DavesMusicDatabase.com is devoted to ranking, rating, and reviewing music of all genres and eras. The DMDB blog serves up album and song reviews, best-of lists, music history snapshots, and music-related essays.
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 | Tony Awards:Best Revival of a Musical: 1977-2019 |
From 1977 to 1993, the Tonys gave an award annually to the Best Revival. Musicals and non-musicals were lumped into the same category. In 1994, they were separated into two separate awards. Those musicals which won for Best Revival of a Musical or Best Revival are noted below. Check out other album of the year awards here.
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First posted 12/24/2021. |
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Originally posted 11/22/2020. January 22, 2019 marked the 10-year anniversary of the DMDB blog. To honor that, Dave’s Music Database announced its own Hall of Fame. This month marks the eighth group of album inductees. These are the top albums of material recorded prior to 1950. Albums previously inducted which would have been on this list include Bing Crosby’s Merry Christmas, Robert Johnson’s The Complete Recordings, Al Jolson’s Songs He Made Famous, and South Pacific cast album. |
Louis Armstrong The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings (box set: 1925-28)Inducted November 2020 as “Top Albums of Material Recorded Before 1950.” |
| “Jazz starts here.” BL “Between 1925 and 1929, Armstrong invented scat singing, defined swing and introduced the jazz solo.” BL “This 4-CD set represents the ‘Rosetta Stone of Jazz’,” JM featuring more than 80 songs, including “West End Blues,” a song which rates in the top 1%, and 10 more top-20 hits. The album is in the National Recording Registry. Read more. |  |
Henry Burr Anthology: The Original King of Pop (compilation: 1903-28)Inducted November 2020 as “Top Albums of Material Recorded Before 1950.” |
| Burr was “the most popular ballad singer” AR in the “acoustical, pre-[Bing] Crosby, pre-crooner era.” AMG This collection follows “Burr’s career from one of his earliest recordings, made in 1903” AZ “when disc technology was still in its primitive stages, and ends in 1928, during the early electrical recording era.” AR He was “a major influence on Al Jolson, Rudy Vallée, and other pre-Crosby favorites.” AMG This set includes “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree,” “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now,” “M-O-T-H-E-R (A Word That Means the World to Me),” “Just a Baby’s Prayer at Twilight,” and “My Buddy,” which were all #1 songs that also rank in the the top 1%. Read more. |  |
Duke Ellington The Blanton-Webster Band (box set: 1939-42)Inducted November 2020 as “Top Albums of Material Recorded Before 1950.” |
| Ellington is “perhaps the single most important creative talent in American popular music history.” JW This set “contains the master takes of all 66 selections recorded by…[his band] during what many historians consider its peak period.” SY It may be “the greatest creative period by any single artist in jazz history.” MG It features more than a dozen top-10 R&B hits from the 1940s, including five consecutive #1 songs and the Grammy Hall of Fame inductee “Take the ‘A’ Train,” which is also featured in the DMDB book The Top 100 Songs of the Pre-Rock Era. The album is in the National Recording Registry. Read more. |  |
George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, Dubose Heyward (composers) Porgy and Bess (show: 1935)Inducted November 2020 as “Top Albums of Material Recorded Before 1950.” |
| This “American folk opera” WK started as a novel and then became a play. The story focuses on “African American life…in Charleston, South Carolina, in the early 1920s.” WK It “is admired for Gershwin’s innovative synthesis of European orchestral techniques with American jazz and folk music idioms.” WK Billie Holiday’s recording of the show’s song “Summertime” is in the DMDB Hall of Fame. Read more. |  |
Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert (live: 1938)Inducted November 2020 as “Top Albums of Material Recorded Before 1950.” |
| Goodman, known as “The King of Swing,” was “the first real jazz musician to capture a mass bourgeois white audience in America” AZ and the first to stage a full jazz concert at Carnegie Hall. The result is “one of the greatest concerts ever captured on record.” AMG The show featured performances of “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” “Don’t Be That Way,” and “Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing),” all ranked in the top 1% of songs. The latter is also in the DMDB Hall of Fame. Read more. |  |
Glenn Miller Glenn Miller (compilation: 1939-42)Inducted November 2020 as “Top Albums of Material Recorded Before 1950.” |
| This collection was released just months after Miller’s airplane went down in the English Channel. It logged sixteen weeks atop the album chart over the next three years. It includes “In the Mood,” which is featured in the DMDB book The Top 100 Songs of the Pre-Rock Era. That song, as well as “Tuxedo Junction” and “Moonlight Serenade,” also rank in the DMDB’s list of top 100 big band songs and are in the top 1% of all songs. Read more. |  |
Billy Murray Anthology: The Denver Nightingale (compilation: 1903-40)Inducted November 2020 as “Top Albums of Material Recorded Before 1950.” |
| He was “the best-selling recording artist of the first quarter of the 20th century, but his name and work had fallen into obscurity before his death in 1954.” AMG This compilation is every bit as crucial to understanding music of the 20th century as the Beatles’ One and Elvis Presley’s 30 #1 Hits. 17 of the songs on this set reached #1. That includes the classics Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis,” “In My Merry Oldsmobile,” “Yankee Doodle Boy,” “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “You're a Grand Old Flag,” and “By the Light of the Silvery Moon.” all of which are featured in the Dave’s Music Database book The Top 100 Songs of the Pre-Rock Era. Read more. |  |
Charley Patton Founder of the Delta Blues (compilation: 1929-34)Inducted November 2020 as “Top Albums of Material Recorded Before 1950.” |
