America's Greatest Hits 1944

We continue our popular and successful series devoted to the biggest chart records of each calendar year in the early chart era as we focus on 1944, the fourth full calendar year of the Billboard Best Sellers chart – the chart was launched in July 1940 – and the first year to feature a Most Played in Juke Boxes chart. This great value 94-track 4-CD set comprises every record which peaked in the Top 10 of either chart during the year, plus those which entered the Top 10 in the final weeks of the year. For reasons of space, it excludes those records were still in the chart at the start of the year, but which peaked in the Top 10 in 1943, and so are included in our existing 1943 collection. One feature of this year was that the American Federation of Musicians’ recording ban was still in force, and so there were a number of big hits which were performed a cappella, and it meant that the vocalists held sway, rather than the big bands of the swing era. It was a vintage year for Bing Crosby, who had 14 hits during the year, including seven No. 1s, and spent 36 weeks at the top of the Best Sellers chart. Others who featured at No.1 were The Andrews Sisters, Jimmy Dorsey, Mills Brothers, Dinah Shore, Louis Jordan, and the Ink Spots with Ella Fitzgerald, while there were also many highly collectable lesser-known records by some artists we don’t hear too much about these days. It makes for an intriguing and very entertaining musical snapshot of a year when WWII was reaching a crucial phase and the news from Europe brought an increasingly euphoric and sentimental wartime flavour to some of the music. It includes a 12,000+ word booklet with a commentary on every record as well as full discographical and chart information.