Colin B wrote:My son has given his daughter [25] a compilation CD of 50s No.1's.
She is delighted with, can't stop playing it & is looking up all she can about Buddy Holly et al !
It got me thinking.
When I got into music for the first time, Bill Haley, Elvis, Buddy Holly, Little Richard & rock 'n' roll, we didn't have the joy of exploring music from previous decades !
All the former music seemed 'old hat' with Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Al Jolson doing the 'square' stuff which we didn't want to know about !
Younger people of today can look back at previous decades & find loads of music that is perfectly acceptable to them !
They are so lucky !
It's true we didn't have the easy access at our fingertips to explore music from previous decades, but the radio was full of it. As a child in East Africa I listened to a lot of music on the radiogram which was not only from the day, but some of which went way back. This was the 'square stuff' and I did want to know about it. I wasn't big on Sinatra and didn't appreciate him until I was in my 40s, but I liked Bing, and Nat Cole and Johnny Mathis and Doris Day and lots of other pre rock 'n' roll stuff.
My uncle was a big country fan, so he introduced me to a lot of country music. We'd listen to the radio for hours when I was little. We had 78s which again went way back. My stepdad to be had some records by artists from years ago, all of which I listened to. He had Louis Armstrong, Mario Lanza, Sophie Tucker, Al Jolson, The Golden Gate Quartet, Victor Borge, and bizarrely, Stan Freburg, just to mention a few.
As a teenager I read as much as I could about music from the past and devoured that information. I bought, and still have a book called Million Selling Records which went back to 1903. I've read this from cover to cover.
You're right, today, at the click of a button you can hear Caruso from 1903 as easily as you can hear today's chart topper, which is great, but I had a lot of fun discovering this music through the radio, and record collections and reading about it. And it's not just younger people that look back and find loads of music, I do it all the time. It only takes Mister Moon to mention a song by someone and off I go to listen to it.
My elder daughter, now 44, loves the 50s and 60s songs, of course through me playing them when she was young, but she now plays all of this to her children aged 9 and 7, and they love it.
What was on the compilation CD your son gave his daughter? Was it all from the rock 'n' roll era?
I used to do compilation CDs of number one hits for friends' birthdays, the number one from each year, but it got tricky pre 1952 I think it was, when the charts started, although there were sheet music charts before that. It was great fun, and of course with the internet, it was dead easy finding the songs.
We're all so lucky to be able to do this.