Loving ‘40s music

One of my recent passions over the past couple of years has been 1940s music. Mostly I like big band music with vocals, but blues, country, “piano bar” and novelty music from the era are rotating through my iPod playlists.

Singers like Fred Astaire singing about dancing cheek to cheek, Fats Waller singing about “feets” being too big, and Doris Day singing about tacos, enchiladas and beans all bring me a bit of joy.

When I go fishing, I’m always putting the music on a little ball-shaped iHome speaker –I like to think of it as a 20-teens version of a 1960s transistor radio set-up. When there are other fisher people around me, all seem to enjoy it with me.

Some things never seem to change. Most of the songs I listen too are love songs as the topic seems to be the ever popular song focus through the decades. When listening to my collection of ‘40s songs, I get shivers down my spine when I hear Keely Smith sing her version of “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons,” and I fondly remember a tall and lean woman I once dated when I hear Frank Sinatra sing “My Lean Baby”.

Of course, my love life now is more reflective of Judy Garland’s “I’m Nobody’s Baby”.

Hearing terms that in the ‘40s weren’t an issue but are problematic to modern ears – well, I like Betty Hutton’s “Doctor, Lawyer, and Indian Chief,” but cringe every time she says “injun” in the song, as well as when she mimics a war dance cry near the end of the song. Or, when I hear the word “Jap” in songs like Dick Robertson and His Orchestra’s “Good-bye Dear, I’ll Be Back In A Year” or Spike Jones’ “You’re a Sap, Mister Jap” – the songs reflected the sentiments and terms used in that era of World War II, but our thoughts on epithets and pejoratives have evolved for the better over the years.

And the war songs! A CD I copied to my iTunes entitled Word War II, the Original Cast Album contains several war bond “commercials” in it. One that particularly caught me off-guard the first time I heard it was a break out in the middle of a Disney song entitled “Yankee Doodle Spirit,” with vocals by Jimmy Newell. Donald Duck pitched war bonds. When Newell asked Donald why he was packing a big gun, Donald replied “My country needs me!” Newell responded, “Yes, your country needs you, but not in the Army.” Donald was told he could fight by buying war bonds, to which first Donald seems dejected about, and then got excited about when Newell told him, “Remember your War Bond dollars buy Uncle Sam’s soldiers’ guns, tanks and bombers.”

“Boy oh boy, I’m going to buy more War Bonds!” Donald replied.

Here’s a reality check for 2014: I think we’d all have a hard time imagining Donald Duck hawking war bonds for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Personally, I discovered how much I liked ‘40s music when I began listening to SiriusXM’s ‘40s On 4 station. It reminded me of a time when things seemed much simpler.

Of course, African Americans were routinely denied their right to vote. Japanese-Americans were interred in American concentration camps. Women were restricted to being either housewives or limited to a handful of professions after the war, and lesbians, gays and bisexuals were seen as the worst kind of immoral people. And trans people! Pfft. We weren’t even a discussion point — for broader American society, straight drag was all there was that even remotely reflected the trans experience, and that drag was pretty much always done by a handful of comics for comedic effect.

The ‘40s music I hear on satellite radio, as well as off of my iPod, is my quirky pleasure from a bygone era. But I know what I’m listening to, as fun as it is to me, doesn’t reflect a period of time I’d actually have wanted to live through.

To quote Jesus Jones from 1990, “Right here, right now, there is no other place I wanna be.”