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The stars are aligned and its March here in 2020 while we look (or is that listen?) back at March, 1952. Let’s see if the charts as full of Spring as the gardens of London are…

The songs of March, 1952

A great crop of new tunes on the main US pop charts this month…

March, 1952 Top 20 Hits

“A Guy Is A Guy” – Doris Day
“Any Time” – Eddie Fisher
“Bermuda” – Bell Sisters
“Blacksmith Blues” – Ella Mae Morse
“Blue Tango” – Hugo Winterhalter
“Blue Tango” – Leroy Anderson
“Broken Hearted” – Johnnie Ray
“Come What May” – Patti Page
“Cry” – Johnnie Ray
“Forgive Me” – Eddie Fisher
“Hambone” – Frankie Laine / Jo Stafford
“I’ll Walk Alone” – Don Cornell
“Perfidia” – Four Aces
“Pittsburgh Pennsylvania” – Guy Mitchell
“Please Mr. Sun” – Johnnie Ray
“Slow Poke” – Arthur Godfrey
“Slow Poke” – Pee Wee King / Redd Stewart
“Tell Me Why” – Eddie Fisher
“Tell Me Why” – Four Aces
“The Little White Cloud That Cried” – Johnnie Ray
“The Three Bells” – Les Compagnon De La Chanson
“Tiger Rag” – Les Paul And Mary Ford
“Tulips And Heather” – Perry Como
“Wheel Of Fortune” – Bobby Wayne
“Wheel Of Fortune” – Kay Starr
“Wimoweh” – Weavers / Gordon Jenkins

You can listen to the full playlist on Youtube via this link or embedded below:

This month in history

There’s nothing from the soundtrack charting yet, but this month in 1952 the classic film “Singin’ in the Rain” was released. Apparently, as is so often the way with true classics, it was only a moderate hit when it was first released but it’s now rated far and wide.

My favourite random accolade is its placement on the British Film Institute’s list of “the 50 films to be seen by the age of 14” – so we’ll get it on Sadie’s radar sometime in the next decade. You can watch a trailer below:

It’s, given the time, a surprisingly post-modern tale – a film about film stars making films – including a plot around lip syncing which feels well ahead of its time. But more surprisingly it wasn’t entirely new even at the time. The titular song was in fact taken from another film, “The Hollywood Revue of 1929” – one of the first films with sound.

The film was a plotless showcase of MGM’s stars including Joan Crawford, Buster Keaton and Laurel & Hardy. “Singin’ in the Rain” is performed initially by Cliff Edwards as “Ukulele Ike,’” and later performed at the end of the film by the entire cast. This latter all-star color sequence was a last-minute addition to the film, shot late at night on June 10, 1929, just ten days before the premiere.

You can see some of that below:

What’d Sadie think?

Kay Starr’s version of “Wheel of Fortune” dominates the number 1 spot throughout March. We’ve liked a few Starr songs so far but this one doesn’t grab us.

Interesting to note though that song was the theme tune of the TV show “Wheel of Fortune”…but not the one we all know. This, short lived, series ran in 1952-53 and involved rewarding everyday people who had done good deeds in their life by having their stories told on national TV, then allowing them to spin the eponymous prize wheel being awarded that prize.

“Black Smith Blues” initially seemed thematically old-fashioned even for 1950 but its a great tune, and Ella Mae Morse is exactly the name of someone you’d expect to find singing it. Apparently the tune was from an earlier song, “Happy Pay Day” which is from a couple of years earlier, but didn’t chart as high:

Johnnie Ray’s “(Here I am) Broken Hearted” has really grown on us. One of the disadvantages of doing this at 4 times speed is that some songs that would gave been creeping up the charts and grow over time are here and gone before we get hooked on them.

“Hambone”, a duet between Frankie Laine and Jo Stafford is catchy but I can’t find out much about it – which is a pity as it interpolates the children’s rhyme, “Hush, Little Baby” as half its lyrics and seems like it must have an interesting story.

