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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 we decided to take the America’s Greatest Hits format back into the Your Hit Parade era of the 1930s. This 95-track 4-CD collection comprises every record that featured in the Your Hit Parade chart during 1938. It was a varied musical landscape, with the big swing orchestras like those of Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey and Benny Goodman making their mark, though often with middle-of-the-road vocal performances rather than jazzy pieces, although there’s plenty of hot stuff here too, from Duke Ellington, Chick Webb with Ella Fitzgerald and Red Norvo with Mildred Bailey. Along with them are the big dance bands who were popular on radio, including Guy Lombardo, Shep Fields, Larry Clinton, Horace Heidt, all with their featured vocalists, who included fine singers like Martha Tilton, Helen Forrest and Bea Wain, plus some of the top solo singers of the era, Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Rudy Vallee and Fred Astaire among them, 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. It’s an enjoyable and fascinating musical snapshot of the era, complete with a 12,000 word booklet with notes on each track, and full discographical and chart information.
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