Death In Vegas - Anita Berber

But ragtime is also good in the more austere sense of the professional critic. I cannot understand how a trained musician can overlook its purely technical elements of interest. It has carried the complexities of the rhythmic subdivision of the measure to a point never before reached in the history of music. It has established subtle conflicting rhythms to a degree never before attempted in any popular or folk music, and rarely enough in art music. It has shown a definite and natural evolution always a proof of vitality in a musical idea. It has gone far beyond most other popular music in the freedom of inner voices, yes, I mean polyphony, and of course harmonic modulation. And it has proved its adaptability to the expression of many distinct moods. Only the trained musician can appreciate the significance of a style which can be turned to many distinct uses. There is the sentimental manner, and the emotional manner and so on, but the style includes all the manners, and there have not been so many styles in musical history that they couldn't be counted on a few people's fingers.

It may be that I am deceived as to the extent of ragtime's adaptability... And I know that we are dealing here with a set of musical materials which have no more than commenced their job of expressing a generation.

We must admit that current ragtime is deficient on the melodic side. Some of the tunes are strong, but many of the best ragtime pieces have little beyond their rhythmic energy and ingenuity to distinguish them. If we had a folk song tradition in America our popular melodies, doubtless, would not be so permeated with vulgarity. The words, also, too often have the chief vice of vulgarity sluggish conventionality without its chief virtue, the generous warmth of everydayness. And this latter quality, when it exists, resides not so much in the words themselves, as in the flavor of the songs, the uninspired but tireless high spirits of the American people.
Source: Evolution of Ragtime & Blues To Jazz by Dr. Karl Koenig

Death In Vegas - Anita Berber

• Written and produced by: Richard Fearless and Tim Holmes
• Release Date: 2004
• Genres: Alternative rock, Trip Hop

"Death In Vegas was formed in 1994 by Richard Fearless and Steve Helier and signed to Concrete Records under the name of Dead Elvis. Due to objections from the Elvis Presley estate, they were forced to change the name, and instead Dead Elvis became the name of their debut album."

See previous Song of the Day

Seat Of Pity - Knife In The Water

The blues appeal to the emotions and also make listeners want to dance or move their body in time to the music. The music usually has an underlying feeling of sadness, yet it can be a positive, happy experience as well. In Mississippi blues guitar players often use a knife held in the left hand or bottleneck worn on a left hand finger. As the player slides up and down the strings, he simulates the sound of a human voice crying. In Piedmont blues the guitar is intended to highlight the party and dance feeling of the song. In other instances the guitar is played in a style called fingerpicking, where the guitarist keeps the rhythm and plays the melody at the same time. The first time that a listener hears this style of playing, it sounds as though two guitars are playing at the same time. Most of the early folk blues artists accompanied themselves by playing finger style guitar. Later many of the musicians started to wear fingerpicks, which are worn over the fingernails of the right hand. Fingerpicks allow a musician to play louder and faster, but they usually produce very little variation in sound. Playing with the right hand fingers enables the player to play with more variations in tone, but the volume is softer. As the electric guitar developed, many musicians started to use a flat pick held in the right hand between the thumb and the index finger. Using the flat pick enables the player to play rapid single note passages, or to play rhythm without much effort. The disadvantage of a flat pick is that guitarists can play only one note at a time. It is possible to use the flat pick together with the right hand fingers, but this is a difficult technique.

Blues are usually sung by a single vocalist, although in a number of instances there are two voices. When two voices perform a song, usually they do not sing in harmony, but one voice answers the other, or offers spoken comments to the first verse. When rhythm and blues began, the instrumentation changed. The harmonica and guitar were amplified, and bass and drums were added. As R&B, developed, the acoustic bass was often replaced by an electric bass, and piano became more common. The piano mostly played rhythm parts, with the occasional solo. Saxophone solos were also featured on many R&B records. In soul records the guitar often became reduced to a rhythmic role, although sometimes, as in the records of such artists as James Brown, the rhythm guitar was prominent.

Source: American Popular Music: Blues by Dick Weissman

Seat Of Pity - Knife In The Water

• From: Plays One Sound and Others album
• Written by: Aaron Blount
• Released: 1997

"Aaron Blunt is the band's primary songwriter and lead gutarist, along with Laura Krause who plays organ and often provides back-up vocals. Their line-up also include steel pedal player Bill McCullough and John Brewington on Bass."

See previous Song of the Day

Mr Twin Sister - Alien FM

The evolution of the blues had to await the mass production of inexpensive guitars, as the first blues musicians bore the burden of racial discrimination and Jim Crow. Therefore, it was the creativity of blues artists, ca. 1900, together with the innovations of the entrepreneurs who developed affordable guitars, that allowed the blues to develop when it did.

The Industrial Revolution, first and foremost, was a revolution in productivity. Say’s Law of Markets states that production creates demand, that is, with the move from muscle power to steam power, entrepreneurs and their employees became more productive. Increased productivity permitted people to demand, or purchase, more goods. Also, when factories produce more of something, they can both manufacture and market the products at lower prices. Sears, Roebuck and Company could produce inexpensive goods, including guitars, and still turn a profit by serving the rising tide of new purchasers. Last but not least, by mechanization, the Industrial Revolution reduced the significance of muscle power, helping to put an end to the horror of slavery.

With the market innovation of the mail order catalogue, Sears, Roebuck and Company could reach rural customers who previously could not hope to own what were, not long ago, a luxury. However, the history of business and economics is replete with stories of how successful entrepreneurs got rich by voluntary exchange, what goes by the label capitalism, they provided a product that many people wanted to buy at a price that many people were willing to pay. One of the products the company produced cheaply and made available to rural customers, including Black Americans who were underserved by rural markets during Jim Crow, was the inexpensive steel string acoustic guitar... The comparatively low prices of the guitars, along with a price drop of almost 60% in only a dozen years, as well as the addition of steel strings, helped fuel the development of the blues in the Mississippi Delta ca. 1900.