“Perfidia” by the Four Aces is likewise excellent. The original is by Mexican composer Alberto Domínguez from the 1940s. At first listen you could hear it as another ’50s song named after a lost love but “Perfidia” is spanish for “perfidy” the root of infidelity.

Guy Mitchell is always good for a tune and “Pittsburgh Pennsylvania” is no exception. Another on the “gold digger” theme,

If you should run into a golden-haired angel
And ask her tonight for a date
She’ll tell you somewhere there’s a rich millionaire
Who is calling again about eight

Guy Mitchell, “Pittsburgh Pennsylvania”

Speaking of vaguely sexist tropes, there’s two versions of “Slow Poke” in the charts – we’ve included Arthur Godfrey’s this week. This seems to focus on waiting for a woman to…get on with something. But as a bonus it has some “clip clop” rhythms that gives it a nice cowboy edge that we’ve not had in a while.

And, seeing as we are listening to a March chart in March, it is nice to have a spring themed tune in there – Perry Como’s “Tulips And Heather”. Not bad actually.

“Wimoweh” by the Weavers required some digging. It’s a version of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”…sort of. Actually it precedes the version with the lyrics we know today. Which were written by George David Weiss and performed by The Tokens in the early 1960s,

But is itself is a cover of “Mbube” from the 1920s by Solomon Linda, a South African Zulu singer. “Wimoweh”, the lyric we still know today, is a mishearing of the original song’s chorus of “Uyimbube” meaning “You are a lion” in Zulu. Here is the original:

There’s a convoluted story of the evolution of the song and the copyright over at wikipedia that is worth a read.

Let’s end the week on Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain” as it looks like a smattering is about to fall here in London.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1ZYhVpdXbQ

We’ve reach February, 1952 in our adventure through audio history – 25 years to the month before I was born. Alas back in 2021, the Scovell family have all come down with a cold that Sadie brought back from her first foray into Nursery… so we’ll make this a light entry while we convalesce.

The songs of February, 1952

We’ll make a bumper February, 1952 playlist to make up for the lack of commentary. Combining the main pop chart:

February, 1952 Top 20 Hits

“A Kiss To Build A Dream On” – Louis Armstrong
“Any Time” – Eddie Fisher
“Because Of You” – Tony Bennett
“Bermuda” – Bell Sisters
“Blue Tango” – Leroy Anderson
“Broken Hearted” – Johnnie Ray
“Charmaine” – Mantovani
“Cold Cold Heart” – Tony Bennett
“Cry” – Johnnie Ray
“Dance Me Loose” – Arthur Godfrey / Chordettes
“Domino” – Tony Martin
“Down Yonder” – Del Wood
“Down Yonder” – Joe Fingers Carr
“Garden In The Rain” – Four Aces
“It’s No Sin” – Eddy Howard
“It’s No Sin” – Four Aces
“Jealousy” – Frankie Laine
“Mother At Your Feet Is Kneeling” – Bobby Wayne
“Please Mr. Sun” – Johnnie Ray
“Shrimp Boats” – Jo Stafford
“Slow Poke” – Arthur Godfrey
“Slow Poke” – Helen O’Connell
“Slow Poke” – Pee Wee King / Redd Stewart
“Tell Me Why” – Eddie Fisher
“Tell Me Why” – Four Aces
“The Little White Cloud That Cried” – Johnnie Ray
“Tiger Rag” – Les Paul And Mary Ford
“Undecided” – Ames Brothers / Les Brown

A top 10 country chart from the month:

And a top 10 Rhythm and Blues chart:

You can listen to the full extended playlist on Youtube via this link or embedded below:

Enjoy it and we’ll see you with more to say, hopefully, next week when we’re back at 100%!

The songs of January, 1952

We’re sweeping into 1952 just as it seems spring has truly sprung back here in 2020. Let’s see what the third year of our adventure holds for us shall we?

