America’s Greatest Your Hit Parade Hits 1937

One of Acrobat’s most popular and successful series are the America’s Greatest Hits collections – 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 74-track 3-CD collection comprises every record that featured in the Your Hit Parade chart during 1937, the first full year of the chart, apart from one of which we could not find a copy. There were many fewer records that made the chart in 1937 compared to 1936, so it all fits onto a 3-CD set.

It was a very varied music landscape, with the big swing orchestras like Tommy 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. Along with them are the big dance bands who were popular on radio, including g Guy Lombardo, Shep Fields and Eddy Duchin, 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, plus some of the top singers of the era, Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire among them. 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.