Decades Archives - Page 11 of 12

Music: Dean Martin

I have grown up listening to the Rat Pack and especially Dean Martin. He was so cool and I love his music.

There is an index at the bottom of the page containing some of my favourite songs by him.

About Dean Martin

Dean Martin was an American singer, actor and comedian. One of the most popular and enduring American entertainers of the mid-20th century, Martin was nicknamed “The King of Cool.” Martin gained his career breakthrough together with comedian Jerry Lewis, billed as Martin & Lewis, in 1946. They performed in nightclubs and later had numerous appearances on radio, television and in films.

Following an acrimonious ending of the partnership in 1956, Martin pursued a solo career as a performer and actor. Martin established himself as a singer, recording numerous contemporary songs as well as standards from the Great American Songbook. He became one of the most popular acts in Las Vegas and was known for his friendship with fellow artists Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr., who together with several others formed the Rat Pack.

Starting in 1965, Martin was the host of the television variety program The Dean Martin Show, which centred on Martin’s singing and comedic talents and was characterized by his relaxed, easy-going demeanour. From 1974 to 1984, he was roastmaster on the popular Dean Martin Celebrity Roast, which drew celebrities, comedians and politicians. Throughout his career, Martin performed in concert stages, nightclubs, audio recordings and appeared in 85 film and television productions.

His best known songs include Ain’t That a Kick in the Head?, Memories Are Made of This, That’s Amore, Everybody Loves Somebody, You’re Nobody till Somebody Loves You, Sway, and Volare.

Dean Martin’s Early Life

Martin was born Dino Paul Crocetti on June 7, 1917, in Steubenville, Ohio, to Italian father Gaetano Alfonso Crocetti (1894 – 1967) and Italian-American mother Angela Crocetti (née Barra; 1899 – 1966). His father, who was a barber, was originally from Montesilvano, Abruzzo, and his mother’s origins are also believed to be from Abruzzo, although they are not clearly known. Martin had an older brother named William Alfonso Crocetti (1916 – 1968). His first language was Italian and he did not speak English until he started school at the age of five. He attended Grant Elementary School in Steubenville, where he was bullied for his broken English. As a teenager, he played the drums as a hobby. He dropped out of Steubenville High School in the tenth grade because, according to Martin, he thought he was smarter than his teachers. He bootlegged liquor, worked in a steel mill, served as a croupier at a speakeasy and a blackjack dealer, and was a welterweight boxer.

At 15 he billed himself as “Kid Crochet”. His prizefighting earned him a broken nose (later straightened), a scarred lip, many broken knuckles (a result of not being able to afford tape used to wrap boxers’ hands), and a bruised body. Of his 12 bouts, he said that he “won all but 11”. For a time, he shared a New York City apartment with Sonny King, who was also starting in show business and had little money. The two reportedly charged people to watch them bare-knuckle box each other in their apartment, fighting until one was knocked out. Martin knocked out King in the first round of an amateur boxing match. Martin gave up boxing to work as a roulette stickman and croupier in an illegal casino behind a tobacco shop, where he had started as a stock boy. At the same time, he sang with local bands, calling himself “Dino Martini” (after the Metropolitan Opera tenor Nino Martini). He got his break working for the Ernie McKay Orchestra. He sang in a crooning style influenced by Harry Mills of the Mills Brothers and Perry Como. By late 1940 he had begun singing for Cleveland bandleader Sammy Watkins, who suggested he change his name to Dean Martin. He stayed with Watkins until at least May 1943. By fall 1943 he had begun performing in New York. Martin was drafted into the military in World War II but after 14 months he was discharged due to a hernia.

In October 1941, Martin married Elizabeth “Betty” Anne McDonald in Cleveland, and the couple had an apartment in Cleveland Heights for a while. They eventually had four children before the marriage ended in 1949.

Dean Martin’s Career

Teaming With Jerry Lewis

Martin attracted the attention of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Columbia Pictures, but a Hollywood contract was not forthcoming. He met comic Jerry Lewis at the Glass Hat Club in New York, where both were performing. Martin and Lewis formed a fast friendship which led to their participation in each other’s acts and the formation of a music-comedy team. Martin and Lewis’s debut together occurred at Atlantic City’s 500 Club on July 24, 1946, and they were not well received. The owner, Skinny D’Amato, warned them that if they did not come up with a better act for their second show that night, they would be fired. Huddling in the alley behind the club, Lewis and Martin agreed to “go for broke”, they divided their act between songs, skits, and ad-libbed material. Martin sang and Lewis dressed as a busboy, dropping plates and making a shambles of Martin’s performance and the club’s decorum until Lewis was chased from the room as Martin pelted him with bread rolls.

They performed slapstick, reeled off old vaudeville jokes and did whatever else popped into their heads. The audience laughed. This success led to a series of well-paying engagements on the Eastern seaboard, culminating in a run at New York’s Copacabana. The act consisted of Lewis interrupting and heckling Martin while he was trying to sing, with the two ultimately chasing each other around the stage. The secret, both said, is that they ignored the audience and played to each other. The team made its TV debut on the first broadcast of CBS-TV network’s The Ed Sullivan Show (then called The Toast Of The Town) on June 20, 1948, with composers Rodgers and Hammerstein also appearing. Hoping to improve their act, the two hired young comedy writers Norman Lear and Ed Simmons to write their bits. With the assistance of both Lear and Simmons, the two would take their act beyond nightclubs.

A radio series began in 1949, the year Martin and Lewis signed with Paramount producer Hal B. Wallis as comedy relief for the movie My Friend Irma. Their agent, Abby Greshler, negotiated one of Hollywood’s best deals: although they received only $75,000 between them for their films with Wallis, Martin and Lewis were free to do one outside film a year, which they would co-produce through their own York Productions.

They also controlled their club, record, radio, and television appearances, and through these, they earned millions of dollars. In Dean & Me, Lewis calls Martin one of the great comic geniuses of all time. They were friends, as well, with Lewis acting as best man when Martin remarried in 1949. But harsh comments from critics, as well as frustration with the similarity of Martin and Lewis movies, which producer Hal Wallis refused to change, led to Martin’s dissatisfaction. He put less enthusiasm into the work, leading to escalating arguments with Lewis. Martin told his partner he was “nothing to me but a dollar sign”. The act broke up in 1956, ten years to the day from the first teaming.

Solo Career

Martin’s first solo film, Ten Thousand Bedrooms (1957), was a box-office failure. Although Volare reached number fifteen in the U.S. and number 2 in the UK, the era of the pop crooner was waning with the advent of rock and roll. Martin wanted to become a dramatic actor, known for more than slapstick comedy films. Though offered a fraction of his former salary to co-star in a war drama, The Young Lions (1958), his part would be with Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift. Tony Randall already had the part, but talent agency MCA realized that with this film, Martin would become a triple threat: they could make money from his work in nightclubs, films, and records. Randall was paid off to relinquish the role, Martin replaced him and the film turned out to be the beginning of Martin’s comeback. Martin starred alongside Frank Sinatra for the first time in the Vincente Minnelli drama, Some Came Running (1958). By the mid-1960s, Martin was a movie, recording, television, and nightclub star. Martin was acclaimed as Dude in Rio Bravo (1959), directed by Howard Hawks and also starring John Wayne and singer Ricky Nelson. He teamed again with Wayne in The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), cast as brothers. In 1960, Martin was cast in the film version of the Judy Holliday stage musical comedy Bells Are Ringing. He won a Golden Globe nomination for his performance in the 1960 film comedy Who Was That Lady? but continued to seek dramatic roles, portraying a Southern politician in 1961’s Ada, and starring in 1963’s screen adaptation of an intense stage drama, Toys in the Attic, opposite Geraldine Page, as well as in 1970’s drama Airport, a huge box-office success.

Sinatra and he teamed up for several more movies, the crime caper Ocean’s 11, the musical Robin and the 7 Hoods, and the Western comedies Sergeants 3 and 4 for Texas, often with their Rat Pack pals such as Sammy Davis, Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop, as well as a romantic comedy, Marriage on the Rocks. Martin also co-starred with Shirley MacLaine in a number of films, including Some Came Running, Artists and Models, Career, All in a Night’s Work, and What a Way to Go! He played a satiric variation of his own womanizing persona as Las Vegas singer “Dino” in Billy Wilder’s comedy Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) with Kim Novak, and he poked fun at his image in films such as the Matt Helm spy spoofs of the 1960’s, in which he was a co-producer. In the third Matt Helm film The Ambushers (1967), Helm, about to be executed, receives a last cigarette and tells the provider, “I’ll remember you from the great beyond,” continuing sotto voce, “somewhere around Steubenville, I hope.”

The Rat Pack

As Martin’s solo career grew, he and Frank Sinatra became friends. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Martin and Sinatra, along with friends Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford, and Sammy Davis Jr. formed the Rat Pack, so-called after an earlier group of social friends, the Holmby Hills Rat Pack centred on Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, of which Sinatra had been a member. The Martin-Sinatra-Davis-Lawford-Bishop group referred to themselves as “The Summit” or “The Clan” and never as “The Rat Pack”, although this has remained their identity in popular imagination. The men made films together, formed part of the Hollywood social scene, and were politically influential (through Lawford’s marriage to Patricia Kennedy, sister of President John F. Kennedy).

The Rat Pack was legendary for its Las Vegas Strip performances. For example, the marquee at the Sands Hotel might read “DEAN MARTIN—MAYBE FRANK—MAYBE SAMMY.” Their appearances were valuable because the city would flood with wealthy gamblers. Their act (always in tuxedo) consisted of each singing individual numbers, duets and trios, along with seemingly improvised slapstick and chatter. In the socially charged 1960s, their jokes revolved around adult themes, such as Sinatra’s womanizing and Martin’s drinking, as well as Davis’s race and religion. Sinatra and Martin supported the civil rights movement and refused to perform in clubs that would not allow African-American or Jewish performers. Posthumously, the Rat Pack has experienced a popular revival, inspiring the George Clooney / Brad Pitt Ocean’s Trilogy.

The Dean Martin Show

In 1965, Martin launched his weekly NBC comedy-variety series, The Dean Martin Show, which ran for 264 episodes until 1974. He won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Musical or Comedy in 1966 and was nominated again the following three years. The show exploited his image as a carefree boozer. Martin capitalized on his laid-back persona of the half-drunk crooner, hitting on women with remarks that would get anyone else slapped, and making snappy if slurred remarks about fellow celebrities during his roasts. During an interview on the British TV documentary Wine, Women and Song, aired in 1983, he stated, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, that he had someone record them on cassette tape so he could listen to them. His TV show was a success. The show’s loose format featured quick-witted improvisation from Martin and his weekly guests. This prompted a battle between Martin and NBC censors, who insisted on more scrutiny of the content. He later had trouble with NBC for his off-the-cuff use of obscene Italian phrases, which brought complaints from viewers who spoke the language. The show was often in the Top Ten. Martin, appreciative of the show’s producer, his friend Greg Garrison, made a handshake deal giving Garrison, a pioneer TV producer in the 1950s, 50% of the show. However, the validity of that ownership is the subject of a lawsuit brought by NBCUniversal.

Despite Martin’s reputation as a drinker—perpetuated via his vanity license plate “DRUNKY”—his alcohol use was quite disciplined. He was often the first to call it a night, and when not on tour or on a film location, liked to go home to see his wife and children. He borrowed the lovable-drunk shtick from Joe E. Lewis, but his convincing portrayals of heavy boozers in Some Came Running and Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo led to unsubstantiated claims of alcoholism. Martin starred in and co-produced four Matt Helm superspy comedy adventures during this time, as well as a number of Westerns. By the early 1970s, The Dean Martin Show was still earning solid ratings, and although he was no longer a Top 40 hitmaker, his record albums continued to sell. He found a way to make his passion for golf profitable by offering a signature line of golf balls and the Dean Martin Tucson Open was an event on golf’s PGA Tour from 1972 to 1975. At his death, Martin was reportedly the single largest minority shareholder of RCA stock.

Now comfortable financially, Martin began reducing his schedule. The final (1973 – 1974) season of his variety show was retooled into one of celebrity roasts, requiring less involvement. In the roasts, Martin and his panel of pals made fun of a variety of popular entertainment, athletic, and political figures. After the show’s cancellation, NBC continued to air The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast as a series of TV specials through 1984.

Later Career

For nearly a decade, Martin had recorded as many as four albums a year for Reprise Records. Martin recorded his final Reprise album, Once in a While in 1974, which was not issued until 1978. His final recordings were made for Warner Bros. Records. The Nashville Sessions was released in 1983, from which he had a hit with “(I Think That I Just Wrote) My First Country Song”, which was recorded with Conway Twitty and made a respectable showing on the country charts. A follow-up single, “L.A. Is My Home” / “Drinking Champagne”, came in 1985. The 1974 film drama Mr. Ricco marked Martin’s final starring role, in which he played a criminal defence lawyer. He played a featured role in the 1981 comedy The Cannonball Run and its sequel, both starring Burt Reynolds.

In 1972, he filed for divorce from his second wife, Jeanne. A week later, his business partnership with the Riviera hotel in Las Vegas dissolved amid reports of the casino’s refusal to agree to Martin’s request to perform only once a night. He joined the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino, where he was the featured performer on the hotel’s opening night of December 23, 1973, and his contract required him to star in a film (Mr. Ricco) for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios. Less than a month after his second marriage had dissolved, Martin was 55 when he married 26-year-old Catherine Hawn, on April 25, 1973. Hawn had been the receptionist at the chic Gene Shacove hair salon in Beverly Hills. They divorced on November 10, 1976. He was also briefly engaged to Gail Renshaw, Miss World–U.S.A. 1969. Eventually, Martin reconciled with Jeanne, though they never remarried.

Martin also made a public reconciliation with Lewis on his partner’s Labor Day telethon, benefiting the Muscular Dystrophy Association, in September 1976. Sinatra shocked Lewis by bringing Martin out on stage and as the two men embraced, the audience gave them a standing ovation and the phones lit up, resulting in one of the telethon’s most profitable years up to that time. Lewis later reported the event was one of the three most memorable of his life. Lewis quipped, “So, you working?” Martin, playing drunk, replied that he was appearing “at the ‘Meggum'” (meaning the MGM Grand Hotel). This, with the death of Martin’s son Dean Paul Martin more than a decade later, helped bring the two men together. They maintained a quiet friendship, but only performed again once, in 1989, on Martin’s 72nd birthday.

Martin returned to films briefly with appearances in the star-laden, critically panned but commercially successful The Cannonball Run and its sequel Cannonball Run II. He also had a minor hit single with Since I Met You Baby and made his first music video, which appeared on MTV and was created by Martin’s youngest son, Ricci. On March 21, 1987, Martin’s son, actor Dean Paul Martin (formerly Dino of the 1960s “teeny-bopper” rock group Dino, Desi & Billy), died when his F-4 Phantom II jet fighter crashed while flying with the California Air National Guard. Martin’s grief over his son’s death left him depressed and demoralized. Later, a tour with Davis and Sinatra in 1988, undertaken in part to help Martin recover, sputtered.

Martin, who responded best to a club audience, felt lost in the huge stadiums they were performing in at Sinatra’s insistence, and he was not interested in drinking until dawn after performances. His final Vegas shows were at Bally’s Hotel in 1991. At Bally’s, he had his final reunion with Lewis on his 72nd birthday. Martin’s last two TV appearances involved tributes to his former Rat Pack members. On December 8, 1989, he joined stars in Sammy Davis Jr’s 60th anniversary celebration, which aired a few weeks before Davis died from throat cancer. In December 1990, Martin congratulated Sinatra on his 75th birthday special.

