Re: Diversity
One of the things that LP collectors know better than anyone is that before the Beatles, there were too many completely different types of music to count. There was a vibrant country scene that included everything from Kentucky hillbilly music to classic honkeytonk country to Western Swing, which was closer to jazz, to bluegrass to citybilly, which was almost like Sinatra. There was latin mambos and lush Mexican style easy listening... Pop vocals, rock n roll, rhythm and blues, light classical like Leroy Anderson, cartoony pop music like Esquivel, exotica like Martin Denny and Les Baxter, sweet orchestral like Bobby Hackett and Jackie Gleason, BeBop jazz, Big Band swing, Dixieland jazz, a million kinds of ethnic pop with strange African percussion instruments, ukuleles or accordians. A lot of records were so unique, they were a genre unto themselves.
Now you might not be familiar with the names and styles I'm citing here, but back in the fifties they were well known and were played on the radio.
When the Beatles hit it big, record companies realized that instead of maintaining a catalog full of titles that sold in reasonable numbers, they could find four kids with electric guitars and sell one record to millions of people. They closed down their country division and sent the ethnic and easy listening artists packing. They boiled down their operations to just rock music. Now people have forgotten that a lot of this music ever existed... every genre today is a different flavor of rock music... New country, r&b, jazz... They retain their names, but the music is still made by a few guys with electric guitars.
In the fifties, there was a million kinds of music. Today there's a million names for rock.
