The AM Forum

1956 to 1960 Virtual Juke Box

340 songs from our high-school years !

To listen, simply click the song title.

Enjoy !

http://www.bobforrest.com/JukeBox.htm

Thanks Don...... many hours of good listening ahead.

Good site. Thanks

However, being a young lad my high school years were 63-67.  I found this site to be good.
Basically covers the Viet-Nam era. Just scroll down to the playlists.


http://chu65nang67.us/nam/vietnam.html

73, Marty

You know, this isn't really helpful. 

I watched the latest Doo Wop concert during a PBS pledge drive.  Then I went out and bought a bunch of CDs.  And now, after browsing these two sites, I'm probably going to go buy some MORE.  And it HASN'T helped at all that while I've been travelling this week, I discovered the "GOLD" and "60s" and "70s" channels on the XM radio in the car.

I wonder if any Acker Bilk stuff is available on CD?  Never should have let the ex-wife keep the Beetles and Lovin' Spoonful and Credence and Arlo Guthrie and the Doors and  ... vinyl either.
 
Sheesh.  This is gonna get expensive.  Need to see if there's enough space on the iPod for Alice's Restaurant ..  and everything Sam Cooke ever recorded, and Otis Redding, and ....

Don and Marty
Thanks so much.  This is great.
I am "lost in the 50's tonight".

73
Steve WA2DTW
Christopher Columbus HS Class of '63

Wow, now that's a site!  Easy click on and listen in a second.

Tnx.

T

Don

This is great! I really enjoyed my first pass through ... listening to around 20 of my favorites.

I had been trying to find one of the songs ("The way you look tonight") by the Jaguars... but I had only been able to find versions by other artists (e.g., for downloading from iTunes). Now, I finally have the version I was looking for.

Best regards
Stu
Bronx HS of Science Class of '63 [also Frank D. Whelan JHS 135, the Bronx, Class of '60]

Wonder if they're good with the publishers.  In case they're not, it'd prolly be good to get what you can while you can before they're shut down.

Yea, there's some great old songs there.

And when you get tired of clicking every single song, there's always wpon.com for obscure stuff from the late 40's to the early 70's.

What I find really interesting is how well so much of the music from all of the time periods on those sites stands the test of time.   Not all of it, but a good bit of it

Been a lot of fun browsing .. so many of the songs have specifc memories (girls, places, parties, whatever) associated with them ...  ;)

Grant/NQ5T

Well guys we have found the party animal among us.

I am a graduate of the class of 1960.  Those songs download very quickly, so I am saving the whole collection because that site probably won't be around for ever.  The quality isn't great, but probably at least as good as it sounded on the crappy radios and 45 rpm record players we listened to in 1956-60.

Note how SHORT most of those old songs were.  Most cuts run between 2 and 3 minutes.  I recall in 1965 what a radical concept it was that Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone was the first big hit that lasted over 5 minutes!

If you are interested, the radio stations drove the trend of short songs.  If you look back to the days of the 30s and early 40s, you will note many of the old 78 RPM records would go for over 3 minutes.  They would record the music that the artist played.

Radio, by the 1940 have become very commercial and they watched every penny. so music cuts that were shorter were favored by stations because they could get more advertising time with them.  An example of this is the Marty Robbins song El Paso.  The first recorded version ran well over 4 minutes.  Someone liked it and thought it would make a hit but was too long.  So they had Marty record the short version that is just over 2.5 minutes.  Result a hit.

Frank Sinatra always had trouble because of the crooner type tunes tended to be well over 4 minutes and he re-recorded several versions that were shortened so they would receive air play.  Diisk Jockeys loved the 4 minute songs and called them John Songs, which would give them time to run down the hall to the bathroom, especailly at night when they were alone. 

By 1955 stations would not play a song over 2 minutes unless it was real popular, so artists would only record very short selections.  I would bet if you timed some of those songs on that site, you will see many of them are just over 1.5 minutes.

Nice sites, great music.  Almost all of it before my generation but I've always enjoyed the doowop of the 50s.

Thanks!