Don’t Stay Up Too Late.

I’ve paused my countdown of great 1920s songs to make updates to the permanent pages (which you can access to the right of this post) of my previous countdowns of 1970s, 1950s, and 1980s songs. Now you can hear every song in those lists in streaming form while you read the nonsense I wrote about it (or better yet, surf some other site in a different tab). I also changed the pictures on the 70s page so that they were the same dimensions as the pictures in later lists, because I am insane and little things like that bug me. Once the 20s list is done, it will go in a similar page, with streaming rather than downloadable mp3s. Get ’em while they’re hot!

And yes, there will be more lists in the future. I’m hammering out an updated 60s list, and I’m slowly researching material for lists covering the 30s, 90s, 40s, and 2000s, in (probably) that order. Nope, my reign of terror ain’t anywhere near over.

As you were.

32. Annette Hanshaw, “Lovable And Sweet”
(Oscar Levant/Sidney Clare)
Okeh 41292, 1929 · mp3
Annette Hanshaw may not have been the first white female jazz singer, but she was certainly the first great one. With fluffy good looks (at twenty-four she could and did pass for sixteen) and an ingenuous personality, she may as well have been the personification of the late 20s ideal of all-American femininity, the girl on countless magazine covers sprung to life and singing in a laid-back style about idealized romance with just the barest hint of sex — a hint so bare, in fact, that it can be completely inaudible to modern listeners. But it’s all in how natural she sounds; the vast majority of contemporary ingénues (including one we’ll be visiting later) either used cartoonish baby voices or assumed a blues-mama holler that was just as unrealistic on the other end. She was a major recording star for a little over a decade, retiring in the late 30s as hotter and hepper sounds overtook her lively flapper bounce — sounds that included those for whom she was a primary influence, like Anita O’Day, Peggy Lee, and even Ella Fitzgerald. “Lovable And Sweet” not only captures the essence of her individual appeal, but is a great song in its own right, with a scat written into the vocal line right at the beginning. Its composer, Oscar Levant, would later be better known as one of the great concert pianists, Hollywood composers, and personalities of the age, a bon vivant and Algonquin-associated wit whose books, film appearances (he’s Gene Kelly’s roommate in An American In Paris), and role as a panelist on one of the all-time great radio shows, Information Please (start here) are among the treasures of the midcentury American aesthetic.

33. Rube Bloom, “Silhouette”
(Rube Bloom)
Okeh 40901, 1927 · mp3
Halfway between Confreyesque piano novelty and real jazz virtuosity as represented in a figure like Art Tatum, this intriguingly chorded piano solo hangs as if caught between beauty and flash, its facile trickles never quite preparing you for its emotional undercurrents. It’s one of the few solo records Rube Bloom made — better known as a journeyman songwriter (he had hits with various lyricists including Johnny Mercer and Ted Koehler into the 50s) and occasionally as a bandleader in the late 20s and early 30s when nearly everyone was a bandleader, he shows himself here to be a superb pianist and an intelligent, sensitive composer. Not, perhaps, at the level of immortals like Gershwin, Rodgers, Porter, and Kern, but one of the points I’ve been trying to make with this list is that the smaller fry also deserve recognition, perhaps even more than the masters whose name everyone knows. And even while recognizing that titles generally have less than nothing to do with the content of the instrumentals they demarcate, I can’t help thinking in terms of silhouette imagery here, high-contrast elegance with eighteenth-century ornamentation — an association only strengthened by flipping through contemporary magazines, where advertising images were full of eighteenth-century costume and the Regency (1811-1820) was frequently used as an historical point of comparison, as a period of relative anarchy in a highly civilized country; the high-contrast Louise Brooks image I’ve used as an illustration was an attempt to draw out those associations.

Vikki Carr, En Español

File Between: Eydie Gormé and Linda Ronstadt

Comments: Vikki Carr, from just seeing her records around, was one of the wave of traditional pop singers in the early 1960s who attempted to keep somewhat current as the musical sands shifted around her. She sang standards and jazz tunes, but also dipped into country, pop (in a Petula Clark/Dionne Warwick kind of way), and most lastingly, Latin pop. Or at least Spanish-language versions of contemporary pop. I have the advantage of knowing Spanish, and she gives convincing readings of a bunch of adult-pop songs, some of which have been translated for the Spanish-language market and some of which were written in Spanish. There’s a real sophistication on display in the music, a kind of international elegance that reminds me more of the 50s and early 60s than of the 70s, although there are contemporary production flourishes as well. But Carr’s big voice, especially when she’s going all-out, is wearing over the course of the album, without enough nuance or shading to give me the kind of lower-key pleasure I’m used to from female vocals.

A Keeper? The idea of a major pop star suddenly deciding to sing in Spanish would smack of opportunism today, but Carr (like Ronstadt after her) gives the impression that it’s an artistic choice, and it mostly works.

Vinyl Rip: Amanece

34. Fiddlin’ John Carson, “The Little Old Log Cabin In The Lane”
(Traditional)
Okeh 4890, 1923 · mp3
And here’s where the story of country music turns ugly. (Wait, turns? Nick Tosches’ book on the subject wasn’t subtitled The Twisted Roots Of Rock & Roll for nothing. But here’s where some ugliness comes to the surface.) Not in this tune, which is as pretty an idyll as a Real Live Hillbilly could scratch onto shellac in 1923, and was in point of fact the first actual country record ever — the first record containing music performed by someone operating within a tradition recognizable as “old-time” or “hillbilly” or “country,” as opposed to some slick Yankee vaudevillian putting on hickface for a quick buck. Fiddlin’ John Carson had also been the first actual country performer on radio, in 1922 (the medium was in its infancy anyway), and was a seven-time winner of Georgia Old-Time Fiddle Championships. Which isn’t to say he didn’t also wear hickface for professional purposes, just as the earliest professional black performers in America wore blackface. He fully embraced the canny, corny old hillbilly stereotypes, helping to establish a tradition which the Grand Ole Opry and Hee Haw would carry into something like the present. He also wrote a song called “Little Mary Phagan” which he performed on the steps of the state capitol in 1915. Mary Phagan was a thirteen-year-old victim of rape and murder whose death instigated the trial, conviction, and subsequent lynching of Leo Frank, the Jewish manager of the pencil factory where she had worked. Frank was innocent (in a cruel irony, the actual murderer seems to have been a black man), but that didn’t stop a wave of anti-Semitic hatred from taking his life, and incidentally sparking both the revival of the Ku Klux Klan and the establishment of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League. “Little Mary Phagan” was a mere murder ballad like thousands of folk songs of unknown provenance, but the historical facts surrounding it can’t help but color the fact that man who wrote it (and recorded it in 1925 with his daughter, who went by the stage name of Moonshine Kate, on vocals) was the man who invented country music as a commercial proposition. The twisted roots of rock & roll, indeed.