America's Greatest - Your Hit Parade Hits: 1936 (4-CD)

by Various Artists

One of Acrobat's most popular and successful series are the America's Greatest Hits collections - 4-CD sets featuring the biggest hits from the Billboard charts from 1940, when the Billboard record sales chart was launched, through to 1962. However, before the Billboard chart was first published, the popular US weekly radio show Your Hit Parade, sponsored by Lucky Strike, began producing a chart in 1935, which was sometimes a Top 10, sometimes a Top 15, so Acrobat decided to take the America's Greatest Hits format back into the Your Hit Parade era of the 1930s. This 98-track 4-CD collection comprises every record that featured in the Top 14 of the Your Hit Parade chart during 1936, the first full year of the chart (records were quite long in those days, and there was insufficient space to include the Top 15 entries, although we have squeezed a couple of them in). With growing optimism in the US as President Roosevelt's New Deal made its impact, it was a very varied music landscape, with the big swing orchestras starting to make their mark, though often with middle-of-the-road vocal performances rather than jazzy pieces, although there's plenty of hot stuff here too, and the big dance bands who were popular on radio competing with each other as they recorded the future classics of the Great American Songbook that were coming out of Broadway, Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley, along with some of the top singers of the era. It's an enjoyable and fascinating musical snapshot of the era, complete with 15,000 word booklet with notes on each track, and full discographical and chart information.