| Patton “was the key figure in the transition between traditional folk and what came to be known as the Mississippi Delta blues.” FH The genre “had an enormous impact…influencing everyone from The Rolling Stones to Cassandra Wilson.” NM “The title of founder might not be exactly accurate” LG but “he was one of the first to be recorded.” NM He sang “in a rough voice that stormed with turmoil. His guitar picking was…skillfully nuanced in expression and, above all, rhythmically imperative.” FH This collection, a Blues Hall of Fame inductee, features “Pony Blues,” which is in the Grammy Hall of Fame and the National Recording Registry. Read more. |  |
Bessie Smith The Essential (compilation: 1923-33)Inducted November 2020 as “Top Albums of Material Recorded Before 1950.” |
| This collection works its way through Smith’s entire career, from her very first recording session on February 15, 1923 through her final session on November 24, 1933. DA The Empress of the Blues “could sing it all, from the lowdown moan of ‘St. Louis Blues’ and ‘Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out’ to her torch treatment of the jazz standard ‘After You’ve Gone.’” CK She was “one of the first true crossover aritsts.” LG Read more. |  |
Various Artists (edited by Harry Smith) Anthology of American Folk Music (box set: 1923-32)Inducted November 2020 as “Top Albums of Material Recorded Before 1950.” |
| This three-disc set was compiled by musicologist Harry Smith. It is comprised of 84 songs which reintroduce “near-forgotten popular styles of rural American music…to new listeners.” WK It could well be “the most influential document” JB of “the folk & blues revival of the ‘50s and ‘60s” WK by bringing attention to the works of the Carter Family, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mississippi John Hurt, and others. Read more. |  |
| First posted 3/7/2012; updated 11/20/2020. |
 | RIAA/NEA:Top Albums of the 20th Century |
On March 7, 2001, The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) revealed the top ten songs from its list of the top 365 songs of the 20th century. According to the RIAA’s press release, the list was created “to promote a better understanding of America’s musical and cultural heritage in our schools.” Strangely, though, there were a handful of albums included on the list. I have listed the albums on this page and you can see the song list here. Note: Links on albums lead to dedicated DMDB pages. Click here to see other lists from publications and/or organizations.
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| SummertimeBillie Holiday |
Writer(s): George Gershwin (music)/ DuBose Heyward/Ira Gershwin (lyrics) (see lyrics here) First Charted: September 12, 1936 Peak: 12 US, 3 DF (Click for codes to charts.) Sales (in millions): -- Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, 6.3 video, -- streaming |
Awards (Billie Holiday): 
Awards (Sidney Bechet):
Awards (Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong):
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About the Song:It has been widely reported and accepted for years that the Beatles’ “Yesterday” is the most recorded song of all time. It isn’t. Not by a longshot. The song has been said to be recorded as many as four thousand times, but a group known as the Summertime Connection says they know of at least 82,000 public performances of “Summertime,” of which more than 67,000 have been recorded. GW Despite all those recordings, the song astonishingly only charted once in the first 50+ years of recorded music PM when Billie Holiday took it to #12 in 1936. In the rock era, Sam Cooke (#81 BB, 1957), Herb Alpert (#28 AC, 1971) the Marcels (#78 BB, 1961), Ricky Nelson (#89 BB, 1962), and the Chris Columbo Quintet (#93 BB, 1963) all had minor hits with the song. In 1966, Billy Stewart had a top ten hit with the song. Fun Boy Three hit #18 with it on the UK charts in 1982. Janis Joplin’s blues-rock version with Big Brother & the Holding Company didn’t chart, but is one of the best known versions. SF The song also became a jazz standard with popular versions from Sidney Bechet as well as Ella Fitzgerald with Louis Armstrong. Others who’ve recorded the song include Tori Amos, Cab Calloway, Perry Como, Bing Crosby, Miles Davis, Lana Del Rey, Dennis DeYoung, Tommy Dorsey, Peter Gabriel, Al Green, Herbie Hancock, Lena Horne, Mahalia Jackson, Al Jarreau, Annie Lennox, Paul McCartney, Willie Nelson, the Platters, Lou Rawls, R.E.M., the Righteous Brothers, Marty Robbins, Pete Seeger, Nina Simone, Sonny & Cher, Sarah Vaughan, Dionne Warwick, Brian Wilson, and the Zombies. SH George Gershwin composed the aria in 1934 for folk opera Porgy and Bess, based on the 1926 DuBose Heyward novel Porgy, a top seller about a South Carolina black community. Heyward and his wife Dorothy turned it into a Broadway play and Gershwin, after reading the novel and seeing the play, turned it into a musical, SF with his brother Ira and Heyward contributing lyrics. George visited Folly Island, off the South Carolina coast, where the opera is set. He observed the local customs and soaked in their music and idioms. LW Originally, Bess had a minor role. However, when Anne Brown – the first African-American singer admitted to Juilliard – contacted Gershwin, he let her sing for him and started crafting songs around her. He expanded the role to the point that he renamed the musical Porgy and Bess. Anne Brown played the role when it opened on Broadway on Ocrober 10, 1935. “Summertime” is sung four times throughout the musical, but most notably as a lullaby to a baby right after the overture. The song mixed “elements of jazz and the song styles of blacks in the southeast United States from the early twentieth century.” AMG Heyward was inspired by the lyrics for “All My Trials,” a southern folk spiritual lullaby. WK The song has also been considered an adaptation of the African American spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim called the lyrics for this and “My Man’s Gone Now” “the best lyrics in the musical theater.” WM
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First posted 1/24/2020; last updated 9/10/2023. |
