1940s in music
After World War II, the big band sounds of the earlier part of the decade had been gradually replaced by crooners and vocal pop.
Bandleaders such as the Dorsey Brothers often helped launch the careers of vocalists who went on to gain popularity as solo artists, such as Frank Sinatra, who rose to fame as a singer during this time.
After the war, a combination of factors such as changing demographics and rapid inflation made large bands unprofitable, so that popular music in the US came to be dominated instead by traditional pop and crooners, as well as bebop and jump blues.
Differing greatly from swing, early bebop divorced itself from dance music, establishing itself more as an art form but lessening its potential popular and commercial value.
The swing era lasted until the mid-1940s, and produced popular tunes such as Duke Ellington's "Cotton Tail" (1940) and Billy Strayhorn's "Take the 'A' Train" (1941).
Some swing era musicians, like Louis Jordan, later found popularity in a new kind of music, called "rhythm and blues", that would evolve into rock and roll in the 1950s.
By the end of the 1940s, the nervous energy and tension of bebop was replaced with a tendency towards calm and smoothness, that eventually influenced the birth of cool jazz, which favoured long, linear melodic lines in the 1950s.
By the 1940s, Dixieland jazz revival musicians like Jimmy McPartland, Eddie Condon and Bud Freeman had become well-known and established their own unique style.
Most characteristically, players entered solos against riffing by other horns, and were followed by a closing with the drummer playing a four-bar tag that was then answered by the rest of the band.
Some of the most notable Jazz artists of the 1940s include Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and also Nat King Cole.
Film producers began incorporating fully orchestrated four-part harmonies and sophisticated musical arrangements into their motion pictures.
Allmusic critic David Vinopal called "Walking the Floor Over You" the first honky tonk song that launched the musical genre itself.
His recording of "Lovesick Blues" (and its flip side, "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry") in 1949 remains a landmark in both country and popular music to this day.
1 country music hit when "You Two-Timed Me One Time Too Often," performed by Tex Ritter, reached the top of the Billboard Most Played Juke Box Folk Records.
1 country music hit as a songwriter when "Don't Rob Another Man's Castle," performed by Eddy Arnold, topped the Billboard Folk Best Seller Charts.
1 song on Billboard magazine's very first Most Played Juke Box Folk Records chart, dated January 8, 1944, saw The Andrews Sisters get co-credit along with Bing Crosby on "Pistol Packin' Mama."
Other popular female acts were Patsy Montana, Martha Carson, The Maddox Brothers and Rose, Molly O'Day with the Cumberland Mountain Folks, and Lulu Belle (of Lulu Belle and Scotty), while Mother Maybelle Carter re-formed the Carter Family with her daughters, Anita, June, and Helen and their popularity would only grow in time.
Shanghai Pathe Records, then belonging to EMI, emerged to be the leading record company in China and featured a blend of Chinese melodies and western orchestrations as well as Big Band Jazz elements in arrangements of music, leading to their superseding traditional Chinese operas in radio broadcasts.
With the help of growing radio audience in the nation, Shidaiqu successfully became prevalent and listening to Mandarin pop songs was regarded as trendy.
Nonetheless, little attention was paid on the groundbreaking breakthroughs of Chinese Mandarin pop songs in the 1940s, both by the academia and the community in China as well as Western countries.