Favourite Dean Martin Songs Index

This list does not contain Christmas songs. You can find Christmas music from Dean Martin here.

The links below will take you to YouTube.

Ain’t That A Kick In The Head.

Everybody Loves Somebody.

Mambo Italiano.

Memories Are Made Of This.

Standing On The Corner.

Sway.

That’s Amore.

Volare.

Walkin’ My Baby Back Home.

When You’re Smiling.

You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You.

Blog Posts

Music: The Rat Pack.

Music: Frank Sinatra.

Notes And Links

The image shown at the top of this page is in the Public Domain via Wikipedia.

Music: Frank Sinatra

I have grown up listening to the Rat Pack and especially Frank Sinatra. He was so cool and I love his music.

There is an index at the bottom of the page containing some of my favourite songs by him.

About Frank Sinatra

Francis Albert Sinatra was an American singer and actor who is generally viewed as one of the greatest musical artists of the 20th century. He is one of the best-selling music artists of all time, having sold an estimated 150 million records worldwide.

Born to Italian immigrants in Hoboken, New Jersey, Sinatra was greatly influenced by the intimate, easy-listening vocal style of Bing Crosby and began his musical career in the swing era with bandleaders Harry James and Tommy Dorsey. Sinatra found success as a solo artist after he signed with Columbia Records in 1943, becoming the idol of the “bobby soxers”. Sinatra released his debut album, The Voice of Frank Sinatra, in 1946. However, by the early 1950s, his professional career had stalled and he turned to Las Vegas, where he became one of its best-known residency performers as part of the Rat Pack. His career was reborn in 1953 with the success of the film From Here to Eternity, his performance subsequently earning him an Academy Award, and a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor. Sinatra then released several critically lauded albums, some of which are retrospectively noted as being among the first “concept albums”, including In the Wee Small Hours (1955), Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! (1956), Come Fly with Me (1958), Only the Lonely (1958), No One Cares (1959), and Nice ‘n’ Easy (1960).

Sinatra left Capitol in 1960 to start his own record label, Reprise Records and released a string of successful albums. In 1965, he recorded the retrospective album September of My Years and starred in the Emmy-winning television special Frank Sinatra: A Man and His Music. After releasing Sinatra at the Sands, recorded at the Sands Hotel and Casino in Vegas with frequent collaborator Count Basie in early 1966, the following year he recorded one of his most famous collaborations with Tom Jobim, the album Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim. It was followed by 1968’s Francis A. & Edward K. with Duke Ellington. Sinatra retired for the first time in 1971 but came out of retirement two years later. He recorded several albums and resumed performing at Caesars Palace, and released “New York, New York” in 1980. Using his Las Vegas shows as a home base, he toured both within the United States and internationally until shortly before his death in 1998.

Sinatra forged a highly successful career as a film actor. After winning an Academy Award for From Here to Eternity, he starred in The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), and in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). He appeared in various musicals such as On the Town (1949), Guys and Dolls (1955), High Society (1956), and Pal Joey (1957), winning another Golden Globe for the latter. Toward the end of his career, he frequently played detectives, including the title character in Tony Rome (1967). Sinatra would later receive the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1971. On television, The Frank Sinatra Show began on ABC in 1950, and he continued to make appearances on television throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Sinatra was also heavily involved with politics from the mid-1940s and actively campaigned for presidents such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. He was investigated by the FBI for his alleged relationship with the Mafia.

While Sinatra never learned how to read music, he worked very hard from a young age to improve his abilities in all aspects of music. A perfectionist, renowned for his dress sense and performing presence, he always insisted on recording live with his band. His bright blue eyes earned him the popular nickname “Ol’ Blue Eyes”. He led a colourful personal life and was often involved in turbulent affairs with women, such as with his second wife Ava Gardner. He later married Mia Farrow in 1966 and Barbara Marx in 1976. Sinatra had several violent confrontations, usually with journalists he felt had crossed him, or work bosses with whom he had disagreements. He was honoured at the Kennedy Center Honors in 1983, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan in 1985, and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1997. Sinatra was also the recipient of eleven Grammy Awards, including the Grammy Trustees Award, Grammy Legend Award and the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He was included in Time magazine’s compilation of the 20th century’s 100 most influential people. After Sinatra’s death, American music critic Robert Christgau called him “the greatest singer of the 20th century”, and he continues to be seen as an iconic figure.

Frank Sinatra’s Early Life

Francis Albert Sinatra was born on December 12, 1915, in an upstairs tenement at 415 Monroe Street in Hoboken, New Jersey, the only child of Italian immigrants Natalina “Dolly” Garaventa and Antonino Martino “Marty” Sinatra. Sinatra weighed 13.5 pounds (6.1 kg) at birth and had to be delivered with the aid of forceps, which caused severe scarring to his left cheek, neck, and ear, and perforated his eardrum—damage that remained for life. Due to his injuries at birth, his baptism at St. Francis Church in Hoboken was delayed until April 2, 1916. A childhood operation on his mastoid bone left major scarring on his neck, and during adolescence, he suffered from cystic acne that further scarred his face and neck. Sinatra was raised in the Roman Catholic church.

Sinatra’s mother was energetic and driven, and biographers believe that she was the dominant factor in the development of her son’s personality traits and self-confidence. Sinatra’s fourth wife Barbara would later claim that Dolly was abusive to him when he was a child, and “knocked him around a lot”. Dolly became influential in Hoboken and in local Democratic Party circles. She worked as a midwife, earning $50 for each delivery, and according to Sinatra biographer Kitty Kelley, also ran an illegal abortion service that catered to Italian Catholic girls, for which she was nicknamed “Hatpin Dolly”. She also had a gift for languages and served as a local interpreter.

Sinatra’s illiterate father was a bantamweight boxer who fought under the name Marty O’Brien. He later worked for 24 years at the Hoboken Fire Department, working his way up to captain. Sinatra spent much time at his parents’ tavern in Hoboken, working on his homework and occasionally singing a song on top of the player piano for spare change. During the Great Depression, Dolly provided money to her son for outings with friends and to buy expensive clothes, resulting in neighbours describing him as the “best-dressed kid in the neighbourhood”. Excessively thin and small as a child and young man, Sinatra’s skinny frame later became a staple of jokes during stage shows.

Sinatra developed an interest in music, particularly big band jazz, at a young age. He listened to Gene Austin, Rudy Vallée, Russ Colombo, and Bob Eberly, and idolized Bing Crosby. Sinatra’s maternal uncle, Domenico, gave him a ukulele for his 15th birthday, and he began performing at family gatherings. Sinatra attended David E. Rue Jr. High School from 1928, and A. J. Demarest High School (since renamed Hoboken High School) in 1931, where he arranged bands for school dances. He left without graduating, having attended only 47 days before being expelled for “general rowdiness”. To please his mother, he enrolled at Drake Business School but departed after 11 months. Dolly found Sinatra work as a delivery boy at the Jersey Observer newspaper, where his godfather Frank Garrick worked, and after that, Sinatra was a riveter at the Tietjen and Lang shipyard. He performed in local Hoboken social clubs such as The Cat’s Meow and The Comedy Club and sang for free on radio stations such as WAAT in Jersey City. In New York, Sinatra found jobs singing for his supper or for cigarettes. To improve his speech, he began taking elocution lessons for a dollar each from vocal coach John Quinlan, who was one of the first people to notice his impressive vocal range.

Frank Sinatra’s Music Career

Hoboken Four, Harry James, And Tommy Dorsey (1935 – 1939)

Sinatra began singing professionally as a teenager, but he learned music by ear and never learned to read music. He got his first break in 1935 when his mother persuaded a local singing group, the 3 Flashes, to let him join. Fred Tamburro, the group’s baritone, stated that “Frank hung around us like we were gods or something”, admitting that they only took him on board because he owned a car and could chauffeur the group around. Sinatra soon learned they were auditioning for the Major Bowes Amateur Hour show, and “begged” the group to let him in on the act. With Sinatra, the group became known as the Hoboken Four, and passed an audition from Edward Bowes to appear on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour show. They each earned $12.50 for the appearance, and ended up attracting 40,000 votes and won first prize—a six-month contract to perform on stage and radio across the United States. Sinatra quickly became the group’s lead singer, and, much to the jealousy of his fellow group members, garnered most of the attention from girls. Due to the success of the group, Bowes kept asking for them to return, disguised under different names, varying from “The Secaucus Cockamamies” to “The Bayonne Bacalas”.

In 1938, Sinatra found employment as a singing waiter at a roadhouse called “The Rustic Cabin” in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, for which he was paid $15 a week. The roadhouse was connected to the WNEW radio station in New York City, and he began performing with a group live during the Dance Parade show. Despite the low salary, Sinatra felt that this was the break he was looking for, and boasted to friends that he was going to “become so big that no one could ever touch him”. In March 1939, saxophone player Frank Mane, who knew Sinatra from Jersey City radio station WAAT where both performed on live broadcasts, arranged for him to audition and record “Our Love”, his first solo studio recording. In June, bandleader Harry James, who had heard Sinatra sing on “Dance Parade”, signed a two-year contract of $75 a week one evening after a show at the Paramount Theatre in New York. It was with the James band that Sinatra released his first commercial record “From the Bottom of My Heart” in July. No more than 8,000 copies of the record were sold, and further records released with James through 1939, such as “All or Nothing at All”, also had weak sales on their initial release. Thanks to his vocal training, Sinatra could now sing two tones higher, and developed a repertoire that included songs such as “My Buddy”, “Willow Weep for Me”, “It’s Funny to Everyone but Me”, “Here Comes the Night”, “On a Little Street in Singapore”, “Ciribiribin”, and “Every Day of My Life”.

Sinatra became increasingly frustrated with the status of the Harry James band, feeling that he was not achieving the major success and acclaim he was looking for. His pianist and close friend Hank Sanicola persuaded him to stay with the group, but in November 1939 he left James to replace Jack Leonard as the lead singer of the Tommy Dorsey band. Sinatra earned $125 a week, appearing at the Palmer House in Chicago, and James released Sinatra from his contract. On January 26, 1940, he made his first public appearance with the band at the Coronado Theatre in Rockford, Illinois, opening the show with “Stardust”. Dorsey recalled: “You could almost feel the excitement coming up out of the crowds when the kid stood up to sing. Remember, he was no matinée idol. He was just a skinny kid with big ears. I used to stand there so amazed I’d almost forget to take my own solos”. Dorsey was a major influence on Sinatra and became a father figure. Sinatra copied Dorsey’s mannerisms and traits, becoming a demanding perfectionist like him, even adopting his hobby of toy trains. He asked Dorsey to be godfather to his daughter Nancy in June 1940. Sinatra later said that “The only two people I’ve ever been afraid of are my mother and Tommy Dorsey”. Though Kelley says that Sinatra and drummer Buddy Rich were bitter rivals, other authors state that they were friends and even roommates when the band was on the road, but professional jealousy surfaced as both men wanted to be considered the star of Dorsey’s band. Later, Sinatra helped Rich form his own band with a $25,000 loan and provided financial help to Rich during times of the drummer’s serious illness.

Read more about Hoboken Four, Harry James, And Tommy Dorsey (1935 – 1939) here.

Onset Of Sinatramania And Role In World War II (1942 – 1945)

“Perfectly simple: It was the war years and there was a great loneliness, and I was the boy in every corner drugstore, the boy who’d gone off drafted to the war. That’s all.” – Frank Sinatra on his popularity with young women.

By May 1941, Sinatra topped the male singer polls in Billboard and DownBeat magazines. His appeal to bobby soxers, as teenage girls of that time were called, revealed a whole new audience for popular music, which had been recorded mainly for adults up to that time. The phenomenon became officially known as “Sinatramania” after his “legendary opening” at the Paramount Theatre in New York on December 30, 1942. According to Nancy Sinatra, Jack Benny later said, “I thought the goddamned building was going to cave in. I never heard such a commotion… All this for a fellow I never heard of.” Sinatra performed for four weeks at the theatre, his act following the Benny Goodman orchestra, after which his contract was renewed for another four weeks by Bob Weitman due to his popularity. He became known as “Swoonatra” or “The Voice”, and his fans “Sinatratics”. They organized meetings and sent masses of letters of adoration, and within a few weeks of the show, some 1000 Sinatra fan clubs had been reported across the US. Sinatra’s publicist, George Evans, encouraged interviews and photographs with fans and was the man responsible for depicting Sinatra as a vulnerable, shy, Italian–American with a rough childhood who made good. When Sinatra returned to the Paramount in October 1944 only 250 persons left the first show, and 35,000 fans left outside caused a near riot, known as the Columbus Day Riot, outside the venue because they were not allowed in. Such was the bobby soxer devotion to Sinatra that they were known to write Sinatra’s song titles on their clothing, bribe hotel maids for an opportunity to touch his bed, and accost his person in the form of stealing clothing he was wearing, most commonly his bow-tie.

Sinatra signed with Columbia Records as a solo artist on June 1, 1943, during the 1942–44 musicians’ strike. Columbia Records re-released Harry James and Sinatra’s August 1939 version of “All or Nothing at All”, which reached number 2 on June 2 and was on the best-selling list for 18 weeks. He initially had great success and performed on the radio on Your Hit Parade from February 1943 until December 1944, and on stage. Columbia wanted new recordings of their growing star as quickly as possible, so Alec Wilder was hired as an arranger and conductor for several sessions with a vocal group called the Bobby Tucker Singers. These first sessions were on June 7, June 22, August 5, and November 10, 1943. Of the nine songs recorded during these sessions, seven charted on the best-selling list. That year he also made his first solo nightclub appearance at New York’s Riobamba, and a successful concert in the Wedgewood Room of the prestigious Waldorf-Astoria New York that year secured his popularity in New York high society. Sinatra released “You’ll Never Know”, “Close to You”, “Sunday, Monday, or Always” and “People Will Say We’re In Love” as singles. By the end of 1943, he was more popular in a DownBeat poll than Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Bob Eberly, and Dick Haymes.

Sinatra did not serve in the military during World War II. On December 11, 1943, he was officially classified 4-F (“Registrant not acceptable for military service”) by his draft board because of a perforated eardrum. However, U.S. Army files reported that Sinatra was “not acceptable material from a psychiatric viewpoint”, but his emotional instability was hidden to avoid “undue unpleasantness for both the selectee and the induction service”. Briefly, there were rumours reported by columnist Walter Winchell that Sinatra paid $40,000 to avoid the service, but the FBI found this to be without merit.

Toward the end of the war, Sinatra entertained the troops during several successful overseas USO tours with comedian Phil Silvers. During one trip to Rome, he met the Pope, who asked him if he was an operatic tenor. Sinatra worked frequently with the popular Andrews Sisters in radio in the 1940s, and many USO shows were broadcast to troops via the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS). In 1944 Sinatra released “I Couldn’t Sleep a Wink Last Night” as a single and recorded his own version of Crosby’s “White Christmas”, and the following year he released “I Dream of You (More Than You Dream I Do)”, “Saturday Night (Is the Loneliest Night of the Week)”, “Dream”, and “Nancy (With the Laughing Face)” as singles.

Columbia Years And Career Slump (1946 – 1952)

Despite being heavily involved in political activity in 1945 and 1946, in those two years, Sinatra sang on 160 radio shows, recorded 36 times, and shot four films. By 1946 he was performing on stage up to 45 times a week, singing up to 100 songs daily, and earning up to $93,000 a week.

