LoveSong1950s

Today in 1950 · Friday, September 1, 1950 Patent diagrams of Peter Goldmark's CBS field-sequential color television system with its spinning color-filter disk · U.S. patent drawing, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons On this day in 1950, the Federal Communications Commission issued its First Report on Color Television Issues — and sent shockwaves through the young television industry by finding CBS's color system the best of the three it had tested. The competitors were giants: CBS, RCA, and Color Television Inc., each with a different scheme for putting color into American living rooms. CBS's field-sequential system was gloriously mechanical: spinning discs of red, blue and green filters, one behind the camera lens and one in front of the home receiver's picture tube. It produced beautiful color — and was completely incompatible with the millions of black-and-white sets already sold. The FCC's report proposed 'bracket standards,' receivers built t...

Story Behind the Song · When the Radio Called My Name (California) , Track 2 ▶ The player starts right at this track (03:44). Let it keep playing for the full album. This song does something sneaky with time. It opens in the morning — sun painting gold on every street they know — and by the chorus it is already midnight, as if the day simply skipped everything that wasn't her. One little smile, one little glance, the pre-chorus shrugs, and an ordinary day turns into romance; the clock never stood a chance. The California moon of the title is less an object in the sky than a stage light. Under it they sway to the radio's favorite tune, her eyes brighter than the sea, and the doo-wah harmonies come in soft as tide. It is the album's first slow-dance, the one where the evening decides to stay. And when the bridge admits that tomorrow might call them far away, the answer is pure 1950s devotion: keep the melody, every day, every sunset, every mile. Forever, the fi...

The Story Behind the Song · Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, 1956 Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers on their 1957 Topps Hit Stars card — Herman Santiago, Jimmy Merchant, Sherman Garnes, Frankie Lymon and Joe Negroni · Topps, 1957, copyright not renewed, public domain Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers: the first recording Frankie Lymon was thirteen years old at the session. The group was still calling itself the Premiers when it recorded at Bell Sound Studios on West 54th Street in New York in November 1955, with Jimmy Wright's tenor saxophone behind them, and the song was still called "Why Do Birds Sing So Gay?" It came out in the last week of December 1955 as Gee 1002, under a new group name. By the Billboard issue dated March 31, 1956 it was No. 1 on the R&B Best Sellers in Stores chart and No. 1 on R&B Most Played by Jockeys; a fortnight later it reached No. 6 on the pop Best Sellers chart, and No. 7 on the Top 100. A boy who had not finished eighth grade...

Today in 1950 · Thursday, August 31, 1950 A Bush TV22a television receiver from 1950 (Design Museum, London) · Photo by Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons On this day in 1950, XHTV Channel 4 signed on in Mexico City, transmitting Mexico's first commercial television signal — the first commercial TV station not just in Mexico but in all of Latin America, and the first in any Spanish-speaking country. The station belonged to newspaper magnate Romulo O'Farrill and his son, operating through Televisión de México S.A. The technical brains behind the launch was engineer Guillermo Gonzalez Camarena — the inventor who had patented a tri-chromatic field-sequential color television system years before color TV reached most of the world's living rooms. The sign-on came on August 31; the station's first full formal program aired the next day, September 1: the broadcast of President Miguel Aleman Valdes's fourth state-of-the-nation address. Mexico had experimented with...

Story Behind the Song · When the Radio Called My Name (California) , Track 1 ▶ The player starts right at this track (00:00). Let it keep playing for the full album. Morning light across the bay, and somewhere in an old café downtown a radio clears its throat and starts to play. That is all it takes. The title track of this album — and the moment that names the whole record — is about the strange, wonderful feeling that a song on the air is talking directly to you. He hears his name in the refrain; she is already reaching for his hand; and suddenly every corner of the town seems to be singing along. Vinyl spins, neon warms up, cherry sodas sweat on the counter — the whole California evening assembles itself around one melody like iron filings around a magnet. Doo-bee doo, doo-wah: the backing vocals are the radio static turned friendly. As an album opener it makes a bold promise — every song led me to you — and then spends twelve more tracks keeping it. Start here, at 00:0...

Today in 1950 · Wednesday, August 30, 1950 Carl Anderson's 1932 cloud-chamber photograph of the first positron ever observed — particle physics of exactly the kind Bruno Pontecorvo devoted his career to · Carl D. Anderson, Physical Review (1933), copyright not renewed, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons In the last days of August 1950, the physicist Bruno Pontecorvo — a protege of Enrico Fermi and a senior scientist at Britain's Harwell atomic research establishment — quietly abandoned his plans to return from an Italian family holiday. Somewhere in that final week of August, by the account preserved by the town council of Abingdon, where he lived at 5 Letcombe Avenue, he was contacted by Soviet agents. What followed was one of the strangest disappearances of the Cold War. Instead of returning to England, Pontecorvo, his Swedish wife Marianne and their three sons flew from Rome via Stockholm to Helsinki, arriving September 1. From there, Soviet handlers drove the fami...