Source: The Blues and the Industrial Revolution by Philip A. Candela

Mr Twin Sister - Alien FM

• Released: Apr 2019
• Genre: Alternative, Funk, Pop
• Label: Twin Group

"Twin Sister formed in 2008, when vocalist Andrea Estella, and her longtime friend bassist Gabe D'Amico joined forces with keyboardist Dev Gupta, guitarist/vocalist Eric Cardona, and drummer Bryan Ujueta, all of whom met in Long Island, New York's music scene."

See previous Song of the Day

Roy Budd - Anyone Can Whistle

The first meaning of blues refers to a musical selection or performance that conveys a feeling of melancholy, regret, longing or similar emotion to the listener. Hearing it, you might say that the performer has the blues and, indeed, you might be moved some way toward that position yourself if the rendition is sufficiently convincing.

The second meaning of blues describes a tune which has a certain type of musical structure. Typically, that structure is a variation on a three phrase, twelve bar chorus, if played in double time, twenty four bars.

However, eight bar blues are quite common, as are sixteen bar blues. A sixteen bar blues may have a few extra bars added to its final phrase, called a turnaround or sweet mama ending.

Among Blues aficionados, longer works, even when bluesy in feeling and per­formed by acknowledged Blues performers, are not conventionally thought of as blues. Thirty two bar numbers, though often found in the repertoire, tend to be regarded instead as pop songs.

When this second meaning is used, the performance need not create a blue mood. The boisterous set closer Weary Blues, for example, or the bouncy Canal Street Blues, qualify as blues because they are constructed according to the conventions of blues composing.

The third meaning of blues, i.e., as a term that refers to a specific musical genre just as Dixieland refers to jazz using a pre swing jazz musical vocabulary. We’re talking about the music you will find if you enter your local record store and browse through the section labelled Blues... The Blues section will include two rather different sounding types of music. One is referred to as acoustic, pre-war, or country Blues, while the other is, naturally, electric, post-war, or urban Blues.

Source: Texas Shout #41 Blues by Tex Wyndham


Roy Budd - Anyone Can Whistle

• Released on: Everything's Coming Up Roses - The Musical World Of Stephen Sondheim album
• Genre: Jazz, Easy Listening
• Written by: Stephen Sondheim
• Released: 1976

"Roy Budd's first film score was for the American western Soldier Blue in 1970, but most of his film work was on British productions. He is best known for his score for the 1971 British cult film Get Carter."

See previous Song of the Day

McCoy Tyner - One Upon a Time

Improvisation of some type is nearly always part of a jazz performance. Even if musicians are reading notes on a page, they can improvise through the way they attack or color a note, or the rhythmic impulse they bring to the music. In early jazz musicians often improvised by creating variations on a given melody. As the tradition developed, it became more common to use a chord progression as the basis for entirely new melodies. In more recent jazz traditions, even chords are abandoned and musicians will simply improvise on a scale, a motive, or even just a tonal center. No matter how they improvise, however, most musicians have a set of phrases, called licks, that lie easily under their fingers and can be used and reused in a variety of contexts. Charlie Parker, for example, had many signature licks that make his style instantly recognizable. In other words, jazz musicians do often play musical lines they have played before, but where they place these lines, and how they pla them, is part of the art of improvisation.

Nearly all jazz has some connection, even if subtle, with the African American blues tradition, in performance technique, common forms used, and overall musical feel. In fact, there are those who would claim that when the music loses its connection to the blues, it ceases to be jazz. This is the claim often used to prove that Kenny G. is not a jazz musician, even though he plays an instrument associated with jazz, the soprano saxophone, and improvises. His references to blues traditions, when they exist at all, are so stylized that they lack any strong connections to the genuine article.

The last three decades have seen the extension of many of jazz history’s streams, as well as the promotion of jazz as an art worthy of academic discourse. As it always has, the art of jazz continues to evolve and reflect changing political and economic climates, as well as absorbing other music that emerges in the now digital

age.
Source: Music: Its Language, History, and Culture by Douglas Cohen

McCoy Tyner - One Upon a Time

• Recorded: April 27 & 28, 1999
• Released: January 25, 2000
• Styles: Post-Bop, Piano Jazz

"McCoy Tyner was a legendary jazz pianist known for his time in the pioneering John Coltrane Quartet. Tyner played piano with Coltrane on his seminal albums. The innovative pianist left Coltrane in 1965 and would release his own critically acclaimed albums which garnered him a Grammy nomination."

See previous Song of the Day

Record Sales By The US Census

Record Sales By The US Census

All information is provided by the Bureau of the Census. Amounts include the number of records that were in production that year. The U.S. Census Bureau terminated the collection of data for this program as of October 1, 2011. See additional sources below for more information.

The changing revenue of the recorded music industry over the past two decades.