January, 1952 Top 20 Hits

A solid set of songs new and (a few months) old on the main pop parade this month.

“A Kiss To Build A Dream On” – Louis Armstrong
“Any Time” – Eddie Fisher
“Because Of You” – Tony Bennett
“Bermuda” – Bell Sisters
“Blue Tango” – Leroy Anderson
“Broken Hearted” – Johnnie Ray
“Charmaine” – Mantovani
“Cold Cold Heart” – Tony Bennett
“Cry” – Johnnie Ray
“Dance Me Loose” – Arthur Godfrey / Chordettes
“Domino” – Tony Martin
“Down Yonder” – Del Wood
“Down Yonder” – Joe Fingers Carr
“Garden In The Rain” – Four Aces
“It’s No Sin” – Eddy Howard
“It’s No Sin” – Four Aces
“Jealousy” – Frankie Laine
“Mother At Your Feet Is Kneeling” – Bobby Wayne
“Please Mr. Sun” – Johnnie Ray
“Shrimp Boats” – Jo Stafford
“Slow Poke” – Arthur Godfrey
“Slow Poke” – Helen O’Connell
“Slow Poke” – Pee Wee King / Redd Stewart
“Tell Me Why” – Eddie Fisher
“Tell Me Why” – Four Aces
“The Little White Cloud That Cried” – Johnnie Ray
“Tiger Rag” – Les Paul And Mary Ford
“Undecided” – Ames Brothers / Les Brown

So we’ll stick to the aggregated top 20 for the month which you can listen to in full on Youtube via this link or embedded below:

This month in history

There’s only one thing of historical note worth mentioning in January 1952, and no its not Churchill’s meeting with Truman in Washington, it is the introduction of the character Sooty to the world on BBC Television in the UK.

The yellow puppet, later to be joined by a dimwitted sidekick “Sweep”, was the brain child of puppeteer Harry Corbett. He invented the character in 1948 when he came across an all yellow bear glove puppet during a holiday in Blackpool. He made use of it to entertain his children during that time, including his newborn son Peter, naming the puppet Teddy.

After winning a talent competition, and a recurring spot on a children’s TV show, Corbett redesigned Teddy’s appearance to make him stand-out on black and white television screens. This involved the use of black dust (‘soot’) upon the ears and nose, which inspired Corbett to change the puppet’s name from Teddy to Sooty.

You can see an early-ish episode here:

Sooty would be joined by Sweep and their slapstick physical comedy would become loved by kids for decades. Sooty was known for his “Xylophone” (actually a glockenspiel) which became show merch. Fittingly one of Sadie’s first gifts, from our dear friend Jo, was a similar toy.

I was a big fan of Sooty & Sweep as a kid. By time I was watching it, Harry’s son Matthew was the host. Quite the dynasty! You can see an 80’s episode at this link, which is what I would have enjoyed.

What’d Sadie think?

Johnnie Ray’s “Cry” was number one for all of January and its a deserving tune in our book. Apparently Tony Bennett called Ray the “father of rock and roll” though Ray’s b-side to this, which also charted, “The Little White Cloud That Cried” is thematically and sonically far from rocking.

It was a great month for Ray though with “Broken Hearted” and “Please Mr. Sun” also charting. The man loved to sing about the weather…Neither stuck out to us.

The impressed Tony Bennett crooned a mere two songs onto the charts in comparison, “Because Of You” and the much covered, “Cold Cold Heart”. They’re both alright.

Has anyone not noticed the playlists are in alphabetical order? The script that compiles the weekly charts in monthly charts sorts them to get rid of duplicates. I’m thinking it might worth ordering them by highest charting position. Let’s see if I find the time.

That’s why Louis Armstrong’s “A Kiss To Build A Dream On” is first – and great song it is. It’s from the soundtrack to Film Noir, “The Strip”. Which looks great, you can watch the trailer below:

Last, alphabetically speaking and thus on the playlist was “Undecided” by the Ames Brothers. Originally an Ella Fitzgerald song from 1939 its had an ear-worm effect on me all day.

