Posts tagged "a hit before"


New Theme: A Hit Before Your Mother Was Born

Posted by whitneymcn January 8, 2009
Posted to themes  a hit before 

Let’s all get up and dance to a song
That was a hit before your mother was born
Though she was born a long, long time ago

Popular music tends to have a pretty short memory, and a lot of incredible music gets forgotten. Let’s bring some of it back…as an arbitrary cut off point, no songs written since your mother was born are eligible.

To open up some options, we’ll say that the specific recording doesn’t necessarily have to predate your mother’s birth, but the song must. Extra points for posting mp3s of those old 78s you have lying around, of course, but a current performer drawing from the hits of past eras is fair game.

Posted by whitneymcn January 8, 2009
Posted to a hit before 
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106 plays so far

The Carter Family - Wildwood Flower

This recording—probably one of the most famous traditional American country recordings—is from 1928, well before my mother was born, though the song itself is even older, dating back to 1860.

Listen to that guitar: you recognize that “folkie” sound? Well, Maybelle invented that style, my friend. The Carter Family’s music was hugely influential in the late ’20s and ’30s (and they sold hundreds of thousands of records at a time when the recording industry was barely established), and filtered through Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, it has continued to shape music all the way through to today.

Posted by daryn January 9, 2009
Posted to a hit before  tips 
78 RPMs & Cylinder Recordings

Like our latest theme?

Then you’ll love this directory on the Internet Archive, featuring a catalog of recordings from the turn of the last century, transferred from old 78s and cylinders.

Posted by daryn January 9, 2009
Posted to a hit before  tips 
Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

Cylinder recordings, the first commercially produced sound recordings, are a snapshot of musical and popular culture in the decades around the turn of the 20th century.

On this site you will have the opportunity to find out more about the cylinder format, listen to thousands of musical and spoken selections from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and discover a little-known era of recorded sound.

Posted by newspeedwayboogie January 13, 2009
Posted to a hit before 
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
122 plays so far

Blind Willie Johnson - Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground

Google this song and you get lots of “greatest song of all time” type results.  Who really knows?  It is, however, one of the most unique, haunting songs ever recorded, this from sometime in the late 1920s.