1939-1940 Time Life - The Swing Era Part 1

When I first moved to Texarkana several years ago I went to the texarkana library to see what was available. After I received my card I proceeded to browse through their records where I came across a set called "The Swing Era" by Time-Life records. I checked it out and copied it to casette where I proceeded to listen to it regularly. When I started working at KTXK 91.5 we would get record collections as donations. Some of these had more of "The Swing Era" sets in them. Now, let's fast forward several years with music being released on CD. I was really overjoyed when I learned that "The Swing Era" was going to be released on CD. I acquired most of these sets and have enjoyed them even though I knew that they weren't the original recordings.

Several months ago I thought wouldn't it be fun to take the songs from "The Swing Era" and see if I could find the originals. So using one of the CDs as my guide I was able to locate most of the songs. I then compared them to some of the record sets we still have at the station. I was really surprised to discover that the songs were different. I then did some searching on the internet where I learned the true story. It seems that Time-Life was not going to release "The Swing Era" on CD but they decided to release two two-CD sets of selected songs from the record sets. These sets sold really well. The folks at Time-Life then decided to release the rest of the sets but they didn't want to duplicate the same songs as on the first two sets so they rearranged the selection on the CDs.

I am using the record sets as my guide  in producing these Big Band Bash programs.  It is fun for me to see if I can find the original recordings while using the playlist from "The Swing Era" sets as my guide.

If you ever get a chance to purchase these sets I highly recommend them. The sound quality is excellent and it's a great introducyion to the great music played by the big bands from the 1930's and 1940's.