Year	Amount	Value	Change In Value	Notes
2010	5,500,000	$92,500,000	+40.5%	***
2009	4,400,000	$65,800,000	+2.8%	***
2008	4,100,000	$64,000,000	+40.6%	***
2007	4,900,000	$45,500,000	+14.6	***
2006	4,500,000	$39,700,000	-45.3%	***
2005	7,100,000	$72,600,000	-28.1%	***
2004	9,100,000	$101,000,000	+133.8%	***
2003	5,300,000	$43,200,000	-4.8%
2002	6,100,000	$45,400,000	-22.7%
2001	7,800,000	$58,800,000	+8.8%
2000	7,000,000	$54,000,000	+9.5
1999	8,200,000	$59,700,000	0%
1998	8,800,000	$59,700,000	-13.3%
1997	10,200,000	$68,900,000	-18.2%
1996	13,000,000	$84,300,000	+17.4%
1995	12,400,000	$71.800,000	+10.4%
1994	13,600,000	$65,000,000	+4%
1993	16,200,000	$61,800,000	-22.6%
1992	22,100,000	$79,900,000	-14.3%
1991	26,800,000	$93,300,000	-48.4%
1990	39,300,000	$180,900,000	-46.2%
1989	71,200,000	$336,700,000	-52.7%
1988	138,000,000	$712,600,000	-28.4%
1987	189,000,000	$996,400,000	-17.7%
1986	219,100,000	$1,211,100,000	-22.4%
1985	287,700,000	$1,561,500,000	-15.4%
1984	336,100,000	$1,847,500,000	-5.6%
1983	334,000,000	$1,958,000,000	-11.3%
1982	379,000,000	$2,208,000,000	-15%
1981	450,000,000	$2,598,000,000	+1.5%
1980	487,100,000	$2,559,600,000	+6.1
1979	502,000,000	$2,411,000,000	-11.8%
1978	531,000,000	$2,734,000,000	+12%
1977	534,000,000	$2,440,000,000
1976	3,201,000	$349,000,000		**
1975	421,000,000	$1,696,500,000
1973	5,235,000	$246,000,000	+15.4%	**
1972	4,256,000	$213,000,000		**
1970	*	$1,182,000,000
1968	4,020,000	$233,000,000	+8.3%	**
1967	3,987,000	$215,000,000	-20.6%	**
1965	4,436,000	$271,000,000		**
1963	3,372,000	*		**
1960	2,840,000	*		**
1959	3,300,000	$330,000,000	+1.5%	**
1957	3,717,000	$335,000,000	+117.5%	**
1955	2,234,000	$154,000,000		**
1954	*	$80,224,000	-12.3%
1953	*	$91,527,000	+4.4%
1952	*	$87,670,000	+2.9%
1950	*	$85,203,000
1947	*	$110,184,000
1947	760,000	$81,432,000		Value including records and record players
1939	*	$19,762,000
1939	*	$48,917,000		Value including record accessories like needles, etc.
1937	*	$7,823,000	+111.1%
1935	*	$3,705,000	+48.2%
1933	*	$2,500,000	-67.5%
1931	30,851,282	$7,698,000	-77.4%
1929	105,085,000	$34,129,000	+7.3%
1927	105,701,000	$31,781,000	+18.6%
1925	82,125,000	$26,791,000	-51.6%
1923	978,000	$55,395,000	+44.8%
1921	588,000	$38,251,000	-56.9%
1919	2,138,000	$88,836,000
1914	514,000	$15,291,000		**
1909	345,000	*		**
1899	151,000	*		**

 
* No data
** All values include phonographs and single record players
*** All values include all analog physical media
Click to download report


The Compact Cassette was invented by Lou Ottens and his team at the Dutch company Philips in 1963.
Click to download census report 

The compact disc was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings in 1982.
Click to download census report


To access the most current data, please refer to the census cited in the source notes.


Additional information and sources:
Global Music Report
Statistical Abstracts of the United States
Statistical Abstracts of the United States Wikipedia
Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970

See previous post

Lulu - Funny How Time Slips Away

Festivals can be sites for musical experimentation and hybridity, essential vehicles for the innovation and affirmation of daring artistic practice, where moments of mutual enrichment of the local by musics from elsewhere are commonplace.

Headliners may be internationally renowned musicians but festivals also provide platforms for up and coming local musicians, music festival producers/promoters are therefore both cultural importers and investors, the flipside of which being occasional claims of cultural invasion and even elitism. Performance at particular festivals can enhance the status of  amusician and increase the chances of further festival bookings, other festivals include elements of adjudication in which musicians are judged and rewarded.

Festivals are often sites for showcasing local talent and for creating a platform for exporting musicians abroad. They can be key tools for developing new audiences for musicians and for genres more broadly. They thus function as trusted curators in which listeners are more willing to take risks in the music they experience and in the venues they attend, indeed, some festivals even sell out before the acts have been announced. Festivals are sites for learning and personal development for musicians, audiences, and crew including volunteers, and may even contribute to social inclusion via political engagement and communitas.

However, there is little research yet about the specific impacts of festivals on musicians/composers and/or genre development, or even on the important roles of festivals in commissioning new work or as sites for musical premieres. The commercialisation of festivals and the need to compete across markets can be seen in the inclusion of popular music into festivals such as world and folk, or other art forms such as comedy and ballet into music festivals, although this can have subsequent impacts on participants’ perceptions of authenticity.

Source: From Glyndebourne to Glastonbury:The Impact of British Music Festivals by Emma Webster and George McKay (Creativity: Music

And Musicians)

Lulu - Funny How Time Slips Away

• Written by: Willie Nelson
• First recording by: Billy Walker
• First release on: April 21, 1961

"The first album for Chelsea Records was recorded with the cream of US session musicians, and includes her

interpretations of songs made famous. In 1974, Lulu recorded that year’s Bond film theme “The Man With The Golden Gun” with John Barry."

See previous Song of the Day

Marvin Gaye - Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)

Folk music has often demonstrated a peculiar resistance to systematic classification, or stated more accurately, to classification systems. Despite the plethora of efforts to discern, describe, and ascribe order in folk music, classification has often been a culture specific or repertory specific endeavor. The systematic description of one repertory, no matter how much tolerance for variation it permits, rarely extends to other repertories. Even when classification systems are modified to account for some aspects of universality, it is usually the accuracy of the specific that suffers, while only a few more repertories yield themselves to the revised descriptive schemes. The history of classification therefore challenges many of the claims to the universality of folk music. At the same time, this history consistently validates and reexamines the boundaries that regional, local, or small group cultures fashion for folk music. Thus, the resistance of folk music to classification is not necessarily symptomatic of an absence of order or unsystematic musical behavior, rather, it may better serve to illumine those levels at which interrelated repertories and social structures prevail. When directed toward such goals, classification stands to establish and articulate the discursive boundaries of folk music.

Classification is a metaphor for our attempts to understand and describe folk music in an orderly fashion. As an abstraction of our concepts of folk music, classification ideally should provide the infrastructure for a systematic discourse about folk music. Two problems, appearing in two general approaches to classification, often prevent this ideal from being the case, thereby limiting also the effectiveness of the systematic discourse. Many inductive approaches begin by describing the specific and then base their theoretical models on that. Whether the specific is musical, cultural, or ideological in nature, its limits become the limitations of the theoretical model. Deductive approaches, in contrast, begin by prescribing a model and then determining which aspects from different repertories fit the model. Both of these approaches frequently result in a fixing and ossification of the canon, which leads to a seductiveness that may underlie classification. We observe this seductiveness when field workers return from a collecting trip ready to make claims for the persistence of this or that canon, even while a sturdy defense against encroachment from other, usually more modern or popular, repertories shows signs of weakening.