In 1946 Sinatra released “Oh! What it Seemed to Be”, “Day by Day”, “They Say It’s Wonderful”, “Five Minutes More”, and “The Coffee Song” as singles, and launched his first album, The Voice of Frank Sinatra, which reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart. William Ruhlmann of AllMusic wrote that Sinatra “took the material very seriously, singing the love lyrics with utter seriousness”, and that his “singing and the classically influenced settings gave the songs unusual depth of meaning”. He was soon selling 10 million records a year. Such was Sinatra’s command at Columbia that his love of conducting was indulged with the release of the set Frank Sinatra Conducts the Music of Alec Wilder, an offering unlikely to appeal to Sinatra’s core fanbase at the time, which consisted of teenage girls. The following year he released his second album, Songs by Sinatra, featuring songs of a similar mood and tempo such as Irving Berlin’s “How Deep is the Ocean?” and Harold Arlen’s and Jerome Kern’s “All The Things You Are”. “Mam’selle”, composed by Edmund Goulding with lyrics by Mack Gordon for the film The Razor’s Edge (1946), was released as a single. Sinatra had competition; versions by Art Lund, Dick Haymes, Dennis Day, and The Pied Pipers also reached the top ten of the Billboard charts. In December he recorded “Sweet Lorraine” with the Metronome All-Stars, featuring talented jazz musicians such as Coleman Hawkins, Harry Carney and Charlie Shavers, with Nat King Cole on piano, in what Charles L. Granata describes as “one of the highlights of Sinatra’s Columbia epoch”.

Sinatra’s third album, Christmas Songs by Sinatra, was originally released in 1948 as a 78 rpm album set, and a 10″ LP record was released two years later. When Sinatra was featured as a priest in The Miracle of the Bells, due to press negativity surrounding his alleged Mafia connections at the time, it was announced to the public that Sinatra would donate his $100,000 in wages from the film to the Catholic Church. By the end of 1948, Sinatra had slipped to fourth on DownBeat‘s annual poll of most popular singers (behind Billy Eckstine, Frankie Laine, and Bing Crosby). In the following year he was pushed out of the top spots in polls for the first time since 1943. Frankly Sentimental (1949) was panned by DownBeat, who commented that “for all his talent, it seldom comes to life”.

Though “The Hucklebuck” reached the top ten, it was his last single release under the Columbia label. Sinatra’s last two albums with Columbia, Dedicated to You and Sing and Dance with Frank Sinatra, were released in 1950. Sinatra would later feature a number of the Sing and Dance with Frank Sinatra album’s songs, including “Lover”, “It’s Only a Paper Moon”, “It All Depends on You”, on his 1961 Capitol release, Sinatra’s Swingin’ Session!!!

Read more about Columbia Years And Career Slump (1946 – 1952) here.

Career Revival And The Capitol Years (1953 – 1962)

The release of the film From Here to Eternity in August 1953 marked the beginning of a remarkable career revival. Tom Santopietro notes that Sinatra began to bury himself in his work, with an “unparalleled frenetic schedule of recordings, movies and concerts”, in what authors Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan describe as “a new and brilliant phase”. On March 13, 1953, Sinatra met with Capitol Records vice president Alan Livingston and signed a seven-year recording contract. His first session for Capitol took place at KHJ studios at Studio C, 5515 Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, with Axel Stordahl conducting. The session produced four recordings, including “I’m Walking Behind You”, Sinatra’s first Capitol single. After spending two weeks on location in Hawaii filming From Here to Eternity, Sinatra returned to KHJ on April 30 for his first recording session with Nelson Riddle, an established arranger and conductor at Capitol who was Nat King Cole’s musical director. After recording the first song, “I’ve Got the World on a String”, Sinatra offered Riddle a rare expression of praise, “Beautiful!”, and after listening to the playbacks, he could not hide his enthusiasm, exclaiming, “I’m back, baby, I’m back!”

In subsequent sessions in May and November 1953, Sinatra and Riddle developed and refined their musical collaboration, with Sinatra providing specific guidance on the arrangements. Sinatra’s first album for Capitol, Songs for Young Lovers, was released on January 4, 1954, and included “A Foggy Day”, “I Get a Kick Out of You”, “My Funny Valentine”, “Violets for Your Furs” and “They Can’t Take That Away from Me”, songs which became staples of his later concerts. That same month, Sinatra released the single “Young at Heart”, which reached No. 2 and was awarded Song of the Year. In March, he recorded and released the single “Three Coins in the Fountain”, a “powerful ballad” that reached No. 4. Sinatra’s second album with Riddle, Swing Easy!, which reflected his “love for the jazz idiom” according to Granata, was released on August 2 of that year and included “Just One of Those Things”, “Taking a Chance on Love”, “Get Happy”, and “All of Me”. Swing Easy! was named Album of the Year by Billboard, and he was also named “Favorite Male Vocalist” by Billboard, DownBeat, and Metronome that year. Sinatra came to consider Riddle “the greatest arranger in the world”, and Riddle, who considered Sinatra “a perfectionist”, offered equal praise of the singer, observing, “It’s not only that his intuitions as to tempi, phrasing, and even configuration are amazingly right, but his taste is so impeccable… there is still no one who can approach him.”

In 1955 Sinatra released In the Wee Small Hours, his first 12″ LP, featuring songs such as “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning”, “Mood Indigo”, “Glad to Be Unhappy” and “When Your Lover Has Gone”. According to Granata it was the first concept album of his to make a “single persuasive statement”, with an extended program and “melancholy mood”. Sinatra embarked on his first tour of Australia the same year. Another collaboration with Riddle resulted in the development of Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!, sometimes seen as one of his best albums, which was released in March 1956. It features a recording of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” by Cole Porter, something which Sinatra paid meticulous care to, taking a reported 22 takes to perfect.

His February 1956 recording sessions inaugurated the studios at the Capitol Records Building, complete with a 56-piece symphonic orchestra. According to Granata his recordings of “Night and Day”, “Oh! Look at Me Now” and “From This Moment On” revealed “powerful sexual overtones, stunningly achieved through the mounting tension and release of Sinatra’s best-teasing vocal lines”, while his recording of “River, Stay ‘Way from My Door” in April demonstrated his “brilliance as a syncopational improviser”. Riddle said that Sinatra took “particular delight” in singing “The Lady is a Tramp”, commenting that he “always sang that song with a certain amount of salaciousness”, making “cue tricks” with the lyrics. His penchant for conducting was displayed again in 1956’s Frank Sinatra Conducts Tone Poems of Color, an instrumental album that has been interpreted to be a catharsis to his failed relationship with Gardner. Also that year, Sinatra sang at the Democratic National Convention and performed with The Dorsey Brothers for a week soon afterwards at the Paramount Theatre.

Read more about Career Revival And The Capitol Years (1953 – 1962) here.

Reprise Years (1961 – 1981)

Sinatra grew discontented at Capitol and fell into a feud with Alan Livingston, which lasted over six months. His first attempt at owning his own label was with his pursuit of buying declining jazz label, Verve Records, which ended once an initial agreement with Verve founder, Norman Granz, “failed to materialize.” He decided to form his own label, Reprise Records and, in an effort to assert his new direction, temporarily parted with Riddle, May and Jenkins, working with other arrangers such as Neil Hefti, Don Costa, and Quincy Jones. Sinatra built the appeal of Reprise Records as one in which artists were promised creative control over their music, as well as a guarantee that they would eventually gain “complete ownership of their work, including publishing rights.” Under Sinatra, the company developed into a music industry “powerhouse”, and he later sold it for an estimated $80 million. His first album on the label, Ring-a-Ding-Ding! (1961), was a major success, peaking at No.4 on Billboard. The album was released in February 1961, the same month that Reprise Records released Ben Webster’s The Warm Moods, Sammy Davis Jr.’s The Wham of Sam, Mavis River’s Mavis and Joe E. Lewis’s It is Now Post Time. During the initial years of Reprise, Sinatra was still under contract to record for Capitol, completing his contractual commitment with the release of Point of No Return, recorded over a two-day period on September 11 and 12, 1961.

In 1962, Sinatra released Sinatra and Strings, a set of standard ballads arranged by Don Costa, which became one of the most critically acclaimed works of Sinatra’s entire Reprise period. Frank Jr., who was present during the recording, noted the “huge orchestra”, which Nancy Sinatra stated “opened a whole new era” in pop music, with orchestras getting bigger, embracing a “lush string sound”. Sinatra and Count Basie collaborated for the album Sinatra-Basie the same year, a popular and successful release that prompted them to rejoin two years later for the follow-up It Might as Well Be Swing, arranged by Quincy Jones. The two became frequent performers together, and appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1965. Also in 1962, as the owner of his own record label, Sinatra was able to step on the podium as conductor again, releasing his third instrumental album Frank Sinatra Conducts Music from Pictures and Plays.

In 1963, Sinatra reunited with Nelson Riddle for The Concert Sinatra, an ambitious album featuring a 73-piece symphony orchestra arranged and conducted by Riddle. The concert was recorded on a motion picture scoring soundstage with the use of multiple synchronized recording machines that employed an optical signal onto 35 mm film designed for movie soundtracks. Granata considers the album to have been “impeachable”, “one of the very best of the Sinatra-Riddle ballad albums”, in which Sinatra displayed an impressive vocal range, particularly in “Ol’ Man River”, in which he darkened the hue.

In 1964 the song “My Kind of Town” was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Sinatra released Softly, as I Leave You, and collaborated with Bing Crosby and Fred Waring on America, I Hear You Singing, a collection of patriotic songs recorded as a tribute to the assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Sinatra increasingly became involved in charitable pursuits in this period. In 1961 and 1962 he went to Mexico, with the sole purpose of putting on performances for Mexican charities, and in July 1964 he was present for the dedication of the Frank Sinatra International Youth Center for Arab and Jewish children in Nazareth.

Sinatra’s phenomenal success in 1965, coinciding with his 50th birthday, prompted Billboard to proclaim that he may have reached the “peak of his eminence”. In June 1965, Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Dean Martin played live in St. Louis to benefit Dismas House, a prisoner rehabilitation and training centre with nationwide programs that in particular helped serve African Americans. The Rat Pack concert, called The Frank Sinatra Spectacular, was broadcast live via satellite to numerous movie theatres across America. The album September of My Years was released in September 1965 and went on to win the Grammy Award for best album of the year. Granata considers the album to have been one of the finest of his Reprise years, “a reflective throwback to the concept records of the 1950s, and more than any of those collections distils everything that Frank Sinatra had ever learned or experienced as a vocalist”. One of the album’s singles, “It Was a Very Good Year”, won the Grammy Award for Best Vocal Performance, Male. A career anthology, A Man and His Music followed in November, winning Album of the Year at the Grammys the following year.

In 1966 Sinatra released That’s Life, with both the single of “That’s Life” and the album becoming Top Ten hits in the US on Billboard‘s pop charts. Strangers in the Night went on to top the Billboard and UK pop singles charts, winning the award for Record of the Year at the Grammys. Sinatra’s first live album, Sinatra at the Sands, was recorded during January and February 1966 at the Sands Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Sinatra was backed by the Count Basie Orchestra, with Quincy Jones conducting. Sinatra pulled out from the Sands the following year when he was driven out by its new owner Howard Hughes, after a fight.

Sinatra started 1967 with a series of recording sessions with Antônio Carlos Jobim. He recorded one of his collaborations with Jobim, the Grammy-nominated album Francis Albert Sinatra & Antônio Carlos Jobim, which was one of the best-selling albums of the year, behind the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. According to Santopietro the album “consists of an extraordinarily effective blend of bossa nova and slightly swinging jazz vocals, and succeeds in creating an unbroken mood of romance and regret”. Writer Stan Cornyn wrote that Sinatra sang so softly on the album that it was comparable to the time that he suffered from a vocal haemorrhage in 1950.

Sinatra also released the album The World We Knew, which features a chart-topping duet of “Somethin’ Stupid” with daughter Nancy. In December, Sinatra collaborated with Duke Ellington on the album Francis A. & Edward K.. According to Granata, the recording of “Indian Summer” on the album was a favourite of Riddle’s, noting the “contemplative mood [which] is heightened by a Johnny Hodges alto sax solo that will bring a tear to your eye”. With Sinatra in mind, singer-songwriter Paul Anka wrote the song “My Way”, using the melody of the French “Comme d’habitude” (“As Usual”), composed by Claude François and Jacques Revaux. Sinatra recorded it in one take, just after Christmas 1968. “My Way”, Sinatra’s best-known song on the Reprise label, was not an instant success, charting at No. 27 in the US and No. 5 in the UK, but it remained in the UK charts for 122 weeks, including 75 non-consecutive weeks in the Top 40, between April 1969 and September 1971, which was still a record in 2015. Sinatra told songwriter Ervin Drake in the 1970s that he “detested” singing the song, because he believed audiences would think it was a “self-aggrandizing tribute”, professing that he “hated boastfulness in others”.

In an effort to maintain his commercial viability in the late 1960s, Sinatra would record works by Paul Simon (“Mrs. Robinson”), the Beatles (“Yesterday”), and Joni Mitchell (“Both Sides, Now”) in 1969.

Retirement And Return (1970 – 1981)

In 1970, Sinatra released Watertown, a critically acclaimed concept album, with music by Bob Gaudio (of the Four Seasons) and lyrics by Jake Holmes. However, it sold a mere 30,000 copies that year and reached a peak chart position of 101. He left Caesars Palace in September that year after an incident where executive Sanford Waterman pulled a gun on him. He performed several charity concerts with Count Basie at the Royal Festival Hall in London. On November 2, 1970, Sinatra recorded the last songs for Reprise Records before his self-imposed retirement, announced the following June at a concert in Hollywood to raise money for the Motion Picture and TV Relief Fund. He gave a “rousing” performance of “That’s Life”, and finished the concert with a Matt Dennis and Earl Brent song, “Angel Eyes” which he had recorded on the Only The Lonely album in 1958. He sang the last line.”‘Scuse me while I disappear.” The spotlight went dark and he left the stage. He told LIFE journalist Thomas Thompson that “I’ve got things to do like the first thing is not to do anything at all for eight months… maybe a year”, while Barbara Sinatra later said that Sinatra had grown “tired of entertaining people, especially when all they really wanted were the same old tunes he had long ago become bored by”. While he was in retirement, President Richard Nixon asked him to perform at a Young Voters Rally in anticipation of the upcoming campaign. Sinatra obliged and chose to sing “My Kind of Town” for the rally held in Chicago on October 20, 1972.

In 1973, Sinatra came out of his short-lived retirement with a television special and album. The album, entitled Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back, arranged by Gordon Jenkins and Don Costa, was a success, reaching number 13 on Billboard and number 12 in the UK. The television special, Magnavox Presents Frank Sinatra, reunited Sinatra with Gene Kelly. He initially developed problems with his vocal cords during the comeback due to a prolonged period without singing. That Christmas he performed at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas, and returned to Caesars Palace the following month in January 1974, despite previously vowing to perform there again. He began what Barbara Sinatra describes as a “massive comeback tour of the United States, Europe, the Far East and Australia”. In July, while on the second tour of Australia, he caused an uproar by describing journalists there – who were aggressively pursuing his every move and pushing for a press conference – as “bums, parasites, fags, and buck-and-a-half hookers”. After he was pressured to apologize, Sinatra instead insisted that the journalists apologize for “fifteen years of abuse I have taken from the world press”. Union actions cancelled concerts and grounded Sinatra’s plane, essentially trapping him in Australia. In the end, Sinatra’s lawyer, Mickey Rudin, arranged for Sinatra to issue a written conciliatory note and a final concert that was televised to the nation. In October 1974 he appeared at New York City’s Madison Square Garden in a televised concert that was later released as an album under the title The Main Event – Live. Backing him was bandleader Woody Herman and the Young Thundering Herd, who accompanied Sinatra on a European tour later that month.

