Bing Crosby’s version of the Irving Berlin song “White Christmas” is the best selling recording of all time. First released in 1942, various versions of the single sold more than 50 million copies. Add in appearances on LPs, CDs and EPs (like this one) and you have total sales of something more than 100 million […]
Category: 1940s
Freeman David was a shoeshine boy from Alabama. While he worked, he would whistle and tap out percussion with whatever was to hand. He became good at it, a precise whistler and able to play the bones, holding four sticks in each hand rather than the usual two. As a performer, under the name “Whistling […]
Marie Warder was a teacher, writer and pianist who grew up in South Africa. Not long after the end of the Second World War, she was walking on a street in Johannesburg. I was about nineteen, newly married and very much in love, when I happened to pass by a music store one day, and […]
It says a lot about the changed status of tobacco that as avuncular and wholesome a figure as Bing Crosby would appear on record sleeve smoking a pipe. Look at that jaw! Those kind twinkling eyes! The nice hat, and the colour-coordinated pocket handkerchief! This is as solid a slice of Middle America as ever […]
I can’t dance, not properly. I have never learned to waltz, rhumba, cha-cha or tango. I do not know the fox trot or the Boston two-step or the Charleston. I wish I did, but I came of age when the ability to dance was no longer an essential social skill. The rock’n’roll dances – the […]
We are an extremely visual culture, and becoming more so. As images and video becomes easier and easier to create and manipulate, and as screens become better and lighter and more portable, our ability to just read, or just listen, gradually erodes. I teach at a university, and it is a constant battle to keep […]
Julia Lee was from Kansas City, a blues singer in the famous club scene there. In the 1940s she had great success with what was then called “dirty blues”, but which to modern ears are just a bit risqué. They were, she said, “the songs my mother taught me not to sing”, with lots of […]
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