I often try and imagine what a song will be like from its title, so I was hoping for some pre-rock from “Dance Me Loose” by Arthur Godfrey but…no its an absolute nonsense song. However it did make me look up Arthur Godfrey who was a Radio and TV presenter at the time. Apparently he was a master of commercialism and drew hug sponsorship fees to his shows. Often disrespecting the scripts from these advertising agencies of these brands but still endearing the products to his audience.

He advertised Chesterfield cigarettes for many years, during which he devised the slogan “Buy ’em by the carton” by all accounts. But he terminated his relationship with the company after he quit smoking, five years before he was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1959. Going on to be a prominent anti-tobacco campaigner. There’s a turnaround!

The other standout song for the month is Frankie Laine’s “Jealousy” – a tango, originally from the ’20s. Which yes, makes it all but 100 years old this decade! And still worth dancing around the living room with your daughter to we say.

To end this month, let’s listen to the Sooty theme (from the 50’s sometime-ish) because why not:

It’s beginning to feel a lot like…Xmas? Yes indeed because here we are at the very end of a second year in our 4x Life journey. 1951 is all but done and dusted just as the last dustings of snow fall on London back in 2021.

The songs of December, 1951

We’ve combined the top 20 pop hits of the month…

December, 1951 Top 20 Hits

“Any Time” – Eddie Fisher
“Because Of You” – Tony Bennett
“Charmaine” – Mantovani
“Cold Cold Heart” – Tony Bennett
“Cry” – Johnnie Ray
“Dance Me Loose” – Arthur Godfrey / Chordettes
“Domino” – Tony Martin
“Down Yonder” – Del Wood
“Down Yonder” – Joe Fingers Carr
“I Get Ideas” – Tony Martin
“It’s No Sin” – Eddy Howard
“It’s No Sin” – Four Aces
“It’s No Sin” – Savannah Churchill
“Jealousy” – Frankie Laine
“Jingle Bells” – Les Paul
“Mother At Your Feet Is Kneeling” – Bobby Wayne
“Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer” – Gene Autry
“Shrimp Boats” – Jo Stafford
“Slow Poke” – Helen O’Connell
“Slow Poke” – Pee Wee King / Redd Stewart
“Tell Me Why” – Four Aces
“The Little White Cloud That Cried” – Johnnie Ray
“Turn Back The Hands Of Time” – Eddie Fisher
“Undecided” – Ames Brothers / Les Brown
“Unforgettable” – Nat King Cole
“White Christmas” – Bing Crosby

…with a top 10 R&B chart for a playlist full of ’51s finest.

You can listen to the full playlist on Youtube via this link or embedded below:

This month in history

For very dull technical reasons I have to spend some time this week working on some of the code that keeps 4x Life purring. Without boring you (much further) the source I’m getting my charts from has changed slightly and to automate how 4-5 weeks of charts are combined into one de-duplicated chart for the month I need to make some tweaks under the hood.

So we’ll skip over the history of the month except to say…oh 1951, you don’t what a “trying” year is! Try 2020 on for size, eh!

What’d Sadie think?

And we’ll leave the song commentary for the week just as simple. Unlike last year, there was no big battle for the Xmas song of the season it seems. No new contenders and the old classics, White Xmas and Rudolph only made it as high as number 16 in consecutive weeks. One assumes most people still had a copy of them from the past couple of years!

The number one spot was shared across the month, twice by Tony Bennett’s “Cold, Cold Heart”, then twice by Eddy Howard’s “It’s No Sin”, with Johnnie Ray’s “Cry” rounding out the month.

Which was the best? We’ll go for Johnnie Ray’s “Cry” but you make up your own mind when you listen to the full playlist on Youtube via this link.