Story Behind the Song · Postcard Heart , Track 14 ▶ The player starts right at this track (49:23). Let it keep playing for the full album. A wave across a crowded street, a name said warmly, coffee cups and quiet smiles — the finale opens on a reunion so gentle you might miss that it is the whole album coming full circle. The postcard from track one has finally been delivered. Every light leads home tonight, the chorus promises; every dream is burning bright. And if tomorrow calls them far away, the song has an answer ready — some doors are left lit precisely so someone can find their way back through them. It is the right ending for a record about addresses of the heart: not a goodbye but a porch light. Press play on track one again and the postcard mails itself over. Every light leads home tonight Every dream is burning bright If tomorrow calls us far away Don't let go/ of /me — from “Every Light Leads Home” Hear the whole album Postcard Heart is a 14-...

Today in 1950 · Tuesday, August 29, 1950 HMS Unicorn leaves Hong Kong for Pusan carrying men of the Middlesex Regiment, September 1950 — a follow-up lift for the brigade whose first contingent landed August 29 · Imperial War Museum photograph GOV 2742, Crown copyright expired, via Wikimedia Commons On this day in 1950, the British 27th Infantry Brigade — the 1st Battalion Middlesex Regiment and the 1st Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders — landed at Pusan from Hong Kong under Brigadier Basil Coad. They were the first UK ground troops committed to Korea, and the first non-American UN ground combat force to reach the peninsula. They came in a hurry, and it showed. The two battalions were understrength and had left Hong Kong only about four days earlier with almost no warning of a combat deployment. They arrived without their own artillery, armor or transport, borrowing all three from the Americans. Within a week the brigade was in the line on the Naktong River, defending...

Story Behind the Song · Postcard Heart , Track 13 ▶ The player starts right at this track (44:55). Let it keep playing for the full album. The stars have tucked themselves into the velvet dark, and he lies awake looking for a sign of morning, reaching across the quiet for a hand he knows the shape of by heart. Only for You is the album's midnight confession — the moment the jokes and the jukeboxes fall away and what is left is a promise said plainly. Only you can make the shadows fade; only you, the promise that we made. The harmonies gather close like blankets, and every whisper in the lyric lands on the same address: a heart that beats, and beats for one person. Sequenced this late in the album, it reads like the vow the whole story has been building toward. Thirteen songs of dancing, and then this: the still point. Only you, can make the shadows fade Only you, the promise that we made In every whisper, in the morning dew My heart is beating, and it beats for yo...

The Story Behind the Song · The Chords, 1954 The Chords in a press photo issued while they recorded for Cat Records · Cat Records press photo, published without copyright notice, public domain The Chords and the original Sh-Boom The Chords recorded "Sh-Boom" in New York on March 15, 1954, and Atlantic's Cat subsidiary released it as the B-side of a cover of "Cross Over the Bridge." By June the label had stopped pressing the A-side altogether. The record had turned itself over. Within weeks a Canadian quartet called the Crew-Cuts cut it for Mercury, and what followed is the episode people mean when they talk about 1950s cover versions. In the Billboard issue of August 14, 1954, the Crew-Cuts sat at No. 1 on the pop Best Sellers in Stores chart and No. 1 on Most Played by Jockeys. The Chords, on the same page, were No. 4 on R&B Best Sellers, No. 2 on the R&B juke-box chart, and No. 14 on the pop chart. The cover had taken the pop market. But the...

Today in 1950 · Monday, August 28, 1950 A U.S. government Social Security Board poster; Truman's 1950 amendments greatly expanded the program · National Archives, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons On this day in 1950, President Truman signed H.R. 6000, the Social Security Act Amendments of 1950 — the first sweeping expansion of Social Security in its fifteen-year history. The law extended old-age and survivors insurance to roughly ten million additional Americans, including, for the first time, regularly employed farm workers and domestic workers. It also roughly doubled benefit levels — the first major increase since the original act of 1935. For a retiree who had watched postwar inflation eat away a benefit designed in the Depression, the 1950 amendments were the difference between a token check and something closer to a pension. Truman used his signing statement for a pointed aside, noting that Congress had also restored insurance rights to workers 'whose insuran...