In 1975, Sinatra performed in concerts in New York with Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald, and at the London Palladium with Basie and Sarah Vaughan, and in Tehran at Aryamehr Stadium, giving 140 performances in 105 days. In August he held several consecutive concerts at Lake Tahoe together with the newly-risen singer John Denver, who became a frequent collaborator. Sinatra had recorded Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and “My Sweet Lady” for Sinatra & Company (1971), and according to Denver, his song “A Baby Just Like You” was written at Sinatra’s request for his new grandchild, Angela. During the Labor Day weekend held in 1976, Sinatra was responsible for reuniting old friends and comedy partners Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis for the first time in nearly twenty years, when they performed at the “Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon”. That year, the Friars Club selected him as the “Top Box Office Name of the Century”, and he was given the Scopus Award by the American Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Nevada.

Sinatra continued to perform at Caesars Palace in the late 1970’s and was performing there in January 1977 when his mother Dolly died in a plane crash on the way to see him. He cancelled two weeks of shows and spent time recovering from the shock in Barbados. In March, he performed in front of Princess Margaret at the Royal Albert Hall in London, raising money for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. On March 14, he recorded with Nelson Riddle for the last time, recording the songs “Linda”, “Sweet Loraine”, and “Barbara”. The two men had a major falling out, and later patched up their differences in January 1985 at a dinner organized for Ronald Reagan, when Sinatra asked Riddle to make another album with him. Riddle was ill at the time and died that October before they had a chance to record.

In 1978, Sinatra filed a $1 million lawsuit against a land developer for using his name in the “Frank Sinatra Drive Center” in West Los Angeles. During a party at Caesars in 1979, he was awarded the Grammy Trustees Award, while celebrating 40 years in show business and his 64th birthday. That year, former President Gerald Ford awarded Sinatra the International Man of the Year Award, and he performed in front of the Egyptian pyramids for Anwar Sadat, which raised more than $500,000 for Sadat’s wife’s charities.

In 1980, Sinatra’s first album in six years was released, Trilogy: Past Present Future, a highly ambitious triple album that features an array of songs from both the pre-rock era and rock era. It was the first studio album of Sinatra’s to feature his touring pianist at the time, Vinnie Falcone and was based on an idea by Sonny Burke. The album garnered six Grammy nominations – winning for best liner notes – and peaked at number 17 on Billboard’s album chart, and spawned yet another song that would become a signature tune, “Theme from New York, New York”. That year, as part of the Concert of the Americas, he performed in the Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which broke records for the “largest live paid audience ever recorded for a solo performer”. The following year, Sinatra built on the success of Trilogy with She Shot Me Down, an album that was praised for embodying the dark tone of his Capitol years. Also in 1981, Sinatra was embroiled in controversy when he worked a ten-day engagement for $2 million in Sun City, in the internationally unrecognized Bophuthatswana, breaking a cultural boycott against apartheid-era South Africa. President Lucas Mangope awarded Sinatra with the highest honour, the Order of the Leopard, and made him an honorary tribal chief.

Favourite Frank Sinatra Songs Index

This list does not contain Christmas songs. You can find Christmas music from Frank Sinatra here.

The links below will take you to YouTube.

I Get a Kick Out Of You.

It Was A Very Good Year.

I’ve Got You Under My Skin.

Love And Marriage.

Mack The Knife.

Me And My Shadow. (With Sammy Davis Jr.).

My Kind Of Town.

My Way.

One for My Baby (And One More For The Road).

Send In The Clowns.

Somethin’ Stupid (With Nancy Sinatra).

Strangers In The Night.

That’s Life.

The Lady Is A Tramp.

Theme From New York, New York.

Three Coins In The Fountain.

Witchcraft.

Blog Posts

Music: The Rat Pack.

Music: Dean Martin.

Notes And Links

The image shown at the top of this page is the copyright of Capital Records via Wikipedia.

Music: The Rat Pack

I have grown up listening to the Rat Pack. Although there were five members, they were more well-known for Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. They were cool, funny and I love their music, especially those by Sinatra and Martin.

In Blog Posts at the bottom of the page, you will find links to Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and an index containing some of my favourite songs by the Rat Pack.

About The Rat Pack

The Rat Pack was an informal group of entertainers, the second iteration of which ultimately made films and appeared together in Las Vegas casino venues. They originated as a group of A-list show business friends who met casually at the Los Angeles home of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. In the 1960s, the group featured Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, and (before falling out with Sinatra in 1962) Peter Lawford, among others. They appeared together on stage and in films in the early 1960s, including the films Ocean’s 11, and Sergeants 3; after Lawford’s expulsion, they filmed Robin and the 7 Hoods with Bing Crosby in what was to be Lawford’s role. Sinatra, Martin, and Davis were regarded as the group’s lead members after Bogart’s death.

The 1950’s

The name “Rat Pack” was first used to refer to a group of friends in New York, and several explanations have been offered for the name. According to one version, Lauren Bacall saw her husband Humphrey Bogart and his friends returning from a night in Las Vegas and said, “You look like a goddamn rat pack.” “Rat Pack” may also be a shortened version of “Holmby Hills Rat Pack”, a reference to the home of Bogart and Bacall which served as a regular hangout.

Visiting members included Errol Flynn, Ava Gardner, Nat King Cole, Robert Mitchum, Elizabeth Taylor, Janet Leigh, Tony Curtis, Mickey Rooney, Lena Horne, Jerry Lewis, and Cesar Romero. According to Stephen Bogart, the original members of the Holmby Hills Rat Pack were Frank Sinatra (pack master), Judy Garland (first vice-president), Sid Luft (cage master), Bogart (rat in charge of public relations), Swifty Lazar (recording secretary and treasurer), Nathaniel Benchley (historian), David Niven, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, George Cukor, Cary Grant, Rex Harrison, and Jimmy Van Heusen.

The 1960’s

The early 1960s version of the group included Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop. This group was originally known as the “Clan”, but that name fell out of favour because it was reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan.

Marilyn Monroe, Angie Dickinson, Juliet Prowse, Buddy Greco, and Shirley MacLaine were often referred to as the “Rat Pack Mascots”.

Comedian Don Rickles wrote that “I never received an official membership card but Frank made me feel part of the fun.”

Peter Lawford was a brother-in-law of President John F. Kennedy (dubbed “Brother-in-Lawford” by Sinatra), and Kennedy spent time with Sinatra and the others when he visited Las Vegas, during which members sometimes referred to the group as “the Jack Pack”. Rat Pack members played a role in campaigning for Kennedy and the Democrats, appearing at the July 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. Lawford asked Sinatra if he would have Kennedy as a guest at his Palm Springs house in March 1962 and Sinatra went to great lengths to accommodate the President, including the construction of a helipad. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy advised his brother to sever ties to Sinatra because of his association with Mafia figures such as Sam Giancana and he cancelled the visit. Kennedy instead stayed at Bing Crosby’s estate, which further infuriated Sinatra. Lawford was blamed for this and Sinatra “never again had a good word” for him. Lawford’s role was written out of the upcoming 4 for Texas, and his part in Robin and the 7 Hoods was given to Bing Crosby.

The Rat Pack Revival

Sinatra, Davis, and Martin announced a 29-date tour called Together Again in December 1987. At the press conference to announce the tour, Martin joked about calling it off, and Sinatra rebuked a reporter for using the term “Rat Pack”, referring to it as “that stupid phrase”.

Dean Martin’s son Dean Paul Martin died in a plane crash in March 1987 on the San Gorgonio Mountain in California, the same mountain where Sinatra’s mother was killed in a plane crash ten years earlier. Martin had since become increasingly dependent on alcohol and prescription drugs. Davis had hip replacement surgery two years previously and was estranged from Sinatra because of Davis’ use of cocaine. Davis was also experiencing severe financial difficulties and was promised by Sinatra’s people that he could earn between six and eight million dollars from the tour.

Martin had not made a film or recorded since 1984 and Sinatra felt that the tour would be good for Martin, telling Davis, “I think it would be great for Dean. Get him out. For that alone it would be worth doing”. Sinatra and Davis still performed regularly, yet they had not recorded for several years. Both Sinatra and Martin had made their last film appearances together in 1984’s Cannonball Run II, which also starred Davis. This marked the trio’s first feature film appearance since 1964’s Robin and the 7 Hoods. Martin expressed reservations about the tour, wondering whether they could draw as many people as they had in the past. Sinatra and Davis complained during private rehearsals about the lack of black musicians in the orchestra. The tour began at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena on March 13, 1988, to a sold-out crowd of 14,500.

Davis opened the show, followed by Martin and then Sinatra; after an interval, the three performed a medley of songs. During the show, Martin threw a lit cigarette at the audience. He withdrew from the tour after just five shows, citing a flare-up of a kidney problem. Sinatra and Davis continued the tour under the title “The Ultimate Event” with Liza Minnelli replacing Martin as the third member of the trio.

Davis’s associate stated that Sinatra’s people were skimming the top of the revenues from the concerts, as well as stuffing envelopes full of cash into suitcases after the performances. In August 1989, Davis was diagnosed with throat cancer which caused his death in May 1990. He was buried with a gold watch that Sinatra had given him at the conclusion of The Ultimate Event Tour.

A 1988 performance of The Ultimate Event in Detroit was recorded and shown on Showtime the following year as a tribute to the recently deceased Davis. A review in The New York Times praised Davis’s performance, describing it as “pure, ebullient, unapologetic show business.

The Rat Pack Reputation

Concerning the group’s reputation for womanizing and heavy drinking, Joey Bishop stated in a 1998 interview: “I never saw Frank, Dean Martin, Sammy or Peter drunk during performances. That was only a gag! And do you believe these guys had to chase broads? They had to chase ’em away!”

The Rat Pack Films

The links below will take you to IMDb.

It Happened in Brooklyn (1947) starring Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford.

Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956) starring cameos by Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.

Some Came Running (1958) starring Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, co-starring Shirley MacLaine.

Never So Few (1959) Starring Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford, and initially Sammy Davis Jr., who was replaced by Steve McQueen.

Ocean’s 11 (1960) starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, Angie Dickinson, Joey Bishop and a cameo by Shirley MacLaine.

Pepe (1960) starring cameos by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop.

Sergeants 3 (1962) starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop.

The Road to Hong Kong (1962) starring cameos by Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.

Come Blow Your Horn (1963) starring Frank Sinatra with a cameo by Dean Martin.

Johnny Cool (1963) starring Sammy Davis Jr. and Joey Bishop. Peter Lawford was the executive producer; Henry Silva of Ocean’s 11 starred, with Mort Sahl and Jim Backus in supporting roles.

4 for Texas (1963) starring Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.

Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964) starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and initially Peter Lawford, who was replaced by Bing Crosby.

Marriage on the Rocks (1965) starring Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.

The Oscar (1966) starring Frank Sinatra uncredited, and Peter Lawford.

A Man Called Adam (1966) starring Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford.

Texas Across the River (1966) starring Dean Martin and Joey Bishop.

Salt and Pepper (1968) starring Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford.

One More Time (1970) starring Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford.

The Cannonball Run (1981) starring Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.

Cannonball Run II (1984) starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., plus Shirley MacLaine and Henrey Silva.

Archival footage of Lawford and Sinatra was used in the 1974 compilation film That’s Entertainment!

Shirley MacLaine appeared in the 1958 film Some Came Running, along with Sinatra and Martin. She had a major role (and Sinatra a cameo) in the 1956 Oscar-winning film Around the World in 80 Days. MacLaine played a Hindu princess who is rescued by and falls in love with, original Rat Pack associate David Niven, and Sinatra had a non-speaking, non-singing role as a piano player in a saloon, whose identity is concealed from the viewer until he turns his face toward the camera during a scene featuring Marlene Dietrich and George Raft. MacLaine appeared alongside Sinatra in Can-Can. She also had an appearance in the 1960 film Ocean’s 11 as a drunken woman. The 1984 film Cannonball Run II, with MacLaine, marked the final time members of the Rat Pack shared theatrical screen-time together.

A biopic titled The Rat Pack, made by HBO in 1998, starred Ray Liotta as Sinatra, Joe Mantegna as Martin, and Don Cheadle as Davis, dramatizing their private lives and, in particular, their roles in the 1960 presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy.

Favourite Rat Pack Songs Index

This list does not contain Christmas songs. You can find Christmas music from Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. here.

The links below will take you to YouTube.

Ain’t That A Kick In The Head – Dean Martin.

All Of Me – Frank Sinatra.

All The Way – Frank Sinatra.

Come Fly With Me – Frank Sinatra.

Everybody Loves Somebody – Dean Martin.

Fly Me To The Moon – Frank Sinatra.

I Get a Kick Out Of You – Frank Sinatra.

It Was A Very Good Year – Frank Sinatra.

I’ve Gotta Be Me – Sammy Davis Jr.

I’ve Got You Under My Skin – Frank Sinatra.

Love And Marriage – Frank Sinatra.

Mack The Knife – Frank Sinatra.

Mambo Italiano – Dean Martin.

Me And My Shadow – Frank Sinatra With Sammy Davis Jr.

Memories Are Made Of This – Dean Martin.

Mr. Bojangles (Live) – Sammy Davis Jr.

My Kind Of Town – Frank Sinatra.

My Way – Frank Sinatra.

One for My Baby (And One More For The Road) – Frank Sinatra.

Send In The Clowns – Frank Sinatra.

Somethin’ Stupid – Frank Sinatra With Nancy Sinatra.

Standing On The Corner – Dean Martin.

Strangers In The Night – Frank Sinatra.

Sway – Dean Martin.

Sweet Gingerbread Man – Sammy Davis Jr.

That’s Amore – Dean Martin.

That’s Life – Frank Sinatra.

The Candy Man (Live) – Sammy Davis Jr.

The Lady Is A Tramp – Frank Sinatra.

Theme From New York, New York – Frank Sinatra.

Three Coins In The Fountain – Frank Sinatra.

Volare – Dean Martin.

Walkin’ My Baby Back Home – Dean Martin.

When You’re Smiling
– Dean Martin.

Witchcraft – Frank Sinatra.

You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You – Dean Martin.

Blog Posts

Music: Frank Sinatra.

Music: Dean Martin.

Notes And Links

The image shown at the top of this page is copyright unknown via Wikipedia.

Music: Christmas Music

Who doesn’t love a good Christmas tune? I certainly do and it is part of my Christmas tradition to play the same ones every year. They may be by someone who is not particularly one of my favourite music artists and bands but I still like them nevertheless.

I have grown up listening to many festive tunes with my Mom and on my own, especially Mom’s LP’s by Nat King Cole, Elvis Presley, Jim Reeves, Mario Lanza, Andy Williams, Perry Como and the Hawaiian Christmas and Christmas Party Sing-A-Long ones too. We also listened to singles as well. I am pleased to say I still have them in my vinyl collection.

There is an index at the bottom of the page containing many, but not all of the Christmas music I like to listen to. There are obviously many artists who cover the same tunes but I will show my favourite versions. Some songs are not necessarily Christmas songs per se but are from Christmas albums.

It is hard to pick just a small selection when there are so many to choose from!

Christmas decorations on sheet music.