We’re starting to see Daffodils popping up about the place as we go for our state-sanctioned daily exercise here in London. Meanwhile its nearing Xmas time again back in our 1951 timeline…

The songs of November, 1951

A few new songs hitting the charts this month…

November, 1951 Top 20 Hits

“And So To Sleep Again” – Patti Page
“Because Of You” – Les Baxter
“Because Of You” – Tony Bennett
“Blue Velvet” – Tony Bennett
“Charmaine” – Mantovani
“Cold Cold Heart” – Tony Bennett
“Cry” – Johnnie Ray
“Domino” – Tony Martin
“Down Yonder” – Del Wood
“Down Yonder” – Joe Fingers Carr
“I Get Ideas” – Louis Armstrong
“I Get Ideas” – Tony Martin
“It’s All In The Game” – Tommy Edwards
“It’s No Sin” – Eddy Howard
“It’s No Sin” – Four Aces
“It’s No Sin” – Savannah Churchill
“Jealousy” – Frankie Laine
“Just One More Chance” – Les Paul & Mary Ford
“Out In The Cold Again” – Richard Hayes
“Shrimp Boats” – Jo Stafford
“Slow Poke” – Pee Wee King / Redd Stewart
“The Little White Cloud That Cried” – Johnnie Ray
“The Loveliest Night Of The Year” – Mario Lanza
“The World Is Waiting For The Sunrise” – Les Paul & Mary Ford
“Turn Back The Hands Of Time” – Eddie Fisher
“Undecided” – Ames Brothers / Les Brown
“Unforgettable” – Nat King Cole
“Whispering” – Les Paul

You can listen to the full playlist on Youtube via this link or embedded below:

A single song of ’51 throughout the decades

Pop songs of the ’50s invariably have a rich history when I dig into them. So few just arrive at the time, many being based on folk songs or pieces from decades prior that have been mixed and mashed with new lyrics or placed into a new genre.

I found the back story to Tommy Edwards’ “It’s All In The Game” particularly fascinating. It didn’t make it to number 1 this month, that was Tony Bennett’s “Cold Cold Heart” which dominated after his song “Because of You” won the top spot the previous month.

The melody to “It’s all in the game” was composed by by Charles G. Dawes, who was later Vice President of the United States under Calvin Coolidge in the late ’20s. But he wrote it back in 1911. A friend of his took it to a publisher without his knowing so he was surprised to see it in a store window being sold alongside a picture of himself.

At the time he was a banker, having also served as “Comptroller of the Currency” for the US Department of Treasury. He quipped of the song, “I know that I will be the target of my punster friends. They will say that if all the notes in my bank are as bad as my musical ones, they are not worth the paper they were written on.”

Apparently he grew to detest the song as it was used to tease him during his political career. It became a favourite of violinist Fritz Kreisler, who used it as his closing number in the 1940s. You can hear that below:

Other performers such as Tommy Dorsey kept the tune topical during that decade:

Dawes actually died in April of 1951. In summer of that year, songwriter Carl Sigman had an idea for a song, and Dawes’s “Melody” struck him as suitable for his sentimental lyrics.

It was recorded by a range of artists who have come up in our charts so far – It was recorded that year by Dinah Shore, Sammy Kaye, Carmen Cavallaro, and Tommy Edwards.

As well as Louis Armstrong:

It wasn’t his 1951 version that was most famous though. In 1958, Edwards had only one session left on his MGM contract. Stereo recording was becoming a thing and it was decided to cut a stereo version of the song with a “rock and roll arrangement”. Though it’s not what we’d call rock today – but a guitar and drum backing rather than the original violins.

The single was a hit, reaching number one for six weeks in 1958 and reviving Edwards career for a few more years.

Its subsequently been recorded by a range of artists like Cliff Richard in the ’60s…

…and Merle Haggard in the 1970s. Quite the journey!

Now go listen to the full playlist of November 1951 hits via this link.

