then again

After writing my longish complaint about planning the Wayback Machine show, I took another look at the flowsheet and it fell right into place. All I had to do was move the talkset (I always do talksets over an instrumental) to 1923, then I could plug in "Somebody Stole My Gal" by Ted Weems. Now the hole is filled, the sets are more balanced, and the show is only a minute too long. Yay! For 1921 I might just leave the instrumental because it's a notable piece -- "Carolina Shout" by James P. Johnson. Or I could replace it with "I'm Going to Jazz My Way Right Into Paradise" by Mary Stafford, an obscure but good early jazz recording. They're the same length so I don't even have to decide until Sunday.

The only problem left is having "Red Hot Mama" for 1924 and "Red Hot Henry Brown" for 1926. Those songs are just way too similar, and neither one is particularly important or influential. They're good examples of racy flapper music, but one is plenty to illustrate the point. Well I could go with "Doctor Jazz" and be two minutes long. I hate to do that to the next DJ though. I think I'll look at the list of notable songs published in 1926 and see if I come up with anything. Wikipedia's "year in music" pages have been a godsend for planning this show.

[ETA: I spent more time on the show and had everything worked out, it had really come together. And then just now I was checking label information for each of the downloads, and I realized that my 1922 song, "Blue Skies" by Josephine Baker, can't possibly work because "Blue Skies" was written in 1926. So first of all, the person who posted it on archive.org got the dates wrong, second, it shouldn't be on there at all because it's still under copyright, and third, now I don't have a song for 1922. I should have known "Blue Skies" wasn't from 1922; it just sounded too clean for the pre-electric recording days.]

[ETA ETA: I've got a song for 1922. It's not super important to the history of modern music, but it's a song, it's pleasant, and I was able to find out a few things about the singer (Henry Burr) to say on the air. So, the show is done and only runs about minute long. That is, until tomorrow night when I will probably start monkeying around with the playlist again.]