1. Perry Como – Prisoner of Love. This is clearly coming out of the Bing Crosby tradition, but it’s way, way more over-the-top. The orchestra keeps sweling and soaring as if to say, “Hey, look, these emotions are really intense!” Como’s voice is also not as good as Crosby’s, or Sinatra’s as far as I can remember. (I haven’t listened to Sinatra any time recently, but he’s coming up later in 1946.) Harmonically, I feel like this is the real origin of all those campy lounge music parodies like Frank Zappa’s “America Drinks and Goes Home.” I’ve been discovering a lot of those things in the past year or so — bits of mid-century American pop culture that I’ve previously only known through parodies, tributes and references. It’s strange how hard it is to tell the difference sometimes.

2. Eddy Howard – To Each His Own. A little bit of sweet big-band jazz, a little bit of crooner song, and a little bit of close-harmony singing. It’s pretty unassuming, but very pleasant and kind of adorable. Howard likes to hit falsetto high notes with a big vibrato, which is something that I pretty much always like, whether in this or in Shudder to Think. And there’s a really cute piano riff at the end. I guess that’s all I have to say.

3. The Ink Spots – The Gypsy. Yay, the Ink Spots are back! I don’t like this song as much as their previous two appearances on the charts, though. There’s nothing that really makes it stand out — just a kind of nice tune and kind of OK lyrics about a fortunetelling gypsy. They even use the same spoken-word technique they did in “We Three,” but it’s not creepy this time, probably because the line “You see, she looked in my hand and told me that my baby would always be true” is a lot less creepifiable than the line “We three… we are all alone, and we’ve been livingin a memory.” Oh well.

4. Frank Sinatra – Five Minutes More. OK, maybe Frank Sinatra doesn’t actually have a better voice than Perry Como. I mean, obviously they’re good singers, but I think Bing Crosby has got them both beat easily. Then again, maybe what I’m reacting to is more a matter of style than of quality: Crosby has a deeper voice and sings in a much more “formal” way. Why I would prefer that, I couldn’t tell you. Anyway, this song is all right, but it’s kind of awkwardly put together. The cleverest lyric — “All week long I dreamed about our Saturday date / Don’t you know that Sunday morning you can sleep late?” — is set so that there’s a pause after “morning” and an accent on “can,” which just sounds wrong to me. And it’s also lyrically rather disturbing, not in the good, Ink Spots way, but in the bad, “Frank, don’t you realize the reason she doesn’t want to kiss you is because she actually doesn’t want to kiss you, and she’s just using the fact that it’s late as an excuse?” way. Nice acoustic guitar riff at the end, though.

5. Frankie Carle – Rumors are Flying. God, did people listen to anything in 1946 other than crooner ballads? I’m really starting to get impatient for the 50s, rock ‘n’ roll and doo-wop. However: OMG, this song is PARALLEL TO THE BEGINNING OF MY FIRST RELATIONSHIP. Singer Marjorie Hughes (Carle’s daughter, by the way) sings about how everyone on the street is talking about how her and her beau’s “affair” is “more than a passing phase” (I’m thinking, wow, do all those people actually pay that much attention to your personal life? Well, I guess she is the singer of the #5 song of the year ;), but how she’s not denying it because “for a change, darling, all the rumors are true.” Well, when I was 14, at CTY, I was into my newly-met friend Abby and it was pretty clear that she was into me as well. She was reluctant to dance with me at one of the session’s three organized dances, because people would spread rumors about us. I said, “I don’t mind rumors like that — if they’re true,” and somehow we were suddenly going out. Yes, I actually said that, and yes, I know, what the hell? But anyway, that’s this song. Weird.