The tenth volume of The History of Pop Radio, a 15-CD box set issued by Germany's History label, covers 1942, and it contains recordings of some of the popular songs of the early '40s and performances by some of the period's major recording and film stars. (The reference to radio in the album title is a misnomer; no Airchecks are included.) But it cannot be considered an adequate chronicle or sampling of the best or most representative popular music of 1942. The compilers, drawing from material that is out of copyright in Europe, seem to have transferred a number of tracks from an anthology of early Capitol Records recordings, since there are studio performances by such label artists as
the King Cole Trio,
Johnny Mercer,
Ella Mae Morse, and
Margaret Whiting, all of them with a sound quality that is noticeably superior to that of other tracks on the album. Another major source is the soundtracks of MGM motion pictures. Two songs, "Honey in the Honeycomb" and "Life's Full o' Consequences," sung by
Lena Horne (with an uncredited Eddie "Rochester" Anderson on the latter), are from the 1943 film Cabin in the Sky, for example. They are far from the only tracks here not actually released during the calendar year 1942, though one should be charitable since 1942 was the year that the musicians union called a recording strike, and many records made in that year were not released until 1943 or 1944. A greater problem is the amount of filler. Along with tracks by popular artists such as
Glenn Miller and
Dinah Shore, and significant ones such as
Billie Holiday and
Paul Robeson, there are many British performers whose names will be unfamiliar to Americans (and not a few Britons, too). This inferior material is just filler, making the album as a whole a grab bag. (Note that there is even some confusion about who one of them is. Two tracks are credited to George Evans, identified by a brief biography in the CD booklet as the turn-of-the-century vaudeville performer of that name. But that George Evans died in 1915 and couldn't, for example, have made a recording of the 1942 copyright "Lamplighter's Serenade.") ~ William Ruhlmann