Christmas Music

Christmas music comprises a variety of genres of music regularly performed or heard around the Christmas season. Music associated with Christmas may be purely instrumental, or in the case of carols or songs may employ lyrics whose subject matter ranges from the nativity of Jesus Christ to gift-giving and merrymaking, to cultural figures such as Santa Claus, among other topics. Many songs simply have a winter or seasonal theme or have been adopted into the canon for other reasons.

While most Christmas songs prior to 1930 were of a traditional religious character, the Great Depression-era of the 1930s brought a stream of songs of American origin, most of which did not explicitly reference the Christian nature of the holiday, but rather the more secular traditional Western themes and customs associated with Christmas. These included songs aimed at children such as “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, as well as sentimental ballad-type songs performed by famous crooners of the era, such as “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and “White Christmas”, the latter of which remains the best-selling single of all time as of 2018.

Elvis’ Christmas Album (1957) by Elvis Presley is the best-selling Christmas album of all time, selling more than 20 million copies worldwide.

Performances of Christmas music at public concerts, in churches, at shopping malls, on city streets, and in private gatherings is an integral staple of the Christmas holiday in many cultures across the world. Radio stations often convert to a 24-7 Christmas music format leading up to the holiday, starting sometimes as early as the day after Halloween – as part of a phenomenon known as “Christmas creep”.

Christmas Music History

Early Music

Music associated with Christmas is thought to have its origins in 4th-century Rome, in Latin-language hymns such as Veni redemptor gentium. By the 13th century, under the influence of Francis of Assisi, the tradition of popular Christmas songs in regional native languages developed. In the 16th century, various Christmas carols still sung to this day include “The 12 Days of Christmas”, “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen”, and “O Christmas Tree”, which first emerged.

Music was an early feature of the Christmas season and its celebrations. The earliest examples are hymnographic works (chants and litanies) intended for liturgical use in observance of both the Feast of the Nativity and Theophany, many of which are still in use by the Eastern Orthodox Church. The 13th century saw the rise of the carol written in the vernacular, under the influence of Francis of Assisi.

In the Middle Ages, the English combined circle dances with singing and called them carols. Later, the word carol came to mean a song in which a religious topic is treated in a style that is familiar or festive. From Italy, it passed to France and Germany, and later to England. Christmas carols in English first appear in a 1426 work of John Audelay, a Shropshire priest and poet, who lists 25 “caroles of Cristemas”, probably sung by groups of wassailers, who went from house to house. Music in itself soon became one of the greatest tributes to Christmas, and Christmas music includes some of the noblest compositions of great musicians.

Puritan Prohibition

During the Commonwealth of England government under Cromwell, the Rump Parliament prohibited the practice of singing Christmas carols as Pagan and sinful. Like other customs associated with popular Catholic Christianity, it earned the disapproval of Protestant Puritans. Famously, Cromwell’s interregnum prohibited all celebrations of the Christmas holiday. This attempt to ban the public celebration of Christmas can also be seen in the early history of Father Christmas.

The Westminster Assembly of Divines established Sunday as the only holy day in the calendar in 1644. The new liturgy produced for the English church recognized this in 1645, and so legally abolished Christmas. Its celebration was declared an offence by Parliament in 1647. There is some debate as to the effectiveness of this ban, and whether or not it was enforced in the country.

Puritans generally disapproved of the celebration of Christmas—a trend that continually resurfaced in Europe and the USA through the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Read more about Christmas Music History here.

Classical Music

Many large-scale religious compositions are performed in a concert setting at Christmas. Performances of George Frideric Handel’s oratorio Messiah are a fixture of Christmas celebrations in some countries, and although it was originally written for performance at Easter, it covers aspects of the Biblical Christmas narrative. Informal Scratch Messiah performances involving public participation are very popular in the Christmas season. Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio (Weihnachts-Oratorium, BWV 248), written for Christmas 1734, describes the birth of Jesus, the annunciation to the shepherds, the adoration of the shepherds, the circumcision and naming of Jesus, the journey of the Magi, and the adoration of the Magi. Antonio Vivaldi composed the Violin Concerto RV270 Il Riposo per il Santissimo Natale (For the Most Holy Christmas). Arcangelo Corelli composed the Christmas Concerto in 1690. Peter Cornelius composed a cycle of six songs related to Christmas themes he called Weihnachtsliede. Setting his own poems for solo voice and piano, he alluded to older Christmas carols in the accompaniment of two of the songs.

Other classical works associated with Christmas include:

Pastorale sur la naissance de N.S. Jésus-Christ (c. 1670) by Marc-Antoine Charpentier.

Christus (1847) an unfinished oratorio by Felix Mendelssohn.

L’enfance du Christ (1853–54) by Hector Berlioz.

Oratorio de Noël (1858) by Camille Saint-Saëns.

The Nutcracker (1892) by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Fantasia on Christmas Carols (1912) and Hodie (1954), both by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

A Ceremony of Carols (1942) by Benjamin Britten.

Christmas Carols

Songs that are traditional, even some without a specific religious context, are often called Christmas carols. Each of these has a rich history, some dating back many centuries.

Popular Christmas Songs

United States

According to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) in 2016, “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”, written by Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie in 1934, is the most played holiday song of the last 50 years. It was first performed live by Eddie Cantor on his radio show in November 1934. Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra recorded their version in 1935, followed later by a range of artists including Frank Sinatra in 1948, the Supremes, the Jackson 5, the Beach Boys, and Glenn Campbell. Bruce Springsteen recorded a rock rendition in December 1975.

Long-time Christmas classics from prior to the “rock era” still dominate the holiday charts – such as “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”, “Winter Wonderland”, “Sleigh Ride” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”. Songs from the rock era to enter the top tier of the season’s canon include Wonderful Christmastime by Paul McCartney, All I Want for Christmas Is You by Mariah Carey and Last Christmas by Wham!

The most popular set of these titles—heard over airwaves, on the Internet, in shopping malls, in elevators and lobbies, even on the street during the Christmas season—have been composed and performed from the 1930s onward. (Songs published before 1925 are all out of copyright, are no longer subject to ASCAP royalties and thus do not appear on their list.) In addition to Bing Crosby, major acts that have popularized and successfully covered a number of the titles in the top 30 most performed Christmas songs in 2015 include Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Andy Williams, and the Jackson 5.

Since the mid-1950s, much of the Christmas music produced for popular audiences have explicitly romantic overtones, only using Christmas as a setting. The 1950s also featured the introduction of novelty songs that used the holiday as a target for satire and a source for comedy. Exceptions such as The Christmas Shoes (2000) have re-introduced Christian themes as complementary to the secular Western themes, and myriad traditional carol cover versions by various artists have explored virtually all music genres.

United Kingdom And Ireland

Most Played Songs

A collection of chart hits recorded in a bid to be crowned the UK Christmas number one single during the 1970s and 1980s have become some of the most popular holiday tunes in the United Kingdom. Band Aid’s 1984 song Do They Know It’s Christmas? is the second-best-selling single in UK chart history. Fairytale of New York, released by The Pogues in 1987, is regularly voted the British public’s favourite-ever Christmas song. It is also the most-played Christmas song of the 21st century in the UK. British glam rock bands had major hit singles with Christmas songs in the 1970s. Merry Xmas Everybody by Slade, I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday by Wizzard, and Lonely This Christmas by Mud all remain hugely popular.

The top ten most played Christmas songs in the UK based on a 2012 survey conducted by PRS for Music are as follows:

Ranked No. 1:
Fairytale of New York by The Pogues with Kirsty MacColl.

Ranked No. 2:
All I Want for Christmas Is You by Mariah Carey.

Ranked No, 3:
Do They Know It’s Christmas? by Band Aid.

Ranked No. 4:
Last Christmas by Wham!

Ranked No. 5:
Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town by Harry Reser and his orchestra (sung by Tom Stacks).

Ranked No. 6:
Do You Hear What I Hear? by Bing Crosby.

Ranked No. 7:
Happy Xmas (War Is Over) John Lennon with Yoko/Plastic Ono Band and the Harlem Community Choir.

Ranked No. 8:
Wonderful Christmastime by Paul McCartney.

Ranked No. 9:
I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday by Wizzard.

Ranked No. 10:
Merry Xmas Everybody by Slade.

Included in the 2009 and 2008 lists are such other titles as Jona Lewie’s Stop the Cavalry, Bruce Springsteen’s Santa Claus is Coming to Town, Elton John’s Step into Christmas, Mud’s Lonely This Christmas, Walking in the Air by Aled Jones, Shakin’ Stevens’ Merry Christmas Everyone, Chris Rea’s Driving Home for Christmas and Mistletoe and Wine and Saviour’s Day by Cliff Richard.

Christmas Number Ones

The “Christmas Number One” – songs reaching the top spot on either the UK Singles Chart, the Irish Singles Chart, or occasionally both, on the edition preceding Christmas – is considered a major achievement in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The Christmas number one, and to a lesser extent, the runner-up at number two, benefit from broad publicity. Social media campaigns have been used to try to encourage sales of specific songs so that they could reach number one.

These songs develop an association with Christmas or the holiday season from their chart performance, but the association tends to be shorter-lived than for the more traditionally-themed Christmas songs. Notable longer-lasting examples include Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (No. 1, 1984, the second-biggest selling single in UK Chart history; two re-recordings also hit No. 1 in 1989 and 2004), Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everybody” (No. 1, 1973), and Wham!’s “Last Christmas” (No. 2, 1984). Last Christmas would go on to hold the UK record for highest-selling single not to reach No. 1, until it finally topped the chart on 1 January 2021, helped by extensive streaming in the final week of December 2020.

The Beatles, Spice Girls, and LadBaby are the only artists to have achieved consecutive Christmas number-one hits on the UK Singles Chart. The Beatles annually between 1963 and 1965 (with a fourth in 1967), the Spice Girls between 1996 and 1998, and LadBaby in 2018, 2019 and 2020 (with the novelty songs We Built This City, I Love Sausage Rolls and Don’t Stop Me Eatin’). Bohemian Rhapsody is the only recording to have ever been Christmas number one twice, in both 1975 and 1991. Three of the four different Band Aid recordings of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” have been number one in Christmas week.

At the turn of the 21st century, songs associated with reality shows became a frequent source of Christmas number ones in the UK. In 2002, Popstars: The Rivals produced the top three singles on the British Christmas charts. The “rival” groups produced by the series—the girl group Girls Aloud and the boy band One True Voice—finished first and second respectively on the charts. Failed contestants The Cheeky Girls charted with a novelty hit, Cheeky Song (Touch My Bum), at third. Briton Will Young, the winner of the first Pop Idol, charted at the top of the Irish charts in 2003.

The X Factor also typically concluded in December during its run; the winner’s debut single earned the Christmas number one in at least one of the two countries every year from 2005 to 2014, and in both countries in five of those ten years. Each year since 2008 has seen protest campaigns to outsell the X Factor single (which benefits from precisely-timed release and corresponding media buzz) and prevent it from reaching number one. In 2009, as the result of a campaign intended to counter the phenomenon, Rage Against the Machine’s 1992 single “Killing in the Name” reached number one in the UK instead of that year’s X Factor winner, Joe McElderry. In 2011, Wherever You Are, the single from a choir of military wives assembled by the TV series The Choir, earned the Christmas number-one single in Britain—upsetting X Factor winners Little Mix. With the Military Wives Choir single not being released in Ireland, Little Mix won Christmas number one in Ireland that year.

Read lots more about Christmas Music here.

Favourite Christmas Music Index

A Cradle In Bethlehem – Nat King Cole.

All I Want For Christmas (Is My Two Front Teeth) – Spike Jones And His City Slickers.

A Marshmallow World – Dean Martin.

An Old Christmas Card – Jim Reeves.

Away In A Manger – Andy Williams.

Baby, It’s Cold Outside – Dean Martin.

Blue Christmas – Elvis Presley.

Carol Of The Bells – Pentatonix.

C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S – Jim Reeves.

Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End) – The Darkness.

Deck The Halls – Nat King Cole.

Do You Hear What I Hear? – Bing Crosby.

Frosty The Snowman – Gean Autry.

Gaudette – Erasure.

Guardian Angels – Mario Lanza.

Good King Wenceslas – Bing Crosby.

God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen – Mario Lanza.

Happy Holiday / The Holiday Season – Andy Williams.

Happy New Year – Abba.

Happy Xmas (War Is Over) – John Lennon With Yoko / Plastic Ono Band And The Harlem Community Choir.

Hark! The Herald Angles Sing – Mario Lanza.

Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas – Frank Sinatra.

Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane) – Elvis Presley.

Here We Come A-Caroling / We Wish You A Merry Christmas – Perry Como.

Holly Jolly Christmas – Burl Ives.

If Every Day Was Like Christmas – Elvis Presley.

I’ll Be Home For Christmas – Elvis Presley.

I Saw Three Ships – Mario Lanza.

It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas – Perry Como And The Fontane Sisters.

It’s Christmas Time All Over The World – Sammy Davis Jr.

I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday – Wizzard.

Jingle Bells – Jim Reeves.

Joy To The World – Nat King Cole.

Last Christmas – Wham!

Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! – Dean Martin.

Lonely This Christmas – Mud.

Mama Liked The Roses – Elvis Presley.

Mary’s Boy Child / Oh My Lord – Boney M.

Mary, Did You Know? – Pentatonix.

Merry Christmas Everyone – Shakin’ Stevens.

Merry Xmas Everybody – Slade.

Mistletoe And Holly – Frank Sinatra.

O Come All Ye Faithfull – Nat King Cole.

O Holy Night – Nat King Cole.

O Little Town Of Bethlehem – Nat King Cole.

O Tannenbaum – Nat King Cole.

Peace On Earth / Little Drummer Boy – David Bowie And Bing Crosby.

Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree – Brenda Lee.

Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer – The Temptations.

Santa, Bring My Baby Back (To Me) – Elvis Presley.

Santa Claus Is Back In Town – Elvis Presley.

Santa Claus Is Coming To Town – Frank Sinatra.

Silent Night – Elvis Presley.

Silver And Gold – Burl Ives.

Silver Bells – Jim Reeves.

Someday At Christmas – The Temptations.

Sweet Little Jesus Boy – Andy Williams.

Thank You – Pentatonix.

Thank God It’s Christmas – Queen.

The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas To You) – Nat King Cole.

The First Noel – Mario Lanza.

The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot – Nat King Cole.

The Merry Christmas Polka – Jim Reeves.

Up On The Housetop – Pentatonix.

Walking In The Air – Aled Jones.

We Three Kings Of Orient Are – Mario Lanza.

What Christmas Means To Me – Pentatonix.

When A Child Is Born – Johnny Mathis.

White Christmas – Bing Crosby.

Winter Wonderland / Don’t Worry Be Happy – Pentatonix And Tori Kelly.

You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch – Pentatonix.

‘Zat You Santa Claus – Louis Armstrong And The Commanders.

Blog Posts

Blue Peter: An Advent Crown For Christmas.

Books: A Christmas Carol By Charles Dickens.

Christmas: A Christmas Carol By Charles Dickens – Screen Versions.

Christmas: Nostalgic Christmas Adverts.

Jokes: Christmas Jokes.

Poetry: A Visit From St. Nicholas By Clement Clarke Moore.

Poetry: Harley Davidson Christmas Poem By Unknown.

Notes And Links

Mick Haupt on Pexels – The image shown at the top of this page is the copyright of Mick Haupt. You can find more great work from the photographer Mick and lots more free stock photos at Pexels.

The image above of Christmas decorations on sheet music is the copyright of neelam279 at Pixabay.

Music: Elvis Presley

I have loved Elvis and his music since the 1980’s, which is when I really got into listening to him a lot. He will ALWAYS be THE KING OF ROCK AND ROLL.

