1. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves Soundtrack – Whistle While You Work. I don’t know in what form people listened to this at the time, but the file I downloaded has a long instrumental break in the middle, so I assume it’s taken straight from the movie. What I find particularly striking is that, although most of the song is the usual slightly quirky, somewhat pop-ified post-Romantic orchestral music that you usually get in old Disney scores, there’s one bit where they try to jazz it up with some syncopations and muted horns. I guess they figured that as long as there was a swing craze going on, they might as well throw some of that hot new stuff in there. The other surprising thing is how high and girlish Snow White’s voice sounds. There is no way that Disney would give an adult female lead a voice like that now. Hell, they wouldn’t even do it twenty years ago.
2. Artie Shaw Orchestra – Begin the Beguine. Beautiful clarinet playing from Shaw, and nice sharp trumpets in back of him. This isn’t exactly swing so much as as classy, syncopated ballroom music. I can completely picture it as a movie: the guys on stage in white tuxedos, the elegant couples dancing on the floor, the suave male lead saying to his hazily-filmed, gauzily-dressed dance parter: “Darling, you look ravishing tonight.” You know, with that Cary Grant diction and pronunciation that nobody has anymore. Alternatively, it could be one of the slighly sad orchestras that play at all of Gatsby’s lavish parties — though in reality it’s a decade too late for that. Anyway, I like it, yay.
3. Benny Goodman and His Orchestra – Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing). I find it really strange that this song was such a huge hit. Yes, the main riffs are really catchy, but the song is almost nine minutes long, and most of it doesn’t consist of those main riffs. Gene Krupa has a whole lot of long drum solos, and Goodman takes a pretty long solo himself accompanied only by the drums. There’s a lot of improvisation and not much of Goodman’s usual tight, complex arrangements. What arranged material there is is largely repetitive and not very melody-oriented, and around five minutes in, it gets really aggressively dissonant and harsh for a while, with nasty brass fluttertongue effects all over the place. I don’t mean any of this negatively — I like the song a lot, especially that dissonant part! — but it’s not what you think of as top-five-hit material. It’s like Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” somehow being a hit single in England in 1981 (which did happen). Well, props to the 1938 radio-listening public, anyway.
4. The Andrews Sisters – Shortenin’ Bread. What a combination of styles! The tune itself sounds like a kids’ song (though maybe I just think that because I knew it as one when I was a kid). The ending gesture makes me think of vaudeville singers taking off their hats right before being yanked off stage with canes; the vocal harmonies remind me of both barbershop and the type of old-timey country music they used in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (See also: The Carter Family.) There’s a boogie-woogie piano break, and occasional big-band interruptions that sound like your average 30s swing. Althogether I’d say the combination works really well, and I love the way their voices work together. I’m just going to ignore the fact that I’m listening to three white women from Minnesota putting on Southern accents and using the word “mammy.”
5. The Andrews Sisters – Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen. In keeping with the title, they’ve given this song an oompah bassline and a minor-mode harmonic language that together make it sound a little like German cabaret music (think Kurt Weill). The funny part is that they pronounce “schoen” like “shane” rather than the more usual Americanization “shern,” and since “shane” is actually the Yiddish pronunciation of that word, the effect comes off almost klezmery rather than German cabaret-ish. Anyway, cute song, with more nice close-harmony vocals. If it weren’t so understated, it would fit pretty well into the musical Cabaret.