Source: The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World by Philip V. Bohlman

Marvin Gaye - Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)

• Written by:Marvin Gaye & James Nyx Jr
• Released: September 16, 1971
• Recorded: March 1971

"Known as The Prince of Soul or The Prince of Motown, Marvin Gaye was originally a member of the doo-wop group The Moonglows. By the time of his shooting death in 1984, at the hands of his clergyman father, Gaye had become one of the most influential artists of the soul music era."

See previous Song of the Day

The Wallflowers - I'm Looking Through You

The Wallflowers - I'm Looking Through You

• Written by: John Lennon and Paul McCartney
• Music from and inspired by: I Am Sam motion picture
• Genre: Rock, Pop
• First recorded and released: 1965

"The Wallflowers have existed as two different bands, both helmed by lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter Jakob Dylan. Guitarist Tobi Miller, keyboard player Rami Jaffee, bass player Barrie Maguire, and drummer Peter Yanowitz formed the band in 1990."


The swing era lasted just ten years, from l935 to 1945. In researching this article... when the Swing Era ended, it also marked the end of Jazz as a Dance and a Popular music. It also marked a change in the culture of this country. What went before was never to be again, the society that created the music from New Orleans Dixieland through this era had changed for good... That past time had been destroyed by the immense social disruption which accompanied the War itself, but it was the foundation, good or bad, for who we are today. As such, my orientation for this period is both the culmination of fifty years of musical evolution and as a transition to the modern, a new way of viewing the world and a new way of viewing Jazz.

Jazz up to the advent of Bebop was a dance music. Its function was to provide musical accompaniment for dancing, in venues designed for dancing. Its very development was a striving to fill larger and larger spaces which existed to fill the social need for dance entertainment. Swing did this better than anything that had come before, but it was the final music whose function was social. Bop changed the artistic percentage, its focus turned inward, centering on the musical elements and the expressive abilities of the individual artist in manipulating those elements. The audience was left to participate only as consumers of art, not participants.

Also, the musicians themselves were striving to break loose from the musical cliches of the Era. Bop reflected a revolt against the confines of the Big Bands, the sparse solo spots in the swing arrangements minimized the opportunities for exploratory improvisational expression. This also reflected a change in emphasis from the melodic to the improvisational. The younger players chaffed at the restrictions the Swing style and the Big Band imposed... And finally, in some ways, the younger players felt section work did not favor or reward creativity but rather craftsmanship.

Source: History Of Jazz by Michael Morangelli


Cannonball Adderley - New Delhi

• Released: 1961
• Written by: Victor Feldman
• Recorded in: New York on May 11, 1961

"The Cannonball Adderley Quintet featured Cannonball on alto sax and his brother Nat Adderley on cornet. Cannonball's first quintet was not very successful, however, after leaving Mile Davis' group, he formed another with his brother, which saw more success."

See previous Song of the Day

Dave Brubeck - All The Things You Are

The history of jazz music is deeply linked to and embedded with the history of New Orleans. As ragtime and the blues began to circulate, New Orleans incubated music that would come to be called jazz, and the unique social construction of the city provided a cadre of musicians as well as an audience to support and sustain a particular form of musical expression. The key element to understanding the early development of jazz relates to its multi dimensional role within New Orleans. The music existed within a fluid spectrum between folk and commerce, with neighbors performing for neighbors in and out of a formal entertainment world. Bars and honkytonks were settings, but so were private gatherings, funerals, dances, and a large array of other events. If the blues reflected a true folk heritage and ragtime connected to the commercial world of selling music, then jazz represented a middle way, a form that helped craft and preserve the identity of the local groups that created this new sound. Ultimately, within this unique multi racial setting, jazz emerged from an unplanned collision of ragtime, the blues, minstrel shows, vaudeville routines, brass band repertoires, string band songs, dance music, marching music, and funeral music. The result was an improvised sound that, within a few years, would captivate the nation.

A significant aspect as to why jazz emerged as it did in New Orleans concerned the city’s unique social order with white, black, and Creole residents living in a landscape defined by French, Spanish, African, and Caribbean influences. Simultaneously the quintessential southern city, as well as a place unlike in other place in the South, New Orleans offered a racial and cultural dynamism few other urban areas in the United States shared. In New Orleans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, creole musicians... white musicians... each contributed in different ways to a flourishing music scene defined by syncopation and improvisation. At the same time, the racial fluidity that had shaped much of the early history of the city had collapsed through a series of legislative, judicial, and violent acts. By the late 1890s, as Plessy v. Ferguson, made Jim Crow a national language, the city’s Creole community, in particular, was broken down as various “One Drop” regulations destroyed the distinctive racial patterns that had long defined New Orleans life. This combination of musical inventiveness and social upheaval provided early jazz a basic form as well as a cultural framework that would soon be disseminated across the entire nation.
Source: Jazz, Blues, and Ragtime in America, 1900–1945 by Court Carney

Dave Brubeck - All The Things You Are

• Genres: Cool Jazz, Post Bop
• Released June 1976
• Released on: All the Things You Are album

"Perhaps the most honored jazz artist of his generation, Brubeck received awards from two sitting United States Presidents, Bill Clinton presented him with the National Medal of the Arts in 1994, and Barack Obama presented him with the Kennedy Center Honors in 2009."