There is an index at the bottom of the page containing some of my favourite songs by him. There are so many to choose from!

About Elvis Presley

Elvis Aaron Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977) was an American singer and actor. Dubbed the “King of Rock and Roll”, he is regarded as one of the most significant cultural icons of the 20th century. His energized interpretations of songs and sexually provocative performance style, combined with a singularly potent mix of influences across colour lines during a transformative era in race relations, led him to both great success and initial controversy.

Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and relocated to Memphis, Tennessee, with his family when he was 13 years old. His music career began there in 1954, recording at Sun Records with producer Sam Phillips, who wanted to bring the sound of African-American music to a wider audience. Presley, on rhythm acoustic guitar, and accompanied by lead guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, was a pioneer of rockabilly, an uptempo, backbeat-driven fusion of country music and rhythm and blues. In 1955, drummer D. J. Fontana joined to complete the lineup of Presley’s classic quartet and RCA Victor acquired his contract in a deal arranged by Colonel Tom Parker, who would manage him for more than two decades. Presley’s first RCA Victor single, “Heartbreak Hotel”, was released in January 1956 and became a number-one hit in the United States. Within a year, RCA would sell ten million Presley singles. With a series of successful network television appearances and chart-topping records, Presley became the leading figure of the newly popular sound of rock and roll.

In November 1956, Presley made his film debut in Love Me Tender. Drafted into military service in 1958, Presley relaunched his recording career two years later with some of his most commercially successful work. He held few concerts, however, and guided by Parker, proceeded to devote much of the 1960s to making Hollywood films and soundtrack albums, most of them critically derided. In 1968, following a seven-year break from live performances, he returned to the stage in the acclaimed television comeback special Elvis, which led to an extended Las Vegas concert residency and a string of highly profitable tours. In 1973, Presley gave the first concert by a solo artist to be broadcast around the world, Aloha from Hawaii. Years of prescription drug abuse severely compromised his health, and he died suddenly in 1977 at his Graceland estate at the age of 42.

Recognized as the best-selling solo music artist of all time by Guinness World Records, Presley was commercially successful in many genres, including pop, country, R&B, adult contemporary, and gospel. He won three Grammy Awards, received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award at age 36, and has been inducted into multiple music halls of fame. Presley holds several records, including the most RIAA certified gold and platinum albums, the most albums charted on the Billboard 200, the most number-one albums by a solo artist on the UK Albums Chart, and the most number-one singles by any act on the UK Singles Chart. In 2018, Presley was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Donald Trump.

Elvis Presley’s Life And Career

1935 – 1953: Early Years

Childhood In Tupelo

Elvis Aaron Presley was born on January 8, 1935, in Tupelo, Mississippi, to Vernon Elvis (April 10, 1916 – June 26, 1979) and Gladys Love (née Smith; April 25, 1912 – August 14, 1958) Presley in a two-room shotgun house that his father built for the occasion. Elvis’s identical twin brother, Jesse Garon Presley, was delivered 35 minutes before him, stillborn. Presley became close to both parents and formed an especially close bond with his mother. The family attended an Assembly of God church, where he found his initial musical inspiration.

Presley’s father, Vernon, was of German, Scottish and English origins. Presley’s mother, Gladys, was of Scots-Irish with some French Norman ancestry. His mother, Gladys, and the rest of the family, apparently believed that her great-great-grandmother, Morning Dove White, was Cherokee; this was confirmed by Elvis’s granddaughter Riley Keough in 2017. Elaine Dundy, in her biography, supports the belief. Gladys was regarded by relatives and friends as the dominant member of the small family.

Vernon moved from one odd job to the next, showing little ambition. The family often relied on help from neighbours and government food assistance. In 1938, they lost their home after Vernon was found guilty of altering a check written by his landowner and sometime-employer. He was jailed for eight months, while Gladys and Elvis moved in with relatives.

In September 1941, Presley entered first grade at East Tupelo Consolidated, where his teachers regarded him as “average”. He was encouraged to enter a singing contest after impressing his schoolteacher with a rendition of Red Foley’s country song “Old Shep” during morning prayers. The contest, held at the Mississippi–Alabama Fair and Dairy Show on October 3, 1945, was his first public performance. The ten-year-old Presley was dressed as a cowboy; he stood on a chair to reach the microphone and sang “Old Shep”. He recalled placing fifth. A few months later, Presley received his first guitar for his birthday; he had hoped for something else—by different accounts, either a bicycle or a rifle. Over the following year, he received basic guitar lessons from two of his uncles and the new pastor at the family’s church. Presley recalled, “I took the guitar, and I watched people, and I learned to play a little bit. But I would never sing in public. I was very shy about it.”

In September 1946, Presley entered a new school, Milam, for sixth grade; he was regarded as a loner. The following year, he began bringing his guitar to school on a daily basis. He played and sang during lunchtime, and was often teased as a “trashy” kid who played hillbilly music. By then, the family was living in a largely black neighbourhood. Presley was a devotee of Mississippi Slim’s show on the Tupelo radio station WELO. He was described as “crazy about music” by Slim’s younger brother, who was one of Presley’s classmates and often took him into the station. Slim supplemented Presley’s guitar instruction by demonstrating chord techniques. When his protégé was twelve years old, Slim scheduled him for two on-air performances. Presley was overcome by stage fright the first time but succeeded in performing the following week.

Read more about 1935 – 1955: Early Years here.

1953 – 1956: First Recordings

Sam Phillips And Sun Records

In August 1953, Presley checked into the offices of Sun Records. He aimed to pay for a few minutes of studio time to record a two-sided acetate disc: “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin”. He later claimed that he intended the record as a birthday gift for his mother, or that he was merely interested in what he “sounded like”, although there was a much cheaper, amateur record-making service at a nearby general store. Biographer Peter Guralnick argued that he chose Sun in the hope of being discovered. Asked by receptionist Marion Keisker what kind of singer he was, Presley responded, “I sing all kinds.” When she pressed him on who he sounded like, he repeatedly answered, “I don’t sound like nobody.” After he recorded, Sun boss Sam Phillips asked Keisker to note down the young man’s name, which she did along with her own commentary: “Good ballad singer. Hold.”

In January 1954, Presley cut a second acetate at Sun Records—”I’ll Never Stand in Your Way” and “It Wouldn’t Be the Same Without You”—but again nothing came of it. Not long after, he failed an audition for a local vocal quartet, the Songfellows. He explained to his father, “They told me I couldn’t sing.” Songfellow Jim Hamill later claimed that he was turned down because he did not demonstrate an ear for harmony at the time. In April, Presley began working for the Crown Electric company as a truck driver. His friend Ronnie Smith, after playing a few local gigs with him, suggested he contact Eddie Bond, leader of Smith’s professional band, which had an opening for a vocalist. Bond rejected him after a tryout, advising Presley to stick to truck driving “because you’re never going to make it as a singer”.

Phillips, meanwhile, was always on the lookout for someone who could bring to a broader audience the sound of the black musicians on whom Sun focused. As Keisker reported, “Over and over I remember Sam saying, ‘If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.'” In June, he acquired a demo recording by Jimmy Sweeney of a ballad, “Without You”, that he thought might suit the teenage singer. Presley came by the studio but was unable to do it justice. Despite this, Phillips asked Presley to sing as many numbers as he knew. He was sufficiently affected by what he heard to invite two local musicians, guitarist Winfield “Scotty” Moore and upright bass player Bill Black, to work something up with Presley for a recording session.

The session held the evening of July 5, proved entirely unfruitful until late in the night. As they were about to abort and go home, Presley took his guitar and launched into a 1946 blues number, Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right“. Moore recalled, “All of a sudden, Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them. Sam, I think, had the door to the control booth open … he stuck his head out and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And we said, ‘We don’t know.’ ‘Well, back up,’ he said, ‘try to find a place to start, and do it again.'” Phillips quickly began taping; this was the sound he had been looking for. Three days later, popular Memphis DJ Dewey Phillips played “That’s All Right” on his Red, Hot, and Blue show. Listeners began phoning in, eager to find out who the singer was. The interest was such that Phillips played the record repeatedly during the remaining two hours of his show. Interviewing Presley on-air, Phillips asked him what high school he attended to clarify his colour for the many callers who had assumed that he was black. During the next few days, the trio recorded a bluegrass song, Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky”, again in a distinctive style and employing a jury-rigged echo effect that Sam Phillips dubbed “slapback”. A single was pressed with “That’s All Right” on the A-side and “Blue Moon of Kentucky” on the reverse.

Read more about 1953 – 1956: First Recordings here.

1956 – 1958: Commercial Breakout And Controversy

First National TV Appearances And Debut Album

On January 10, 1956, Presley made his first recordings for RCA Victor in Nashville. Extending Presley’s by-now customary backup of Moore, Black, Fontana, and Hayride pianist Floyd Cramer—who had been performing at live club dates with Presley—RCA Victor enlisted guitarist Chet Atkins and three background singers, including Gordon Stoker of the popular Jordanaires quartet, to fill in the sound. The session produced the moody, unusual “Heartbreak Hotel”, released as a single on January 27. Parker finally brought Presley to national television, booking him on CBS’s Stage Show for six appearances over two months. The program, produced in New York, was hosted on alternate weeks by big band leaders and brothers Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. After his first appearance, on January 28, Presley stayed in town to record at the RCA Victor New York studio. The sessions yielded eight songs, including a cover of Carl Perkins’ rockabilly anthem “Blue Suede Shoes”. In February, Presley’s “I Forgot to Remember to Forget”, a Sun recording initially released the previous August, reached the top of the Billboard country chart. Neal’s contract was terminated, and, on March 2, Parker became Presley’s manager.

RCA Victor released Presley’s self-titled debut album on March 23. Joined by five previously unreleased Sun recordings, its seven recently recorded tracks were of a broad variety. There were two country songs and a bouncy pop tune. The others would centrally define the evolving sound of rock and roll: “Blue Suede Shoes”—”an improvement over Perkins’ in almost every way”, according to critic Robert Hilburn—and three R&B numbers that had been part of Presley’s stage repertoire for some time, covers of Little Richard, Ray Charles, and The Drifters. As described by Hilburn, these “were the most revealing of all. Unlike many white artists … who watered down the gritty edges of the original R&B versions of songs in the ’50s, Presley reshaped them. He not only injected the tunes with his own vocal character but also made guitar, not piano, the lead instrument in all three cases.” It became the first rock and roll album to top the Billboard chart, a position it held for 10 weeks. While Presley was not an innovative guitarist like Moore or contemporary African-American rockers Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, cultural historian Gilbert B. Rodman argued that the album’s cover image, “of Elvis having the time of his life on stage with a guitar in his hands played a crucial role in positioning the guitar… as the instrument that best captured the style and spirit of this new music.”

Read more about 1956 – 1958: Commercial Breakout And Controversy here.

1958 – 1960: Military Service And Mother’s Death

On March 24, 1958, Presley was drafted into the U.S. Army as a private at Fort Chaffee, near Fort Smith, Arkansas. His arrival was a major media event. Hundreds of people descended on Presley as he stepped from the bus; photographers then accompanied him into the fort. Presley announced that he was looking forward to his military stint, saying that he did not want to be treated any differently from anyone else: “The Army can do anything it wants with me.”

Presley commenced basic training at Fort Hood, Texas. During a two-week leave in early June, he recorded five songs in Nashville. In early August, his mother was diagnosed with hepatitis, and her condition rapidly worsened. Presley was granted emergency leave to visit her and arrived in Memphis on August 12. Two days later, she died of heart failure at the age of 46. Presley was devastated and never the same; their relationship had remained extremely close—even into his adulthood, they would use baby talk with each other and Presley would address her with pet names.

After training, Presley joined the 3rd Armored Division in Friedberg, Germany, on October While on manoeuvres, Presley was introduced to amphetamines by a sergeant. He became “practically evangelical about their benefits”, not only for energy but for “strength” and weight loss as well, and many of his friends in the outfit joined him in indulging. The Army also introduced Presley to karate, which he studied seriously, training with Jürgen Seydel. It became a lifelong interest, which he later included in his live performances. Fellow soldiers have attested to Presley’s wish to be seen as an able, ordinary soldier, despite his fame, and to his generosity. He donated his Army pay to charity, purchased TV sets for the base, and bought an extra set of fatigues for everyone in his outfit.

While in Friedberg, Presley met 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu. They would eventually marry after a seven-and-a-half-year courtship. In her autobiography, Priscilla said that Presley was concerned that his 24-month spell as a GI would ruin his career. In Special Services, he would have been able to give musical performances and remain in touch with the public, but Parker had convinced him that to gain popular respect, he should serve his country as a regular soldier. Media reports echoed Presley’s concerns about his career, but RCA Victor producer Steve Sholes and Freddy Bienstock of Hill and Range had carefully prepared for his two-year hiatus. Armed with a substantial amount of unreleased material, they kept up a regular stream of successful releases. Between his induction and discharge, Presley had ten top 40 hits, including “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck”, the bestselling “Hard Headed Woman”, and “One Night” in 1958, and “(Now and Then There’s) A Fool Such as I” and the number-one “A Big Hunk o’ Love” in 1959. RCA Victor also generated four albums compiling previously issued material during this period, most successfully Elvis‘ Golden Records (1958), which hit number three on the LP chart.

1960 – 1968: Focus On Films

Elvis Is Back

Presley returned to the United States on March 2, 1960, and was honourably discharged three days later with the rank of sergeant. The train that carried him from New Jersey to Tennessee was mobbed all the way, and Presley was called upon to appear at scheduled stops to please his fans. On the night of March 20, he entered RCA Victor’s Nashville studio to cut tracks for a new album along with a single, “Stuck on You”, which was rushed into release and swiftly became a number-one hit. Another Nashville session two weeks later yielded a pair of his bestselling singles, the ballads “It’s Now or Never” and “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”, along with the rest of Elvis Is Back! The album features several songs described by Greil Marcus as full of Chicago blues “menace, driven by Presley’s own super-miked acoustic guitar, brilliant playing by Scotty Moore, and demonic sax work from Boots Randolph. Elvis’ singing wasn’t sexy, it was pornographic.” As a whole, the record “conjured up the vision of a performer who could be all things”, according to music historian John Robertson: “a flirtatious teenage idol with a heart of gold; a tempestuous, dangerous lover; a gutbucket blues singer; a sophisticated nightclub entertainer; [a] raucous rocker”. Released only days after the recording was complete, it reached number two on the album chart.

Presley returned to television on May 12 as a guest on The Frank Sinatra Timex Special—ironic for both stars, given Sinatra’s earlier excoriation of rock and roll. Also known as Welcome Home Elvis, the show had been taped in late March, the only time all year Presley performed in front of an audience. Parker secured an unheard-of $125,000 fee for eight minutes of singing. The broadcast drew an enormous viewership.

G.I. Blues, the soundtrack to Presley’s first film since his return, was a number-one album in October. His first LP of sacred material, His Hand in Mine, followed two months later. It reached number 13 on the U.S. pop chart and number 3 in the UK, remarkable figures for a gospel album. In February 1961, Presley performed two shows for a benefit event in Memphis, on behalf of 24 local charities. During a luncheon preceding the event, RCA Victor presented him with a plaque certifying worldwide sales of over 75 million records. A 12-hour Nashville session in mid-March yielded nearly all of Presley’s next studio album, Something for Everybody. As described by John Robertson, it exemplifies the Nashville sound, the restrained, cosmopolitan style that would define country music in the 1960s. Presaging much of what was to come from Presley himself over the next half-decade, the album is largely “a pleasant, unthreatening pastiche of the music that had once been Elvis’ birthright”. It would be his sixth number-one LP. Another benefit concert, raising money for a Pearl Harbor memorial, was staged on March 25, in Hawaii. It was to be Presley’s last public performance for seven years.

