Vintage Vinyl takes us back to the swell tunes of the 1950’s.
By: Emily Scholle
For those of you who listen to my show on a somewhat regular basis, you know how much I love the 1960s. Well I’ve decided to go backwards this week and focus on my records from the 1950s. It’s been awhile. It’s time to dust them off.
As of late, I’ve gotten really interested in music of the Rockabilly genre. Finding it is more difficult than one would realize, because a lot of the big names are popular enough that most people don’t want to sell or donate those records. I have a couple 45s of the Crickets (Buddy Holly’s band) and I did manage to pick up a Jerry Lee Lewis 45 the other day, but that’s sadly just about all I own. I was reading up on the genre earlier and I subsequently realized that my shows as of late have contained music from the 1960s to ‘80s. This is not to say that I don’t like music of the 50s, quite the contrary. A lot of my top movies are set in the 1950s (American Graffiti, Grease, Back to the Future, etc) and a large part of the reason is the music.
A lot was going on at this time of course. Having not been fortunate enough to be alive during the 1950s, I can really just read and assume things. It seems like the 1950s were a pretty cookie-cutter time. Conformity was the norm and being an individual seemed almost dangerous. As such, I love the rebellion factor of music. Perry Como is just fine, but I can see how teenagers would look for more; more danger, more intrigue, more sex. Rock and Roll was all the rage, or at least getting there. And how funny it is to us, to hear this music and think of how tame it sounds in comparison to music today. If nothing else, it’s exuberant. And on the rare occasion I go dancing, I realize how important and liberating it is to dance to music that shakes, rattles and rolls deep in your bones.
This week, I hope to bring a little of this into your Wednesday night. We’re going to be rocking and rolling and remembering (or reminiscing) times past. We’ll hear the Chordettes, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Chuck Berry. Maybe I’ll even bring my full LP soundtrack of “American Graffiti” so Wolfman Jack can interject between songs. Either way, this week’s show promises to have you bopping. I’ll most likely be hopping in my socks in the KJHK studio between queuing up records, so slip off your saddle shoes and join me in spirit. Vintage Vinyl is on KJHK on Wednesday nights from 10-midnight. Tune in.