See previous Song of the Day

Jim Croce - Bad, Bad Leroy Brown

Jazz music has often been called the only art form to originate in the United States, yet blues music arose right beside jazz. In fact, the two styles have many parallels. Both were created by African Americans in the southern United States in the latter part of the 19th century and spread from there in the early decades of the 20th century, both contain the sad sounding blue note, which is the bending of a particular note a quarter or half tone, and both feature syncopation and improvisation. Blues and jazz have had huge influences on American popular music. In fact, many key elements we hear in pop, soul, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll have their beginnings in blues music. A careful study of the blues can contribute to a greater understanding of these other musical genres. Though never the leader in music sales, blues music has retained a significant presence, not only in concerts and festivals throughout the United States but also in our daily lives. Nowadays, we can hear the sound of the blues in unexpected places, from the warm warble of an amplified harmonica on a television commercial to the sad cry of a slide guitar on a new country and western song.

Blues music also became popular with British musicians... Ironically, young white British musicians were largely responsible for the revival of the blues in the U.S. during the 1960s and 1970s. Social commentators have credited this musical integration of older black musicians and young white audiences with contributing to the success of the civil rights movement in the United States and, ultimately, helping to improve race relations there. Although the blues and today’s pop music have little in common musically, there are a surprising number of similarities... Because the blues has served as the basis for other forms of American music, its influence has been significant.

Source: The Red Hot Blues by Kent S. Markle


Jim Croce - Bad, Bad Leroy Brown

• Genre: Pop/Rock
• Released Date: 1974
• Released On: Photographs & Memories: His Greatest Hits Album

"Jim Croce was a folk rock singer who released a number of hits during the early 1970s. Some were memorable enough to become lasting memes, such as the phrase “you don’t tug on Superman’s cape”."

See previous Song of the Day

How Vinyl is Manufactured and Processed

How Vinyl is Manufactured and Processed

The process of how to press vinyl records to be played or sold. Let’s assume that the song, or album, has been recorded, mixed and mastered, depending on quantities, vinyl records are produced by cutting on vinyl blank or on lacquer disk and pressing as a result. The audio file will be physically cut into a master disc.

Making the Vinyl Blank
If it is a single piece record, vinyl dubplate, it will be cut in real time using a cutting machine. The cutting head of the machine cuts the audio information directly into the vinyl blank via the cutting stylus. Manufacturing takes exactly as long as the entire playing time of the finished plate. After that, the record is ready to play. An edition of 5 to about 50 pieces of a vinyl album, mixtape, etc., is done by direct real time cutting on vinyl blanks.

Making the Lacquer Disc
The audio information is cut on an aluminum disc which is coated with an acetate lacquer layer in real time with a cutting lathe. All later made vinyl are identical copies of this master disc. It is vital in this phase to keep the dust away from the surface of the lacquer sides to prevent any imperfections.


Recording Sound onto the Lacquer Disc
Process of custom vinyl pressing start with placing the blank disc onto a lathe. A heated sapphire designed to engrave grooves into the lacquer surface of the disc is used to record sound. The sapphire tips cut the recorded sound wave into the surface of the disc, with a small vacuum sucking up the lacquer. The recorded sound will be engraved into the disc as one continuous spiral groove, a physical manifestation of the frequency and amplitude. Once the cutting is complete, the sapphire tip is lifted, and the lacquer surface is checked for any defects.

Preparing the Stamper
The lacquer master is being sprayed with a layer of silver nitrate and then gets placed in a special electric bath. By the addition of nickel and electric current which flows through the pool, the nickel deposits on the silver of the lacquer master. After some hours this new negative layer is ready for pulling off, the result is a mirror image of the master disc, known as the stamper or the father, which is necessary for the next step. after this process the lacquer master is defective or useless.

Sometimes a mother is being formed again from the first father which gets engraved and archived to be able to produce additional stampers after several years. The mother is the negative image replacing the master disc.




The Finished Vinyl
A stamper serves to press 500 to 1000 pieces of vinyl until it's worn out. In mechanical or hydraulic press machines. A stamper for each side of the vinyl, A and B, is being clamped into the pressing machine. Vinyl granules are placed in the form of a puck, also called vinyl cake, with the labels in the middle between the two stampers and pressed together with high temperature and force. Overlapping material gets removed and the vinyl is ready for cooling. In a few minutes, a large number of vinyl copies can be produced.

In the vinyl pressing phase, PVC pellets can be coloured and mixed to create different tones of the finished record. The entire process usually takes about 30 seconds per record and is fully automated. Once the records are perfectly trimmed, the first step starts again with a new lacquer fed into the stamper.


Additional information and sources:
Know the process of pressing vinyl records
The making of vinyl records
Production of phonograph records


Below find data showing the sales history for vinyl records:
Vinyl sales in America

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David Crosby - The Us Below

Musical events and the patterns they reveal ought to present few problems to the historian, once informed about them, he can treat them more or less as he does any other historical data. However, when it comes to dealing with music itself the historian may find himself growing uncomfortable. Even if he likes music, listens to it regularly, perhaps even sings or plays, he may have difficulty finding the language to interpret it with anything near the sophistication that he applies to other historical data. Yet the ultimate value of music is found not in the historical information it generates but in its intrinsic nature, in the special kind of experience that it can create. Precisely because music differs from other kinds of activity, an understanding and consideration of pieces of music could help to provide the historian with access to sectors of past experience otherwise lost. Few historians have undertaken such inquiries, perhaps chiefly because they have felt themselves insufficiently schooled in the technical bases of music making. Is a thorough knowledge of musical technique necessary for such an inquiry? Or is a significant amount of knowledge about pieces of music and how they work and what they tell us available even to people who lack a full understanding of its technical workings?

Perhaps the most obvious property of music is its power to create its own framework for experience, to set it off in a separate sphere. Just as poetry, to a certain degree, heightens a thought and creates a new context for it, so singing a poem stylizes it even further, transforming the way the words are structured and related to each other. Singing a poem slows it down and intensifies its accents, stressing certain words at the expense of others... One needs no technical grasp of music at all to recognize the formidable social bond generated when a group of people focuses its energy and attention on singing... Rather it is to recognize that singing is so commonplace and fundamental a human act that it is natural to overlook it unless it happens to occur in the service of an artistic masterwork. In pausing to comment upon it here, we are doing no more than noticing that one of life's simplest and most available pleasures, one obviously very much a part of eighteenth century American life, can also be a social force of some power.
Source: A Historians Introduction to Early American Music by Richard Crawford

David Crosby - The Us Below

• Released: October 21, 2016
• Album: Lighthouse
• Written by: Michael Kelly, Rea League, David Crosby, and Marcus Quinn Eaton

"The folk rock pioneer, who was inducted into the prestigious Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2009, has also served as our social conscience, not only eloquently writing about societal issues but continuously donating concert proceeds to like minded causes."