Story Behind the Song · Postcard Heart , Track 12 ▶ The player starts right at this track (40:41). Let it keep playing for the full album. Friday, quarter to eight, a corner crowded with everyone else's plans — and then a wave through the crowd beneath the theater lights, and the whole street brightens like the marquee just gained a thousand bulbs. She is wearing the ribbon he gave her in June, which is its own kind of love letter. The song turns a movie date into mythology: a thousand little lights spelling destiny, two names written across hopeful hearts as the picture starts. She is, the chorus declares, the only leading lady he can see, and the film itself never stood a chance of competing. It is the album's most cinematic three minutes — fitting, for a series whose whole promise is making the listener the main character of a 1950s romance. Meet me under the marquee Where a thousand little lights spell destiny Hold my hand when the picture starts We can w...

Today in 1950 · Sunday, August 27, 1950 An 1850 illustration of the paddle tug Goliath laying the first Dover-Calais submarine telegraph cable — the centenary the first cross-Channel telecast marked, one hundred years later to the season · Archives of the French PTT, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons On this day in 1950, television left its home island for the first time. The BBC mounted its first live outside broadcast from continental Europe: an hour of live pictures from Calais, France, introduced by Richard Dimbleby, timed to the centenary of the first telegraph message ever passed beneath the English Channel. Viewers in Britain watched the people of Calais en fête — a torchlight procession, songs, dancing and fireworks around the town's Hôtel de Ville — while the signal made a 95-mile journey home in four relay hops, ending at Senate House in London and then by cable to the transmitter at Alexandra Palace. It was a one-night engineering stunt, and it was also the fu...

Story Behind the Song · Postcard Heart , Track 11 ▶ The player starts right at this track (35:38). Let it keep playing for the full album. The café has closed. Chairs up, lights low, rain drawing silver lines on the windowsill — and two cups still on the table, one hers, one his, cooling while they borrow time neither wants to give back. This is the quietest episode on the album and maybe its most grown-up: love not as fireworks but as the refusal to reach for a coat. The world outside can hurry, the chorus allows, but your hand is holding mine, and that settles the argument with the clock. One light above the door, a doo-wah sung barely above a whisper — stay a little longer. If the album has a 1 a.m. track, it is this one, and it earns every minute it steals. Two cups after closing Two hearts taking time Ooh, the world outside can hurry But your hand is holding mine Two cups after closing One light above the door Doo-wah, stay a little longer That's all I...

Today in 1950 · Saturday, August 26, 1950 General Douglas MacArthur on an inspection tour of the Korean front, 1950 · U.S. Army Signal Corps photo, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons On this day in 1950, the simmering conflict between President Truman and General Douglas MacArthur broke into the open — over a message to a veterans' convention. MacArthur, invited to address the Veterans of Foreign Wars' 51st National Encampment in Chicago, had cabled a statement laying out his personal views on Formosa (Taiwan) as vital to America's 'strategic potential in the Pacific.' The problem: those views flatly contradicted the administration's policy of neutralizing the Formosa question, and the text had already been released to the press before the White House ever saw it. On August 26, the Department of Defense telegraphed MacArthur that the President directed withdrawal of the message 'because various features with respect to Formosa are in conflict with ...

Story Behind the Song · Postcard Heart , Track 10 ▶ The player starts right at this track (31:43). Let it keep playing for the full album. Shop doors opening one by one, a ribbon in her hair, two bicycles rolling down Pacific Avenue while the ocean mails a little summer inland on the breeze. Morning songs are rare in doo-wop — the genre loves its streetlamps — but this one makes dawn feel like the most romantic hour ever invented. Every bell in town is ringing, the chorus claims, just because she is riding near, and the arrangement backs the claim: bright golden wheels of harmony turning underneath the melody, skies-so-clear guitar keeping the pace easy. It is the album's deep breath — the episode where love is not an event but a climate. The breeze keeps turning pages, and the story is glad to be read slowly. Pacific Avenue morning Golden wheels and skies so clear Every bell in town is ringing Just because you're riding near Oh, the breeze keeps turning pag...

The Story Behind the Song · The Penguins, 1954 The maroon DooTone label of the original 1954 pressing — "Earth Angel" as the B-side of catalogue number 348 · DooTone Records label scan, public domain as typography Where did the Penguins record Earth Angel? The most famous doo-wop record ever made was taped in a garage behind a house on West 30th Street in South Los Angeles. The garage belonged to Ted Brinson, a mail carrier who had played bass in the Jimmie Lunceford and Andy Kirk orchestras and who was related to the Penguins' lead singer, Cleve Duncan. Brinson had built a studio in there around a single-track Ampex, and the label owner Dootsie Williams used it for sessions. The drummer, Preston Epps, muffled his kit with pillows. Curtis Williams played piano. It came out in September 1954 on DooTone 348 — as the B-side. The record was pressed to sell "Hey Señorita"; "Earth Angel" was the flip. Disc jockeys turned it over in October, and by ...