1957 was… a year in music

I wanted to try to look at records from a year I didn’t know much about, and landed more or less randomly on 1957. I think when most people think about 50s music, they think of Rock n Roll. But while the music that would dominate the rest of the century was already going, it didn’t have a lot of commercial traction. It was still considered a novelty, or kids’ music (I have a much longer explanation I’ll post sometime of how, before rock n roll in the late 50s, the whole concept of “teenager” and a market that sold things to teenagers was not really a thing) Instead, Jazz and Broadway show tunes ruled the roost. Songbook artists like Sinatra and Pat Boone cranked out a constant stream of well-groomed, beloved melodies.

Classical music was still something any music publication was expected to keep track of. I just missed being able to include Glenn Gould’s first recordings of the Brandenburg Concertos by a year. Leonard Bernstein had been busy opening “West Side Story,” but was about to take over the NY Philharmonic and turn it into a global institution for the next 20 years.

There was also a weird obsession with sounds from other lands, maybe because of having American troops stationed all over the globe in the previous decade. I wouldn’t exactly call it “world music” because it seems that there was only a narrow band of sounds that was appealing to middle class white America, the more showy and exotic and caricatured the better. Hawaiian guitar records, Brazilian Bossa Nova, Mambo, Cuban jazz, and all sorts of others. It was novelty music for a lot of people, but there was a lot of it in the marketplace.

Then there was the almost entirely separate market for singles. Country music stocked in juke boxes, rock and R&B bought by working class people in shops the big music media paid no mind. “Race music,” blues and spirituals that were marketed to black audiences, but also bought by whites. Plus folk music, mountain music, cowboy songs, and so much else. The record industry just sort of threw everything at the wall to see what stuck. What stuck, eventually, was the fact that Elvis sold more records in 1957 than just about anybody else, and the emerging market for young adults who had disposable income changed the popular music world drastically over the next few years.

But For this small period, there was a lot of experimentation and possibility. This week (and change) is a wide array of what you could get at a record store in 1957.