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T.L. Barrett & Youth For Christ Choir - Ever Since

The most common musical form of blues is the 12 bar blues. The term "12 bar" refers to the number of measures, or musical bars, used to express the theme of a typical blues song. Nearly all blues music is played to a 4/4 time signature, which means that there are four beats in every measure or bar and each quarter note is equal to one beat.

A 12 bar blues is divided into three four bar segments. A standard blues progression, or sequence of notes, typically features three chords based on the first (written as I), fourth (IV), and fifth (V) notes of an eight-note scale. The I chord dominates the first four bars, the IV chord typically appears in the second four bars and the V chord is played in the third four bars.

The lyrics of a 12 bar blues song often follow what's known as an AAB pattern. "A" refers to the first and second four bar verse, and "B" is the third four bar verse. In a 12 bar blues, the first and second lines are repeated, and the third line is a response to them, often with a twist.

Not all blues songs follow the 12 bar format, but by understanding this basic musical framework, the listener will gain a deeper understanding and appreciation for all blues music.

Source: Understanding the 12-Bar Blues by Vulcan Productions


T.L. Barrett & Youth For Christ Choir - Ever Since

• From Like a Ship (Without a Sail)
• Songwriter, arranger, electric piano by: Pastor T.L. Barrett
• Genres: Gospel, Soul, Funk, Chicago Soul

"Self-released in 1971, Like A Ship was the result of Barrett channeling his passion for music, a determination to keep children off the streets, and his charismatic preaching into the production of the album."

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Robin Trower - Confessin' Midnight

The region around the Nile is one of the oldest and richest cultural areas in the world. There are documents stating that Egyptian musicians have used harps and flutes circa 4000 B.C., and double clarinets and lyres from around 3500 B.C. Percussion instruments were added to the orchestras around 2000 B.C. Probably there was no musical notation system existing in that period and there are no notated documents about the music of ancient Egypt. Yet musicologists believe that the liturgical music of the Coptic Church is directly deriving from the ancient Egyptian music.

Arabs call Egypt "The mother of the world" because of its long and colourful history, which started thousands of years ago. In the recent centuries Egypt has been one of the first countries to create recorded and visual art forms in Arabic world... Cairo has been the dreamland for many Arabic musicians and singers to create a career in classical and pop music. Classical Arabic music has resulted from various styles across the regions of Arab speaking world, and is enjoyed by people of different classes and backgrounds. Egyptian classical music has been the most powerful and effective among all Arabic countries, and it represents many styles particularly associated to certain cities, such as Alexandria, Ismailia, Portsaid and the villages of Upper Egypt.

In Egypt also many different religious Islamic music styles, such as Sufi and Zar, are existing, and simultaneously a Christian liturgical music sung in the ancient Coptic language is part of Egyptian legacy in her small, but still extant Coptic Christian population. Egyptian cultural life has left also remarkable mark to people representing other ethnic groups, even after they l had keft the country. These include sizeable populations of Greeks, Jews and Armenians.
Source: ‘Between Two Worlds’ – Comparisons and Explorations in Oriental And Western Music Cultures by Alaa El Din Abbas

Robin Trower - Confessin' Midnight

• Album: A Tale Untold: The Chrysalis Years
• Genre:Rock
• Released: 2010

"Robin Trower's first two albums, Twice Removed From Yesterday and Bridge Of Sighs firmly established his reputation. This was particularly true in America, so when Trower recorded his third album, 1975's For Earth Below, it was during a most inspired and successful time in his career."

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Nina Simone - Trouble in Mind

And so it goes. In the world of artists of all mediums and disciplines, the musician is most audacious when it comes to altering another’s creation. Imagine an artist taking a palette of paints and a brush to the Museum of Fine Arts and painting an extra nose on a Picasso masterpiece? Or someone putting a hat on Rodin’s timeless bronze and marble sculpture The Thinker? Scandalous, to say the least... and possibly resulting in some jail time!

However, the history of jazz performance and arranging, as well as European classical tradition... is filled with players and writers whose creative intention could be distilled down to Tal’s response.

There are instances in which the reharmonized song is considered so superior to the original chord changes that the new version becomes the standard harmonic form which, in turn, becomes subjected to further variation. The Victor Young classic “Stella by Starlight” and the Burke/Van Heusen standard “Like Someone in Love” are excellent examples of “new” standards.

Can you imagine what a cocktail pianist, who has been on the same five night a week gig for 10 years, would have to endure if they weren’t able to take some kind of harmonic liberty with the repertoire? Maybe reharmonization contributes to good mental health for the performer. No matter how you frame it, reharmonization has a long-standing tradition in the world of jazz and popular music.

For the improvising player, reharmonization is regarded as improvising harmonies to a fixed melody line, the opposite of melodic improvisation. For the improviser who is soloing melodically within the standard framework of the chord changes of a tune, the various substitution and approach techniques... and superimposed against the rhythm section accompaniment can be applied to great effect.

To reharmonize means to alter the underlying harmonic form, while maintaining the original melodic structure. It is essentially an arrangement change that puts the focus on the harmony.

Source: Understanding Reharmonization By Steve Rochinski

Nina Simone - Trouble in Mind

• Written by: Richard M. Jones
• First recording and first release by: Thelma La Vizzo May 1924
• Released on: November 1960

"Some were songs that she wrote herself, while others were new arrangements of other standards, and others had been written especially for the singer. Her first hit song in America was her rendition of George Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy" 1958."

