Popular Songs of the 20th Century: Chart Detail & Encyclopedia, 1900-1949

Rating:
Summary: Excellent reference book
Review: There were no real charts, in the contemporary sense, of popular music prior to 1940. This book does much to address that gap. A presentation of 600 Top 20 monthly popularity charts, running from January 1900 to December 1949, makes up the main portion of the book. Another section of the book displays these charts in a spreadsheet format so one can see each song's rise and fall in popularity. Of course, one researcher's opinion cannot be definitive, but his methods are described and justified in some detail and the results seem as accurate as we can hope to expect. Joel Whitburn's "Pop Memories", also highly recommended, covers similar ground with extraordinary detail, covering commercially-available phonograph records. Each of these books complements the other. Popular music historians and chart buffs should have both of these excellent books. Note : there are several references in "Popular Songs of the 20th Century" to a Volume II, covering the rest of the 20th century, which seems not have been published yet. I'm looking forward to it.