As we head towards the end of a full year in some form of lockdown, we are making it to the end of our second year of 4x life. It’s October, 1951 so let’s see what there is for us to listen to…

The songs of October, 1951

Not a lot of change on the pop charts this month…

October, 1951 Top 20 Hits

“And So To Sleep Again” – Patti Page
“Because Of You” – Les Baxter
“Because Of You” – Tony Bennett
“Blue Velvet” – Tony Bennett
“Cold Cold Heart” – Tony Bennett
“Come On-A My House” – Rosemary Clooney
“Detour” – Patti Page
“Domino” – Tony Martin
“Down Yonder” – Champ Butler
“Down Yonder” – Del Wood
“Down Yonder” – Joe Fingers Carr
“Hey Good Lookin’” – Jo Stafford / Frankie Laine
“I Get Ideas” – Louis Armstrong
“I Get Ideas” – Tony Martin
“It’s No Sin” – Eddy Howard
“It’s No Sin” – Four Aces
“It’s No Sin” – Savannah Churchill
“Just One More Chance” – Les Paul & Mary Ford
“Shanghai” – Doris Day
“Sweet Violets” – Dinah Shore
“The Loveliest Night Of The Year” – Mario Lanza
“The World Is Waiting For The Sunrise” – Les Paul & Mary Ford
“Too Young” – Nat King Cole
“Turn Back The Hands Of Time” – Eddie Fisher
“Undecided” – Ames Brothers / Les Brown
“Whispering” – Les Paul

…so we’ll supplement with the best selling country songs of October. The two charts have a couple of songs in common, if not artists, which we’ll get to in a bit.

You can listen to the full playlist on Youtube via this link or embedded below:

This month in history

If there’s a TV show which says 1950’s more than “I Love Lucy” then…someone let me know. It premiered in October of 1951 and ran through to 1957 across six seasons.

You can watch the beginning of the first episode below. It’s delightfully meta (and expectedly sexist) as it talks about Desi Arnaz’s impending TV stardom, “On television you have to have a pretty girl in your show to demonstrate your sponsors product.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5etvy5LqpW0

On a musical tip you can see a spot from a later episode where Arnaz sings the previously unknown words to the theme song:

The fact that the duo of Ball and Arnaz were a real couple (at least during the ’50s) only makes it more meta and delightful.

What’d Sadie think?

Tony Bennett’s “Because of You” continues its run at the top of the charts for all of October. It’s good but not deserving of that much time at the top to my ears.

It might be the rainy-saturday-morning-in-bed effect but this time around Les Paul and Mary Ford’s chillaxed “Just One More Chance” really struck a chord.

As did “Turn Back The Hands Of Time” by Eddie Fisher which Sadie particularly liked. It’s thematically very similar, singing about forbidden young love, as the still brilliant and still charting “Too Young” by Nat King Cole.

The pop and country charts are linked by two songs – “Hey Good Lookin’” by Jo Stafford & Frankie Laine and “Cold Cold Heart” by Tony Bennett on one side and Hank Williams who sings, and actually wrote, both on the other.

The original of a song isn’t always the best, especially in the ’50s where so many covers of hit songs are released, but in this case Hank’s versions are easily superior and both personal faves.

“I Wanna Play House With You” by Eddy Arnold is the other stand-out on the chart apart from… the quartet of hits by Lefty Frizzell. The man had a good month and listening to all four songs you can hear how his sound became so influential. As Merle Haggard said, “The impact Lefty had on country music is not even measurable. … No one could handle a song like Lefty. He would hold on to each word until he finally decided to drop it and pick up the next one. Most of us learned to sing listening to him.”

“Always Late” is my favourite of the four, with “Travellin’ blues” close behind. (Oh to have travellin’ blues as a problem we think from within lock down back in 2020.)

To end on then, here’s a video of Lefty singing one of his four hits of the month, “I want to be with you always” on TV some time later:

Now enjoy the hits of October, 1951 and see you all next week.