White Christmas
1942
Berlin's snowless Christmas song, the best-selling physical single ever pressed, and the sound of every soldier's homesickness.
★ 9.3
Browse by time · decade
1940s
1940 – 1949
Showing 18 songs from the 1940s
I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry
1949 · From 40 Greatest Hits
Issued as a B-side because jukeboxes wanted uptempo, with Jerry Byrd's steel guitar shadowing every line Williams sings.
★ 8.5
Take the "A" Train
1941
Strayhorn turned Ellington's subway directions into a theme song; Ray Nance's trumpet solo got copied note for note ever after.
★ 8.2
Round Midnight
1947 · From Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 1
Monk wrote it around 1940, cutting it for Blue Note in 1947; no jazz composer's tune is recorded more.
★ 7.8
God Bless the ChildBillie Holiday
God Bless the Child
1941
A quarrel with her mother over money, by Holiday's own account, gave the song its title line and its steel.
★ 7.8
La Vie en Rose (Edith Piaf)Edith Piaf
La Vie en Rose (Edith Piaf)
1947
Piaf's own lyric, dismissed by her collaborators as foolishness, then a million American sales and a French national possession.
★ 7.8
A Night in TunisiaDizzy Gillespie
A Night in Tunisia
1946
Written at a Kelly's Stables piano in 1942 under the title Interlude, with a bass line that refuses to walk.
★ 7.6
The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire)
1946
Tormé and Wells wrote it in a July heat wave, thinking cool, and Cole overruled Capitol about the strings.
★ 7.5
Boogie Woogie Bugle BoyThe Andrews Sisters
Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy
1941
Raye and Prince wrote it for an Abbott and Costello comedy, and the sisters harmonize like a brass section.
★ 6.5
The Fat Man
1949
Cosimo Matassa's J&M studio, December 1949: Earl Palmer's backbeat, Domino's wordless wah-wah, and a million copies sold.
★ 6.5
Stardust (1941)Artie Shaw
Stardust (1941)
1941
Lennie Hayton's arrangement gives Butterfield's trumpet and Jenney's trombone their solos, then floats Shaw's clarinet over strings.
★ 6.3
Stormy Weather (Lena Horne)
1943
Arlen and Koehler wrote it for the Cotton Club in 1933; a decade later Horne made it hers on film.
★ 6.2
Chattanooga Choo Choo
1941
Cut in Hollywood in May 1941; nine months later RCA handed Miller the first gold record ever presented.
★ 6.0
Swinging on a Star
1944
Van Heusen heard Crosby warn a son at dinner he might grow up a mule, and Burke built the lyric.
★ 4.8
Mind Your Own Business
1949 · From 40 Greatest Hits
Cut at Castle Studio in 1949, Williams answering the gossips with a grin, a fiddle and Clyde Baum's mandolin.
★ 4.5
Rudolph the Red-Nosed ReindeerGene Autry
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
1949
Recorded in June 1949 by a reluctant Autry, at his wife's urging, from a story written for a department store.
★ 4.4
Paper Doll
1944
Cut in under fifteen minutes as a B-side in 1942, it sat at number one for twelve weeks.
★ 3.4
You Always Hurt the One You Love
1944
Doris Fisher's music, Allan Roberts's lyric, four voices in close harmony, and a B-side, "Till Then," that charted too.
★ 3.4