I'm currently mulling over potentially new show(s), tentatively titled Swing It!
It/they would consist of popular music from the Swing Era of 1933-1947 (possibly extending a bit before and after). While there would be a lot of jazz, as that genre made up a good portion of popular music in the day, there would also be crooners and other types mentioned in the thread Why Pop Music Sucks.
The first show would be hosted by myself, playing select music from the period. The second show would be a random playlist of all the 'charting' music from that era.
I put charting in quotes, as there were no charts as such for those years. Billboard magazine existed (and in fact pretty much the entire run can be found in various places on the Internet), but the Billboard Hot 100 chart didn't come into existence until 1958. However, Joel Whitburn, music historian extraordinaire, took it upon himself to come up with what would have been the charts for those years, taking into account radio play, sales, popularity, etc. It was a monumental task, and you can argue with the results, but no one else has done it to that extent. So, in light of the fact that there are no other choices, we go with his work.
The Artisan Radio archives do contain most of the songs on these charts for the Swing period, and I've started going through them. The vast majority were directly recorded from the original 78s in mono and are in excellent shape, sonically.
It'll take a while to get all this up and running, so don't hold your breath. But it likely will come.
I'll probably schedule the hosted show in for the Midnight, 6AM, Noon, 6PM slots on a weekday(Thursdays?), and replace the Jazz playlist with the Swing It playlist weekends (currently the jazz playlist goes 7 days a week). Or I'll do the Swing It playlist weekdays and the jazz playlist weekends.
Hey, more pop music that doesn't suck!
Just what I want to do! I want to feature swing/jazz singers like Billie Holiday, Kitty Allen, early Frank Sinatra, swing bands like Glen Miller, Count Basie, Benny Goodman etc. What was listened to in the 30s and 40s and early 50s on the radio besides OTR.
Want to put together some 1 hour shows. I actually liked what my parents grew up with and many of the popular songs of that time were done by Do-wop groups as they were the style that do-wop could easily adopt...like songs like "Till Then", "Blue Moon", "Heart and Soul" and many others. But I like to go back to where the originals came from.
I asked you if you had done any as I can compile playlists but not a DJ.
But right now my youtube downloader app expired and wasn't active and I paid the $20 for a year to renew it but I was sent a license key but no link to activate it. Emailed and got no answer so I paid for nothing. Re-downloaded and paid again for the "turbo speed" downloads and the same thing happened. The free version takes 5 minutes for a 3 minute song, the paid version takes 10 to 15 seconds for a 3 minute song. Have to find another good MP3 downloader that works at fast speed and can download a whole playlist of songs besides one song at a time. It's a good thing I got the OTR dramas done before while I had it.
Seems I gave you the idea for the swing era shows? Like you it's in the thinking of stage till I can get a good fast downloader to MP3.
I like to give credit where it's due.
Yes, you asked about swing shows, and after thinking about it for a while, I've decided to do some. I'll certainly make them available to anybody who wants them.
I'm currently going through the 'charts' of the swing era and getting ideas for show themes, in addition to just doing random playlists (I've done 1933, 1934 and am working on 1935).
One theme idea is to feature the top 20 songs for each year of that era (15 shows in total). Another is to do the bottom 20 songs (there was no Bubbling Under chart - of course, there were really no charts as such at all).
Many jazz greats played in multiple bands, so I'm sure there could be a raft of shows featuring a specific artist. Or perhaps a specific focus on an instrument, such as the saxophone.
I'm sure many more will come to me. Thanks Mark, for putting the bee in my bonnet.