1900-1949

 

I recognised at the start that I would be missing out many essential names, but I gave it a go and chose some acts over others.  For example I chose Caruso instead of Callas, as he was earlier and had the first ever million-selling hit song.

 

I bet none of us could choose 25 acts covering 1950-1999 and not leave out lots of important names.

 

Had my words ... incorrectly placed ... but the LP itself goes back to the turn of the century almost ... however, it was not a mass market thing, and they were very expensive.

 

The history of the LP really takes off after WW2 ... again, see the Tom Dowd DVD for the American version of it ... as he was one of the very early engineers of the making of LP's.  Tom has an interesting idea about why before the LP was not as viable as it became ... and the recording levels and the controls and everything else goes into it ... which you would expect from a recording engineer!

 

Film history is very clear that there was no direct/actual sound until the Jazz Singer (not actually true ... more later), because the celluloid at the time had no "sound strip" and most projectors and cameras had no facility to handle these. The "Jazz Singer" was one of the first to actually take a recording and "match" it to the film ... where you can see on occasion that the timing is not correct, but it was very well done and obviously painstakingly detailed to ensure that it did not come off bad! 

 

But in a generalized context, the amount of material you can get and learn from and understand and figure out how to place it in a historical context within those 49 years, it would show that the development was there, but it was still in a transitional and experimental stage. FILM, and specially Hollywood, is often given the credit for helping the LP develop further, to be able to make even more copies ... and they immediately made sure that their "stars" could sing, and immediately had albums available to the public ... and in essence this is the beginning of the history of the LP, because before that the number of copies made was too limited and its distribution was not possible and in some cases, downright difficult and mostly local ... the stuff by Robert Johnson and some of the other black folks, whose music survived, was being made but rarely gor very far beyond its locations and certainly got no help from record companies or other institutions by comparison -- Tom Dowd -- who also states that a lot of black music was killed when the studios brought out their stuff ... everyone started buying the other stuff and the black stuff ... disappeared in the media and in people's collections other than a handful!

 

And most of the stuff that survives, including Robert Johnson recordings, are of such sad and bad quality compared to other stuff at the time, that it has been thought that they were more representative of a period of American History, than they would be considered a part of American Music History ... most of which STILL ignores the relevancy of many of those folks! While we speak of the likes of Robert Johnson, according to Tom Dowd, the live jazz scene was far more important and inventive and was the scene that died badly ... and has the "least" history, only because Mr. Slowhand or Jack White mention Robert, so to speak, otherwise no one would know them or have heard of them!