Read more about 1960 – 1968: Focus On Films here.

1968 – 1973: Comeback

Elvis: The ’68 Comeback Special

Presley’s only child, Lisa Marie, was born on February 1, 1968, during a period when he had grown deeply unhappy with his career. Of the eight Presley singles released between January 1967 and May 1968, only two charted in the top 40, and none higher than number 28. His forthcoming soundtrack album, Speedway, would rank at number 82 on the Billboard chart. Parker had already shifted his plans to television, where Presley had not appeared since the Sinatra Timex show in 1960. He manoeuvred a deal with NBC that committed the network to both finance a theatrical feature and broadcast a Christmas special.

Recorded in late June in Burbank, California, the special simply called Elvis, aired on December 3, 1968. Later known as the ’68 Comeback Special, the show featured lavishly staged studio productions as well as songs performed with a band in front of a small audience—Presley’s first live performances since 1961. The live segments saw Presley dressed in tight black leather, singing and playing the guitar in an uninhibited style reminiscent of his early rock and roll days. Director and co-producer Steve Binder had worked hard to produce a show that was far from the hour of Christmas songs Parker had originally planned. The show, NBC’s highest-rated that season, captured 42 percent of the total viewing audience. Jon Landau of Eye magazine remarked, “There is something magical about watching a man who has lost himself find his way back home. He sang with the kind of power people no longer expect of rock ‘n’ roll singers. He moved his body with a lack of pretension and effort that must have made Jim Morrison green with envy.” Dave Marsh calls the performance one of “emotional grandeur and historical resonance”.

By January 1969, the single “If I Can Dream”, written for the special, reached number 12. The soundtrack album rose into the top ten. According to friend Jerry Schilling, the special reminded Presley of what “he had not been able to do for years, being able to choose the people; being able to choose what songs and not being told what had to be on the soundtrack… He was out of prison, man.” Binder said of Presley’s reaction, “I played Elvis the 60-minute show, and he told me in the screening room, ‘Steve, it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I give you my word I will never sing a song I don’t believe in.'”

Read more about 1968 – 1973: Comeback here.

1973 – 1977: Health Deterioration And Death

Medical Crises And Last Studio Sessions

Presley’s divorce was finalized on October 9, 1973. By then, his health was in major and serious decline. Twice during the year, he overdosed on barbiturates, spending three days in a coma in his hotel suite after the first incident. Towards the end of 1973, he was hospitalized, semi-comatose from the effects of a pethidine addiction. According to his primary care physician, Dr. George C. Nichopoulos, Presley “felt that by getting drugs from a doctor, he wasn’t the common everyday junkie getting something off the street”. Since his comeback, he had staged more live shows with each passing year, and 1973 saw 168 concerts, his busiest schedule ever. Despite his failing health, in 1974, he undertook another intensive touring schedule.

Presley’s condition declined precipitously in September. Keyboardist Tony Brown remembered Presley’s arrival at a University of Maryland concert: “He fell out of the limousine, to his knees. People jumped to help, and he pushed them away like, ‘Don’t help me.’ He walked on stage and held onto the mic for the first thirty minutes like it was a post. Everybody’s looking at each other like, ‘Is the tour gonna happen?” Guitarist John Wilkinson recalled, “He was all gut. He was slurring. He was so fucked up… It was obvious he was drugged. It was obvious there was something terribly wrong with his body. It was so bad the words to the songs were barely intelligible… I remember crying. He could barely get through the introductions.” Wilkinson recounted that a few nights later in Detroit, “I watched him in his dressing room, just draped over a chair, unable to move. So often I thought, ‘Boss, why don’t you just cancel this tour and take a year off …?’ I mentioned something once in a guarded moment. He patted me on the back and said, ‘It’ll be all right. Don’t you worry about it.'” Presley continued to play to sell-out crowds. Cultural critic Marjorie Garber wrote that he was now widely seen as a garish pop crooner: “In effect, he had become Liberace. Even his fans were now middle-aged matrons and blue-haired grandmothers.”

On July 13, 1976, Vernon Presley—who had become deeply involved in his son’s financial affairs—fired “Memphis Mafia” bodyguards Red West (Presley’s friend since the 1950s), Sonny West, and David Hebler, citing the need to “cut back on expenses”. Presley was in Palm Springs at the time, and some suggested that he was too cowardly to face the three himself. Another associate of Presley’s, John O’Grady, argued that the bodyguards were dropped because their rough treatment of fans had prompted too many lawsuits. However, Presley’s stepbrother, David Stanley, claimed that the bodyguards were fired because they were becoming more outspoken about Presley’s drug dependency.

RCA, which had always enjoyed a steady stream of product from Presley, began to grow anxious as his interest in the recording studio waned. After a session in December 1973 that produced 18 songs, enough for almost two albums, Presley made no official studio recordings in 1974. Parker delivered RCA yet another concert record, Elvis Recorded Live on Stage in Memphis. Recorded on March 20, it included a version of “How Great Thou Art” that would win Presley his third and final competitive Grammy Award. (All three of his competitive Grammy wins—out of 14 total nominations—were for gospel recordings.) Presley returned to the recording studio in Hollywood in March 1975, but Parker’s attempts to arrange another session toward the end of the year were unsuccessful. In 1976, RCA sent a mobile recording unit to Graceland that made possible two full-scale recording sessions at Presley’s home. Even in that comfortable context, the recording process had become a struggle for him.

Despite concerns from RCA and Parker, between July 1973 and October 1976, Presley recorded virtually the entire contents of six albums. Though he was no longer a major presence on the pop charts, five of those albums entered the top five of the country chart, and three went to number one: Promised Land (1975), From Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee (1976), and Moody Blue (1977). Similarly, his singles in this era did not prove to be major pop hits, but Presley remained a significant force in the country and adult contemporary markets. Eight studio singles from this period released during his lifetime were top ten hits on one or both charts, four in 1974 alone. “My Boy” was a number-one adult contemporary hit in 1975, and “Moody Blue” topped the country chart and reached the second spot on the adult contemporary chart in 1976. Perhaps his most critically acclaimed recording of the era came that year, with what Greil Marcus described as his “apocalyptic attack” on the soul classic “Hurt”. “If he felt the way he sounded”, Dave Marsh wrote of Presley’s performance, “the wonder isn’t that he had only a year left to live but that he managed to survive that long.”

Read more about 1973 – 1977: Health Deterioration And Death and more about Elvis Presley here.

The above articles were sourced from Wikipedia and are subject to change.

Favourite Elvis Presley Songs Index

This list does not contain Christmas songs. You can find Christmas music from Elvis Presley here.

The links below will take you to YouTube.

A Little Less Conversation.

All Shook Up.

Amazing Grace.

An American Trilogy (Live).

Anything That’s Part Of You.

Are You Lonesome Tonight?

Blue Moon.

Blue Suede Shoes.

Bridge Over Troubled Water (Live).

Burning Love.

Can’t Help Falling In Love.

Crying In The Chapel.

Don’t (With The Jordanaires).

Good Rockin’ Tonight.

Heartbreak Hotel.

Hound Dog.

Hurt (Live).

I Don’t Care If The Sun Don’t Shine.

I Forgot To Remember To Forget.

If I Can Dream.

I Got Stung.

I Just Can’t Help Believin’ (Live).

I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone.

I Love You Because.

I’ll Never Let You Go (Little Darlin’).

It’s Now Or Never.

In The Ghetto.

I’ve Lost You (Live).

I Want To Be Free.

I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.

Jailhouse Rock.

Just Pretend (Live).

King Creole.

(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear.

Little Sister.

Love Me Tender.

(Marie’s The Name) His Latest Flame.

My Way (Live).

(Now And Then There’s) A Fool Such As I.

One Night.

Polk Salad Annie (Live).

That’s When Your Heartaches Begin.

The Girl Of My Best Friend.

The Wonder Of You.

Treat Me Nice.

Tryin’ To Get To You.

Unchained Melody (Live).

Viva Las Vegas.

Way Down.

Wear My Ring Around Your Neck.

Wooden Heart.

You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me (Live).

(You’re The) Devil In Disguise).

Notes And Links

Graceland: The Home Of Elvis Presley – You’ve heard the music, now see the place Elvis called home. Explore the beautiful mansion, walk the gardens where he found peace, tour the aircraft that he traveled on from show to show, and encounter Elvis Presley’s Memphis entertainment complex for an unforgettable experience featuring legendary costumes, artefacts, and personal mementoes from Elvis and his family.

The image shown at the top of this page is in the public domain and is found on Wikipedia.

Blue Peter: An Advent Crown For Christmas

Blue Peter, the world’s longest-running children’s television programme, is known for its famous ‘makes’ – creative projects which transform everyday household objects into toys and gifts.

The make featured on this page is taken from “Here’s One I Made Earlier”, a book I got from The Works at a bargain price of 75p!

The collection in this book reproduces some of Blue Peter’s most memorable designs and has a foreword by Valerie Singleton and contributions from former presenters and the ‘Queen of Makes’, Margaret Parnell.

An Advent Crown For Christmas

About Blue Peter

You can read all about Blue Peter here.

Blog Posts

Books: A Christmas Carol By Charles Dickens.

Christmas: A Christmas Carol By Charles Dickens – Screen Versions.

Christmas: Nostalgic Christmas Adverts.

Jokes: Christmas Jokes.

Music: Christmas Music.

Poetry: A Harley Davidson Christmas Poem By Unknown.

Poetry: A Visit From St. Nicholas By Clement Clarke Moore.

Television: Blue Peter.

Notes And Links

Blue Peter – Official page on CBBC.

You can read about Valerie Singelton here.

You can read about John Noakes here.

The images on this page are copyright of the BBC and Octopus Publishing Group.

Television: Blue Peter

Although started in 1958, I associate Blue Peter in my life mainly to the 1970’s and 1980’s for it is in these decades I watched it the most. I wouldn’t say I was a fan of the show, I preferred Magpie more, but I watched it sometimes as a school kid back in the day when the mood took me.

When Jnr and Deb were kids I may have watched a few then but it was more on in the background and I never paid much attention to it as the nostalgia for it had gone for me by then.

Blue Peter Logo.

About Blue Peter

Blue Peter is a British children’s television magazine programme created by John Hunter Blair. It is the longest-running children’s TV show in the world, having been broadcast since October 1958. It was broadcast primarily from BBC Television Centre in London until September 2011, when the programme moved to dock10 studios at MediaCityUK in Salford, Greater Manchester. It is currently shown live on the CBBC television channel on Thursdays at 5 pm.

Following its original creation, the programme was developed by a BBC team led by Biddy Baxter; she became the programme editor in 1965, relinquishing the role in 1988. Throughout the show’s history, there have been 40 presenters; currently, it is hosted by Richie Driss, Mwaksy Mudenda, and Adam Beales.

The show used a nautical title and theme. Its content, which follows a magazine/entertainment format, features viewer and presenter challenges, competitions, celebrity interviews, popular culture and sections on making arts and crafts items from household items. The show has had a garden in both London and Salford, known as the Blue Peter Garden, which is used during the summer and for outdoor activities. The programme has featured a number of pets that became household names, such as dogs Petra, Shep, and Goldie, as well as other animals such as tortoises, cats, and parrots. The longevity of Blue Peter has established it as a significant part of British culture and British heritage.

Blue Peter Theme Music

Click here to hear every Blue Peter opening theme from 1958 to the present day.

Blue Peter Content

Blue Peter‘s content is wide-ranging. Most programmes are broadcast live but usually include at least one filmed report. There will also often be a demonstration of an activity in the studio, or a music or dance performance. Between the 1960s and 2011 the programme was made at BBC Television Centre, and often came from Studio 1, the fourth-largest TV studio in Britain and one of the largest in Europe. This enabled Blue Peter to include large-scale demonstrations and performances within the live programme. From the September 2007 series, the programme was broadcast from a small fixed set in Studio 2. However, from 2009 the series began to use the larger studios once more; also more programmes were broadcast in their entirety from the Blue Peter Garden. The show is also famous for its “makes”, which are demonstrations of how to construct a useful object or prepare food. These have given rise to the oft-used phrase “Here’s one I made earlier”, as presenters bring out a perfect and completed version of the object they are making – a phrase credited to Christopher Trace, though Marguerite Patten is another possibility. Trace also used the line “And now for something completely different”, which was later taken up by Monty Python. Time is also often given over to reading letters and showing pictures sent in by viewers.

Over 5,000 editions have been produced since 1958, and almost every episode from 1964 onwards still exists in the BBC archives. This is unusual for programmes of that era. Editor Biddy Baxter personally ensured that telerecordings and, from 1970, video recordings were kept of each episode.

Many items from Blue Peter‘s history have become embedded in British popular culture, especially moments when things have gone wrong, such as the much-repeated clip of Lulu the baby elephant (from a 1969 edition) who urinated and defecated on the studio floor, appeared to tread on the foot of presenter John Noakes and then proceeded to attempt an exit, dragging her keeper along behind her. Although it is often assumed to have been broadcast live, the edition featuring Lulu was one of the rare occasions when the programme was pre-recorded, as the presenters were en route to Ceylon for the summer expedition at the time of transmission. Other well-remembered and much-repeated items from this era include the Girl Guides’ campfire that got out of hand on the 1970 Christmas edition, John Noakes’s report on the cleaning of Nelson’s Column, and Simon Groom referring to a previous item on the production of a facsimile door knocker for Durham Cathedral which was displayed alongside the original, with the words ‘what a beautiful pair of knockers’.

Blue Peter History

Early Years

Blue Peter was first aired on 16 October 1958. It had been commissioned to producer John Hunter Blair by Owen Reed, the head of children’s programmes at the BBC, as there were no programmes for children aged between five and eight. Reed got his inspiration after watching Children’s Television Club, the brainchild of former radio producer, Trevor Hill, who created the latter show as a successor to his programme Out of School, broadcast on BBC Radio’s Children’s Hour; Hill networked the programme from BBC Manchester and launched it aboard the MV Royal Iris ferry on the River Mersey, Liverpool with presenter Judith Chalmers welcoming everyone aboard at the bottom of the gangplank.

It was subsequently televised about once a month. Hill relates how Reed came to stay with him and his wife, Margaret Potter, in Cheshire and was so taken with the “Blue Peter” flag on the side of the ship and the programme in general, that he asked to rename it and take it to London to be broadcast on a weekly basis (see Reed’s obituary). The “Blue Peter” is used as a maritime signal, indicating that the vessel flying it is about to leave, and Reed chose the name to represent ‘a voyage of adventure’ on which the programme would set out. Hunter Blair also pointed out that blue was a popular colour with children, and Peter was a common name of a typical child’s friend.

The first two presenters were Christopher Trace, an actor, and Leila Williams, winner of Miss Great Britain in 1957. The two presenters were responsible for activities that matched the traditional gender roles. As broadcasting historian, Asa Briggs expressed it in 1995: “Leila played with dolls; Chris played with trains”. They were supported on occasion by Tony Hart, an artist who later designed the ship logo, who told stories about an elephant called Packi (or Packie). It was broadcast every Thursday for fifteen minutes (17.00–17.15) on BBC TV (which later became BBC One). Over the first few months, more features were added, including competitions, documentaries, cartoons, and stories. Early programmes were almost entirely studio-based, with very few filmed inserts being made.

