Latest Song Hits – 49 Years On

Tyneside Don Dada and my Big Ten Inch cohort Lord Leigh Park just came back from a trip to NYC, which contained as much vintage-retail-perplexity as these trips always seem to (when confronted by 175 great Latin jazz albums, your eyes fuzz over, your mind goes soft and you walk away empty-handed).

Anyway, he DID manage to bring back a real treat for me, a May 1962 edition of the legendary Country Song Roundup, a publication I’d heard of but never actually seen. And it’s wonderful stuff.

Nobody would mistake it for mid-70s NME journalism: it’s homespun and positive and good clean family country fun. But from the ads to the Smash Hits-style lyric printing (dozens of current country smashes per issue) to the light and fluffy features, it’s a link to a time just before country music (or at least the Nashville stuff) turned sour (and to a time when country still saw its DNA in rock’n’roll, with Elvis featuring big on its pages till the 60s).

I’ve tried and failed to find out if it’s still in print – the latest reference I can find is from the 90s so I guess not – and I suspect very few issues after the mid to late 60s have the same charm once the big-hatted bastards and shiny moms took over, but I’m definitely planning on collecting a fair few of the first 100 or so issues…

 

~ by stagger lee on April 10, 2011.