Boy, you listen to the radio, or youtube, or spotify, or WHATEVER, and you just simply wonder, “who wrote this stuff?”. It sounds like musical MacDonald’s, fast food that you forget about in 10 minutes. Has it always been this way?
So, I did my annual check on what songs were popular 100 years ago, in 1922 when Jack Dempsey was the heavyweight champ, Silent Cal Coolidge was in the White House and Babe Ruth, in his first year of not being a pitcher, started tearing up baseball with the New York Yankees.
The Dixieland Jazz Band had made their first “jazz” recordings 5 years earlier, but this was definitely before the “Swing” era, so things were still pretty stiff. Still, there was a great selection of songs to “jazz up” and make “hot”, and they are still with us today.
Here’s a list of 100 year old gems, and recommended versions.
- “All Or Nothing At All”. Sinatra’s version with Harry James, or Billie Holiday on her own are fairly definitive.
- “Bugle Call Rag”. Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa and Bunny Berigan turned this into a tour-de-force in the early days of Swing.
- “Carolina Shout” James P Johnson’s fingers never strode the ivories better
- “China Boy”. Benny Goodman’s trio with Teddy Wilson and Gene Krupa, or maybe an earlier one with Jack Teagarden,
are wonderous moments of torrid joy. - “Do It Again”. Julie London-what more can I say
- “Limehouse Blues” Both Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson produced cleverly swinging orchestrations.
- “Runnin’ Wild”. It’s a toss up between Benny Goodman’s Quartet with Lionel Hampton, or Marilyn Monroe teamed with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot. Both bounce in their own ways.
- “Way Down Yonder In New Orleans” Still a classic best known by Jack Teagarden with or without Louis Armstrong
- “’Taint Nobody’s Business If I Do”. Both Jimmy Witherspoon and Billie Holiday got traction from this, but Bessie Smith’s is the most defiant read.
- “On The Alamo” a song so hip that even Stan Getz and Dave Brubeck did versions, although not together.
- BONUS “April Showers” and “The World Is Waiting For The Sunrise”. Jolson did a great version of the former, and Goodman tears apart the latter on almost every recording.