from the shacks (chicken and shotgun and all-night and love) of the backwoods, the brothels of the cities, the lonely trails in the swamps and on the uplands where men don’t congregate or if they do they don’t talk about it later.

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100 Great American Recordings Of The 1940s, Act III Sc. 5.

Saturday, August 8th, 2009

Scene Five: A Hand Me Down Broom

The last time we looked at the official, overground version of 1940s pop for any length of time was back in the first half of this list, when we suggested that Frank Sinatra in 1945 was at the tail end of a tradition of songwriting and interpretation which would be swallowed up bodily by the subsequent waves of vernacular pop on the one hand and prissy nostalgia-mongering on the other.

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100 Great American Recordings Of The 1940s, Act III Sc. 4.

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

Scene Four: Pettin’ Party Or A Poker Game

Even more so than the blues, we have kept country music off to one side in these misbegotten wanderings, bringing it in only when we’ve exhausted every other topic.

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