Category: 1940s

“Good Rockin’ Tonight” doesn’t ease you in or ask for permission. It kicks down the door with a laugh, a shout, and a beat that already knows where your hips are headed. When Wynonie Harris recorded the song in 1948, popular music was standing at a crossroads, and this record didn’t bother looking both ways.…

“Star Dust” drifts into the room the way memory often does—unannounced, half-formed, glowing more brightly the longer you sit with it. When Artie Shaw recorded his definitive version in 1940, the song was already well known, having been written by Hoagy Carmichael over a decade earlier. Yet Shaw’s interpretation didn’t merely restate a standard; it…

In 1941, Billie Holiday released a song that would become one of the most enduring and poignant entries in the American songbook: “God Bless the Child.” Co-written with Arthur Herzog Jr., the song is as much a reflection of Holiday’s personal struggles as it is a universal meditation on independence, self-reliance, and the hardships of…

Dizzy Gillespie’s A Night in Tunisia is one of those rare jazz compositions that transcends its genre to become a universal symbol of innovation, creativity, and virtuosity. Recorded in 1946, the piece marked a turning point in the evolution of jazz, blending bebop complexity with Afro-Cuban rhythmic elements in a way that had never been…

There are pieces of music that transcend their form, compositions that seem less like creations of man and more like things discovered, unearthed from some hidden well of emotion and sound. Thelonious Monk’s “’Round Midnight” belongs to that rare category. Written in the early 1940s and first recorded in 1947, it has become perhaps the…