1940s in music

For music from a year in the 1940s, go to 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49

Main article: Timeline of musical events

Popular music
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List of popular music genres

This article includes an overview of the major events and trends in popular music in the 1940s.

In the First World, pop music, Swing, Big band, Jazz, Latin and Country music dominated and defined the decade's music.

The U.S. and North America

See also: Music history of the United States (1940s and 50s)

Pop

Bing Crosby was one of the best-selling male pop artists of the 1940s.

Frank Sinatra was one of the best-selling male pop artists of the 1940s.

In the US, by the late 1930s and early 1940s, swing had become the most popular musical style and remained so for several years, until it was supplanted in the late 1940s by the pop standards sung by the crooners who grew out of the Big Band tradition that swing began. Bandleaders such as the Dorsey Brothers often helped launch the careers of vocalists who went on to popularity as solo artists, such as Frank Sinatra, whom rose to fame as a singer during this time. Sinatra's vast appeal to the "Bobby soxers" revealed a whole new audience for popular music, which had generally appealed mainly to adults up to that time, making Sinatra the first teen idol.

Some of the most notable Swing artists of the 1940s include Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller. Some of the most notable crooners of the 1940s include Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole.

Jazz

Benny Goodman performing in 1943 Stage Door Canteen.

In the 1940s, pure jazz began to become more popular, along with the blues, with artists like Ella Fitzgerald ("A-Tisket, A-Tasket") and Billie Holiday ("Strange Fruit") becoming nationally successful.

By the 1940s, Dixieland jazz revival musicians like Jimmy McPartland, Eddie Condon and Bud Freeman had become well-known and established their own unique style. Most characteristically, players entered solos against riffing by other horns, and were followed by a closing with the drummer playing a four-bar tag that was then answered by the rest of the band.

Some of the most notable Jazz artists of the 1940s include Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole.

Bebop

In the early and mid-1940s the bebop style of jazz was developed, led by such distinctive stylists as the saxophonist Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. This marked a major shift of jazz as pop music for dancing to a high-art, less-accessible, cerebral "musician's music." Bebop valued complex improvizations based on chord progressions rather than melody.

Country music

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, cowboy songs, or Western music, became widely popular through the romanticization of the cowboy and idealized depictions of the west in Hollywood films. Singing cowboys, such as Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, sang cowboy songs in their films and became popular throughout the United States. Film producers began incorporating fully orchestrated four-part harmonies and sophisticated musical arrangements into their motion pictures.

In the post-war period, country music was called "folk" in the trades, and "hillbilly" within the industry. In 1944, The Billboard replaced the term "hillbilly" with "folk songs and blues," and switched to "country" or "country and Western" in 1949.

Other Trends

• In 1941 Les Paul designs and builds the first solid-body electric guitar.
• In 1942 Bing Crosby recorded and released the single White Christmas which became the best-selling single of all time, with estimated sales in excess of 50 million copies worldwide.
• In 1948 Columbia Records introduces the 33⅓ rpm LP (“long playing”) record at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, featuring 25 minutes of music per side
• In 1949 RCA Victor introduces the 45 rpm record, featuring 8 minutes of music.

Latin America

• In 1948 Perez Prado recorded the first Mambo in Mexico for RCA Victor

See also

• 1950s in music