Some Music For The Holiday
This week on Afterglow the program is Popular Song On the Picket Line, a look at a time when American popular-song artists, both singers and composers, found themselves drawn to music with socially significant themes. We'll hear:
- Recordings from Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and others
- Duke Ellington performing the title song from his 1941 social-significance musical, Jump For Joy
- A recording I managed to track down from the original 1937 cast of And the Cradle Will Rock, the controversial Federal Theater Orson Welles production
- An anthemic anti-lynching song that preceded Billie Holiday's iconic "Strange Fruit"
Whatever you're up to over this long holiday weekend, whether that's cooking out, watching movies or TV, catching up on reading, or digging into that stack of CDs you haven't listened to yet, have a safe and happy Labor Day. Me, I'm hoping to finally finish Jeanine Basinger's The Star Machine, a fascinating book about how the Hollywood studio system groomed its famous (and not-so-famous) actors and actresses.
Other Resources
- Listen to the Afterglow show, Popular Song On the Picket Line
- Hear an entire WFIU program devoted to Ellington's musical here: Jump For Joy: Duke Ellington's Celebratory Musical