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Christine McVie - Bad Journey

Throughout all of the genres explored here, there are musicians who mainly perform their own songs, mainly perform songs written by others, or perform some combination of original and borrowed repertoire. Even in a genre like blues, which is still frequently, and often mistakenly,  construed as a superiorly authentic genre whose performers express their most profound personal emotions through descriptions of their literal autobiographical experience, many musicians frequently perform songs written by others. For instance, Bessie Smith composed many of her own lyrics, but also recorded songs by Percy Grainger, Fletcher Henderson, and many others. Indeed, many of the songs that Taft cites in his study of the blues lyric formula were written by someone other than the performer, but he simply attributes the songs to the performers who made them familiar to audiences.

This same mix of borrowing and originality holds true for early country music, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, and again brings up the question of which artists should, in a study like this, receive attribution for the songs under consideration, when the singer and songwriter are different people. Following Taft, my solution here is simply to identify the songs with the musicians who are most prominently featured on the singles, albums, and compilations that I’m working with... Elvis Presley was primarily a performer who recorded songs written by multiple songwriters, and yet many of those songs remain more closely associated with Presley than with the composer, by virtue of both his exceptional interpretations and his access to a wider market than was available to Black musicians whose songs he performed; Willie Dixon, by contrast, was not only a performer but also a prodigious songwriter whose work was performed by a wide range of artists, but his songs nonetheless remain closely associated with Dixon the songwriter.

One of the most direct ways that songs resonate with listeners is, of course, through their lyrics, and these pre-rock singers, and their handlers, correspondingly chose to record and issue the songs, whether original or not, that they hoped would speak to their audience most persuasively, and therefore sell the most records.
Source: Blues Lyric Formulas in Early Country Music, Rhythm and Blues, and Rock and Roll by Nicholas Stoia

Christine McVie - Bad Journey

• Released: 09/07/2004
• Produced by: Christine McVie, Ken Caillat, Dan Perfect
• Released on: In The Meantime album

"In 1998, the Fleetwood Mac was induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in 2006, McVie was awarded the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors' Gold Badge of Merit."

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Sam Cooke - Summertime

Jazz is the music, not of repression or immorality, but of freedom, our American watchword. In fact, the music itself may be the freedom. The true spirit of jazz is a joyous revolt from convention, custom, authority, boredom, even sorrow, from everything that would confine the soul of man and hinder its riding free on air... Jazz with its mocking disregard for formality is a leveler and makes for democracy.

Yet democracy relies on self rule, as a society, and as individuals. We depend on taking responsibility, not on waiting for a king or a political party to do it for us. We depend on using our clear minds to find our own answers. Out of this attentiveness comes personal freedom. Or as the author William Least Heat-Moon wrote after observing boys with kites, “No strings, no flight.” In this responsibility, we make a statement... To solve the lack of order they saw all around them, the founding fathers seized on one of the great, and often missed, ironies in world history, the only thing that could make men forsake their own freedom and still believe they were free was self rule. Early jazz music had no rule books, much of it came from the freewheeling sanctified churches.

So if jazz breaks from formality, the rigid observance of convention, what rule does it follow? Where, in fact, are the rules? To find the moment of swing, do we need a formula? And if jazz has no standard form, how do we recognize it? What template did musicians use to develop their skills. They were blowing stuff not on the sheet, stars blinking in and out. They were talking without words.

Ironically, it is no secret that early American music evolved from the historic forms of European harmony and Afro/Caribbean rhythms. Throughout the 1800s, village bands by the thousands paraded through streets playing European marches, reels, and hymns. Later, ragtime, coming from the plantation banjo, brought strains, symphonic movements on American soil. And it brought regular syncopation, for which there was little counterpart... To the general populace, the European stuff was not new, the African rhythms were. Today, the whole nation dances to them.
Source: Prohibition and the Rise of Jazz, Part One by Peter Gerler


Sam Cooke - Summertime

• Written by: Ira Gershwin, George
  Gershwin
• Genre: Doo Wop, Soul
• Released on: September 1957

"Ira and George Gershwin's highly evocative writing brilliantly mixes elements of jazz and the song styles of blacks, inspiration for the lyrics were from the spiritual lullaby 'All My Trials.'"

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Freddie Mercury - Time Waits For No One

The blues impulse understands a world in which there are no good choices; in which we have made terrible mistakes already; where we have innocent blood on our hands, even though we had our reasons; a world in which we are damned if we go deeper and damned if we duck out; and yet a world in which we nonetheless have to make choices.

The gospel impulse takes us one giant step beyond the blues. Gospel begins with a brutal history, too, asking: “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” In fact, this song in some ways is more blues than gospel, despite its formal genre. The gospel impulse testifies to the same burdens that the blues carries. Rather than simply enduring, however, the gospel impulse seeks to transcend those burdens by expressing itself in relation to others and to God. The gospel impulse reaches out and reaches up and always moves toward higher ground... The gospel impulse bears witness to the burden and upholds the tradition, but it extends a hand to humanity and to God, and works toward redemption. Where the blues endures, the gospel transcends, lifts up, sees the divine light within us and finds God in the beauty of Creation. Gospel vision holds out the hope for a better tomorrow.

Like blues and gospel, the jazz impulse is rooted in that same burden of a brutal history and in traditions of addressing it. A jazz artist keeps one hand wrapped in what Ellison calls “the chain of tradition,” and yet improvises outward, finding new ways of phrasing and rephrasing the problem and innovative means of dealing with it. Jazz keeps one foot on the old melody, testifying to the burden just like blues and the first turn of gospel, and then tries to work its way forward, keeping the world in motion. Louis Armstrong said that “jazz is music that is never played the same way once.” The jazz impulse is a means of rethinking the human condition, not just an approach to the saxophone. Jazz says we don’t have to do it the way we have always done it.
Source: Blues, Gospel and Jazz Impulses: A Way of Understanding of African American Culture and Damn Near Anything Else, For That Matter by Timothy B. Tyson

Freddie Mercury - Time Waits For No One

• Produced by: Dave Clark
• Recorded: 1986
• Genre: Rock, Pop

"Starting off as a rhythm track, the session recorded 48 tracks of backing vocals (Freddie plus John Christie and Peter Straker), 2 x 24 track tapes locked together which had never been done before for that amount of backing vocals."

