Strange Fruit
1939
A Bronx schoolteacher's poem about lynching, sung in a single spotlight, still the bravest three minutes on record.
★ 9.6
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1930s
1930 – 1939
Showing 17 songs from the 1930s
Over the Rainbow
1939
MGM cut it from the film twice until Arthur Freed threatened to quit; Garland was sixteen.
★ 9.0
Sing Sing Sing (With a Swing)
1937
Louis Prima's tune, Krupa's tom-toms, and a performance long enough to fill both sides of a twelve-inch 78.
★ 8.0
Cross Road Blues
1936 · From King of the Delta Blues Singers
Two takes in a San Antonio hotel room, Johnson's slide answering his own voice; the devil came later.
★ 7.9
Body and Soul
1939
Hawkins barely states the melody, improvises two choruses instead, and the 1939 Bluebird side pointed jazz toward bebop.
★ 7.7
Minnie the Moocher
1931
Calloway forgot the words on a Cotton Club broadcast, by his account, and the hi-de-ho call and response was born.
★ 7.6
Can the Circle Be Unbroken (By and By)
1935
A 1907 hymn rewritten into a mother's funeral, with A.P. Carter tightening the grief and Maybelle's guitar holding it.
★ 7.5
In the Mood
1939
Joe Garland's tune cut to three minutes to fit a 78, and those false endings that never quite stop.
★ 7.5
Mood Indigo
1930
Ellington inverted the horns, trombone high and clarinet low, and the overtones invent a fourth instrument that is not there.
★ 6.9
If I Didn't CareThe Ink Spots
If I Didn't Care
1939
Kenny's tenor floats, Jones talks the lyric back in bass, and doo-wop inherited that top-and-bottom trick wholesale.
★ 6.8
Moonlight Serenade
1939
Composed under Joseph Schillinger's tuition, and the band was playing it as a theme before it had a title.
★ 6.7
Begin the BeguineArtie Shaw
Begin the Beguine
1938
RCA called it "a complete waste of time", hid it on a B-side, and Shaw's clarinet sold six million anyway.
★ 6.6
One O'Clock JumpCount Basie
One O'Clock Jump
1937
A head arrangement built section by section, Lester Young and Herschel Evans trading solos, Basie's theme song ever after.
★ 6.6
Stormy Weather (Ethel Waters)
1933
Written for Cab Calloway, who missed the Cotton Club bill; Waters premiered it there in 1933 and owned it.
★ 5.8
Anything Goes
1934
Porter loaded the lyric with Depression-era scandal, and Ethel Merman belted it at the Alvin for eight months.
★ 5.8
Wabash CannonballRoy Acuff
Wabash Cannonball
1936
Recorded in 1936 with someone else singing lead, then cut again by Acuff in 1947, a train that never existed.
★ 5.6
I'm in the Mood for Love
1935
Cut in New York on October 3, 1935, among Armstrong's first Decca sides, trumpet and voice doing identical work.
★ 5.1