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The O'Jays - Enjoy Yourself

In my system, the form of blues choruses is limited by the small page of the breastpocket notebook in which they are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus, and so sometimes the word meaning can carry from one chorus into another, or not, just like the phrase meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus to the other, or not, in jazz, so that, in these blues as in jazz, the form is determined by time, and by the musician's spontaneous phrasing Sc harmonizing with the beat of the time as it waves and waves on by in measured choruses. It's all gotta be non stop ad libbing within each chorus, or the gig is shot.

"The Author" speaks its painful content, which is not to exempt him from a responsibility therefore... He spoke no English until he was five. He wrote incessantly, carrying usually a small spiral notebook in his back pocket so as to "sketch" what occurred on the spot. He was in that old way "serious." He really believed in words. So one will read here his various recording, invention, improvisation, story. Yet all will be mistaken, misunderstood, if there is not the recognition that this remarkable person is living here, is actual in all that is written.
Source: Book Of Blues by Jack Kerouac

The O'Jays - Enjoy Yourself

• Label: S-Curve Records
• Genres: Funk / Soul

"Throughout their career The O’Jays have achieved 10 Gold albums, 9 Platinum albums and 10 #1 hits. The O’Jays were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2005."

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Eagles - Take It Easy

There were only four kinds of country music. One is your gospel songs, your religious songs. The others were your jigs and reels... Your third were your heart songs, sentimental songs that came from the heart, and the fourth, which has passed out to a degree today and was terrific in those days, were the event songs. Now would you like to ask me what I mean by an event song? An event song is something that had happened, not today, maybe years ago, but hadn’t permeated through the South because of a lack of newspapers and no radio and no television in those days, but they had heard of it. For instance, some of the biggest sellers we were ever able to bring out was things like The Sinking of The Titanic. Bring out a record years after it happened and tell a story with a moral. The Sinking of The Titanic was a big seller, but there was a little bit of a moral that people shouldn’t believe that they could build a ship that couldn’t be sunk. That’s the way they talked about it; of thinking God took it upon Himself to show them that they couldn’t build anything greater than He could. Everything had a moral in the events songs.

Well, for instance, things that have been made into a motion picture since... That shows the interest of the people in hearing somebody else recount an event, because re­member there were thousands of buyers of phonograph records that had no other means of communication. You had sad ones, the stories of Jesse James and all kinds of bandits and convicts and every­ thing you could think of. Yes, and a murder here and there. Naomi Wise is a story of a little girl who lived. Marion Parker was married unfortunately, in Atlanta. But there was always a moral so what was done wrong should not be done by the person who was listening. It did a tremendous amount of good. I can’t emphasize that too much.
Source: Anthology of American Folk Music Edited by Josh Dunson and Ethel Raim


Eagles - Take It Easy

• Release date: 1 June 1972
• Written by: Glenn Frey, and Jackson Browne
• Produced by:Glyn Johns

"Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975), in February 1976. proved to be surprisingly meteoric. It topped the charts and became a phenomenal success, eventually selling upwards of 25,000,000 copies and dueling with Michael Jackson's Thriller for the title of the best selling album of all time in the U.S."

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Mono vs Stereo Vinyl and how audio channels are used

Mono vs Stereo Vinyl
and how audio channels are used

Image by Lena Kudryavtseva

What do stereo and mono mean and what are audio channels? Audio channels are a source for sound. A speaker is a channel, a microphone is a channel, two speakers are two audio channels. In the simplest terms, each single-point source of sound is a channel.

When audio is recorded, it can be recorded on multiple channels. This is where terms like mono and stereo come in. Mono is recorded in one channel and stereo in multiple channels.

Stereo records
Stereo sound systems can be divided into two forms: the first is true or natural stereo in which a live sound is captured, with any natural reverberation present, by an array of microphones. The signal is then reproduced over multiple channel to recreate the live sound.

The Second is artificial or pan stereo, in which a single-channel sound is reproduced over multiple channels. By varying the relative amplitude of the signal sent to each channel, an artificial direction can be suggested. By combining multiple panned mono signals together, a complete, yet entirely artificial, sound field can be created.

In technical usage, true stereo means sound recording and sound reproduction that uses stereographic projection to encode the relative positions of objects and events recorded.

Mono records
Monaural or monophonic or mono sound reproduction is sound intended to be heard as if it were emanating from one position. This contrasts with stereo, which uses two separate audio channels to reproduce sound from two microphones on the right and left side, which is reproduced with two separate channels to give a sense of the direction of sound sources. In mono, only one channel is necessary, but, when played through multiple channels, identical signals are fed to each channel, resulting in the perception of one-channel sound imaging. In the mastering stage, particularly in the days of mono records, the one- or two-track mono master tape was then transferred to a one-track lathe used to produce a master disc intended to be used in the pressing of a monophonic record. Today, however, monaural recordings are usually mastered to be played on stereo and multi-track formats, yet retain their center-panned mono soundstage characteristics.

Mono sound can sometimes simply refer to a merged pair of stereo channels. Over time some devices have used mono sound amplification circuitry with two or more speakers since it can cut the cost of the hardware.




Stereo encoding on vinyl
A stereophonic phonograph provides two channels of audio, one left and one right. This is achieved by adding another vertical dimension of movement to the needle in addition to the horizontal one. As a result, the needle now moves not only left and right, but also up and down. But since those two dimensions do not have the same sensitivity to vibration, the difference needs to be evened out by having each channel take half its information from each direction by turning the channels 45 degrees from horizontal.

As a result of the 45-degree turn, it can be demonstrated that out of the new horizontal and vertical directions, one would represent the sum of the two channels, and the other representing the difference. Record makers decide to pick the directions such that the traditional horizontal direction codes for the sum. As a result, an ordinary mono disk will be decoded correctly as no difference between channels, and would play a stereophonic record without too much loss of information.

For additional sources visit:
Vinyl 101: How to Prepare Your Audio for Vinyl
Stereophonic sound From Wikipedia
Monaural From Wikipedia

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