1960 – 1969

From Monday 10 October 1960, Blue Peter was switched to every Monday and extended from 15 minutes to 20 minutes (17.00–17.20). In 1961, Hunter Blair became ill and was often absent. After he produced his last edition on 12 June 1961, a series of temporary producers took up the post. Hunter Blair was replaced the following September by Clive Parkhurst. He did not get along with Leila Williams, who recalled “he could not find anything for me to do”, and in October, Williams did not appear for six editions, and was eventually fired, leaving Christopher Trace on his own or with one-off presenters. Parkhurst was replaced by John Furness, and Anita West joined Trace on 7 May 1962. She featured in just 16 editions, making her the shortest-serving presenter, and was replaced by Valerie Singleton, who presented regularly until 1972 and on special assignments until 1981. Following the departure of Furness, a new producer who was committed to Blue Peter was required, so Biddy Baxter was appointed. At the time she was contracted to schools’ programmes on the radio, and therefore unable to take up her new post immediately.

It was suggested that Edward Barnes, a production assistant, would temporarily produce the show until Baxter arrived, at which point he would become her assistant. This suggestion was turned down, and a more experienced producer, Leonard Chase, was appointed, with Barnes as his assistant. Baxter eventually joined Blue Peter at the end of October 1962.

During this period, many iconic features of Blue Peter were introduced. The first appeal took place in December 1962, replacing the practice of reviewing toys that children would ask for themselves. Blue Peter‘s first pet, a brown and white mongrel dog named Petra, was introduced on 17 December 1962. The puppy soon died of distemper, and having decided against upsetting young viewers over the news, Barnes and Baxter had to search London pet shops for a convincing clandestine replacement. Features such as “makes” (normally involving creating something such as an advent crown, out of household junk) and cooking became regular instalments on Blue Peter and continue to be used today. The Blue Peter badge was introduced in 1963, along with the programme’s new logo designed by Tony Hart. Baxter introduced a system that ensured replies sent to viewers’ letters were personal; as a girl, she had written to Enid Blyton and twice received a standard reply, which had upset her.

The next year, from 28 September 1964, Blue Peter began to be broadcast twice weekly, with Baxter becoming the editor in 1965, and Barnes and Rosemary Gill (an assistant producer who had joined as a temporary producer while Baxter was doing jury service) becoming the programme’s producers. The first Blue Peter book, an annual in all but name, was published that year, and one was produced nearly every year after that, until 2010. A third presenter, John Noakes, was introduced at the end of 1965 and became the longest-serving presenter. A complete contrast to Trace, Noakes set the scene for “daredevil” presenters that have continued through the generations of presenters. Trace left Blue Peter in July 1967, and was replaced by Peter Purves in November. The trio of Valerie Singleton, John Noakes and Peter Purves lasted five years, and according to Richard Marson were ‘the most famous presenting team in the show’s history. In 1965, the first Summer Expedition (a filming trip abroad) was held in Norway, and continued every year (except 1986 and 2011) until 2012, all over the world.

1970 – 1999

The first colour edition of Blue Peter aired on 14 September 1970, and the last black and white edition on 24 June 1974. A regular feature of the 1970s was the Special Assignments, which were essentially reports on interesting topics, filmed on location. Singleton took this role, and in effect became the programme’s “roving reporter”. Blue Peter also offered breaking news on occasion, such as the 1971 eruption of Mount Etna, as well as unique items such as the first appearance of Uri Geller on British television. In May 1976, presenter Lesley Judd interviewed Otto Frank, father of Anne Frank, after he had agreed to bring his daughter’s diaries to Britain. From 1971 the summer expedition from the previous year was edited into special programmes broadcast under the title Blue Peter Flies The World, televised during the summer break when the team were recording the latest expedition. The first was shown in July 1971 and featured the expedition to Jamaica.

In 1974, the Blue Peter Garden was officially opened in a green space outside the Television Centre restaurant block. By this time, Blue Peter had become an established children’s programme, with regular features which have since become traditions. In 1978, the show celebrated its twentieth anniversary with a nationwide balloon launch from five regional cities during a special edition of the programme when Christopher Trace, Leila Williams, Valerie Singleton and Peter Purves returned. John Noakes contributed a message pre-recorded on film. At this time, Trace introduced the Blue Peter Outstanding Endeavour Award. Its theme music was updated by Mike Oldfield in 1979, and at the end of the decade a new presenting team was brought in, consisting of Simon Groom, Tina Heath and Christopher Wenner. They were overshadowed by the success of the previous two decades and failed to make as much of an impact. Heath decided to leave after a year when she discovered she was pregnant but agreed to have a live scan of her baby, something which had never been done on television before. Blue Peter was praised for this by the National Childbirth Trust who told the BBC that in ‘five minutes, Blue Peter had done more to educate children about birth than they’d achieved in ten years of sending out leaflets’. Wenner decided to leave along with Heath on 23 June 1980.

Sarah Greene and Peter Duncan both joined in 1980, and a new producer, Lewis Bronze, joined in 1982. The 1980s saw the Blue Peter studio become more colourful and bright, with the presenters gradually wearing more fashionable outfits, in contrast to the more formal appearance of previous decades. Several videos of Blue Peter were made available from 1982, the first being Blue Peter Makes, and an omnibus comprising the two weekly editions appeared in 1986 on Sunday mornings. Ahead of the show’s 25th anniversary in October 1983, BBC1 ran a series Blue Peter Goes Silver, revisiting previous summer expeditions. The 25th anniversary itself was commemorated by a documentary presented by Valerie Singleton shown on BBC1 on Sunday, 16 October 1983. This was followed the next day by a special edition of the programme when Christopher Trace presented the annual Outstanding Endeavour Award and Valerie Singleton, Peter Purves, Christopher Wenner, Tina Heath and Sarah Greene returned to celebrate the show’s birthday with the current presenting trio of Simon Groom, Peter Duncan and Janet Ellis who launched a national balloon treasure hunt. On 27 June 1988, Baxter took part in her final show, after nearly 26 years of involvement, and Bronze took her place as editor. Around this time, Blue Peter became distinctively environmentally aware and introduced a green badge in November 1988 for achievements related to the environment. Shortly before, in October 1988, the show celebrated its thirtieth anniversary with a competition to design the cover of a commemorative issue of the ‘Radio Times’ and Valerie Singleton presented the Outstanding Endeavour Award on the birthday show itself. The following year, the award was presented for the last time.

On 13 September 1984, Champion trampolinist and professional performer Michael Sundin presented for the first time, as a replacement for Peter Duncan. He had been talent-spotted by the Blue Peter team when they filmed an item on the set of “Return to OZ” (Sundin was playing the part of Tik-Tok.) After 77 appearances as a Blue Peter presenter, his contract was not renewed. It has since been explained by Biddy Baxter, that he attracted complaints from viewers, stating in her Autobiography that homophobia was not the reason for his departure, “he came across as a whinger….and an effeminate whinger to boot”, “… it was nothing to do with his sexual proclivities”. Sundin successfully continued his performing career but lost his life to an AIDS-related illness in 1989.

In 1989 (and again in 1992 and 1994), new arrangements of the theme tune were introduced. Due to falling ratings in BBC children’s programming, BBC1 controller Alan Yentob suggested airing a third edition of Blue Peter each week from 1995. This meant that it was sometimes pre-recorded; Joe Godwin, the director, suggested that the Friday edition should be a lighter version of Blue Peter, which would concentrate on music, celebrities and games. Helen Lederer presented a documentary on BBC2 to celebrate the show’s 35th anniversary Here’s One I Made Earlier, with a special edition of the regular programme featuring the returns of Leila Williams, John Noakes and Lesley Judd amongst many other presenters. Neither Noakes nor Judd had appeared in the studio since leaving the programme and Williams was returning for the first time in 15 years. A fourth presenter, Katy Hill, was introduced in 1995, but unlike earlier decades, there was little stability in the line-up, with resignations and new additions made almost every year of the decade. The 1990s also saw many more live broadcasts on location, with many shot entirely away from the studio. Blue Peter was also one of the first television series to launch a website. Oliver Macfarlane replaced Bronze as editor in 1996.

1998 marked the 40th anniversary of the TV show. Apart from two summer proms concerts, the most talked about event to celebrate the milestone was a trip behind LNER Peppercorn Class A2 60532 Blue Peter on an Edinburgh to London rail tour. The special train in question was Days out Limited’s “Heart of Midlothian” from London Kings Cross to Edinburgh Waverley on Sun 19 April 1998, with 60532 working the train from Edinburgh. Due to safety rules, none of the presenters was supposed to ride onboard the footplate during the trip. Peter Kirk, who was in charge onboard the train and who was presenting from the footplate, however, allowed Stuart Miles to travel onboard the footplate between Newark-on-Trent and Peterborough. This was the stretch of track which, on 3 July 1938, saw the world speed record for steam locomotives of 126 mph (203 km/h) set by LNER A4 Locomotive no. 4468 Mallard.

In October 1998, Richard Bacon was sacked, following reports in News of the World that he had taken cocaine. This incident followed shortly after the show’s 40th anniversary when previous presenters returned for a special programme. Those returning included Leila Williams, Valerie Singleton, John Noakes, Peter Purves, Diane Louise Jordan, Anthea Turner, John Leslie, Tim Vincent, Yvette Fielding, Caron Keating, Mark Curry, Janet Ellis, Peter Duncan, Sarah Greene, Tina Heath, Simon Groom and Christopher Wenner. Steve Hocking then replaced Macfarlane as editor, at what was regarded as a difficult period for the programme. He introduced a further re-arrangement of the theme tune and a new graphics package in September 1999.

2000 – 2010

The 2000s began with the opening of two previously buried time capsules. Former presenters including Singleton, Purves and Noakes were invited back to assist, and the programme also looked at life in the 1970s when the first capsule was buried. With Hill’s departure and replacement by Liz Barker in 2000, the new team of herself, Konnie Huq, Simon Thomas, and Matt Baker were consistent for the next few years. The Friday edition, as in the previous decade, featured games, competitions and celebrities, but additionally, there was a drama series, The Quest, which featured cameos of many former presenters.

It was at this time that the new Head of the BBC Children’s Department, Nigel Pickard, asked for Blue Peter to be broadcast all year round. This was achieved by having two editions per week instead of three during the summer months and using pre-recorded material. The early 2000s also introduced Christmas productions, in which the presenters took part. In 2003, Richard Marson became the new editor, and his first tasks included changing the output of Blue Peter on the digital CBBC. The first year of the channel’s launch consisted of repeated editions, plus spin-off series Blue Peter Unleashed and Blue Peter Flies the World. This new arrangement involved a complex schedule of live programmes and pre-recorded material, being broadcast on BBC One and CBBC. Marson also introduced a brand new set, graphics and music.

In September 2007, a new editor, Tim Levell, took over. At the same time, budget cuts meant that the programme came from a smaller studio. In February 2008 the BBC One programme was moved from 5 pm to 4.35 pm to accommodate The Weakest Link, and as a result, Blue Peter‘s ratings initially dropped to as low as 100,000 viewers in the age 6–12 bracket, before steadily improving.

As with the previous decade, numerous presenters joined and left the programme. This included the exits of Thomas, Baker and Barker and the additions of Zöe Salmon, Gethin Jones and Andy Akinwolere. Early 2008 saw the departure of Huq, who had become the longest-serving female presenter with over ten years on the show. Later that year, Salmon and Jones both left and the presenting team of Akinwolere with new additions Helen Skelton and Joel Defries was introduced.

On 16 October 2008, Blue Peter celebrated its 50th Anniversary with a reception at Buckingham Palace hosted by Queen Elizabeth II and featuring several former presenters. There was a special live edition of the show broadcast to celebrate the anniversary with many returning presenters and a 60-minute documentary on BBC1 featuring interviews with many previous presenters and production staff, including Edward Barnes, Biddy Baxter and Rosemary Gill.

Writing in the BBC’s in-house magazine, Ariel, in 2009, BBC Children’s Controller Richard Deverell announced plans to re-invent the show to be more like the BBC’s motoring programme Top Gear. Deverell hopes that by adding “danger and excitement”, Blue Peter will achieve the same “playground buzz” among children as Top Gear.

2011 – 2017

In January 2011 Barney Harwood was introduced to the programme as a replacement for Defries, who had departed in late 2010 after two years. Unusually, Harwood was no stranger to Blue Peter viewers, having appeared as a presenter on CBBC for many years, on shows including Prank Patrol and Bear Behaving Badly.

On 29 March 2011 Blue Peter became the first programme in the UK to broadcast an entire show in 360 degrees on the web. Viewers were able to watch the programme via their TVs and simultaneously interact with the television studio in front of and behind the cameras on the website. Viewers were also challenged to play a game where they had to find particular crew members and staff dressed up in distinctive costumes.

The final edition of Blue Peter to broadcast from the BBC’s Television Centre in London was broadcast on 28 June 2011, before a move to the BBC’s new facilities at Dock10, MediaCityUK. The set left behind at BBC Television Centre was subsequently purchased and installed at Sunderland University’s David Puttnam Media Centre in August 2013.

When the new series started on 26 September 2011, after the usual summer break, Harwood and Skelton revealed the new look Blue Peter studio along with the new music and title sequence. Departed presenter Andy Akinwolere was not initially replaced, and for the first time in 50 years, only two presenters remained on the programme. The new Blue Peter Garden, located outside the studios, was officially opened by Princess Anne in February 2012.

From 12 January 2012, Blue Peter has been broadcast all year round (with no break for summer) once a week, its original premiere being on CBBC on Thursdays at 5.45 pm, changed to 5.30 pm from April 2013 then 5:00 pm from March 2015. It was usually repeated on Fridays on BBC One, although this ceased in December 2012. A repeat airs at 9.00 am on Sundays. At this time, Levell left to work at BBC Radio 5 Live; he was replaced (initially in an acting capacity) as editor by Ewan Vinnicombe, who had worked on the programme as a producer since 2007. The reformatted Blue Peter occasionally also included specials and spin-offs such as “Helen’s Polar Adventure” or the Stargazing Live special on other days of the week.

In 2013 Lindsey Russell was voted the 36th presenter via Blue Peter – You Decide!, a series of five programmes hosted by Dick and Dom, where ten aspiring presenters were set a number of challenges to prove that they were worthy of the position. Judges Cel Spellman, Eamonn Holmes and Myleene Klass decided the final three before viewers were given the chance to vote online. Russell joined Blue Peter in September of that year, shortly before Skelton’s departure and the introduction of her replacement Radzi Chinyanganya.

From October 2013, the team consisted of Harwood, Russell and Chinyanganya. The format adapted with slightly different branding and a more classic take on the show, as well as beginning Blue Peter Bites, which are five-minute clips showing just one challenge or video from episodes broadcast on CBBC. Blue Peter guide pup Iggy joined the team in 2014 and Shelley the Tortoise continues to make occasional appearances. The Blue Peter Garden is currently maintained by child gardener George who appears throughout the year. The team made more use of the website with more quizzes and videos such as ‘Blue Peter VS…’ and ‘Ultimate Challenges’ as well as holding a fan club hour after the show where fans could leave comments as to the answers of riddles or headline suggestions and ask guests questions. A popular game on the programme, Spot Shelley was also introduced, where, in most episodes, an animated version of Shelley the tortoise is hiding somewhere/on something and viewers must leave a comment on the website during the show, the first person to spot her wins a shout-out (or some more expensive or weird prizes as Harwood would often joke, such as a house in Spain or a unicorn called Eric). From April 2017, the show reverted to 5:30 pm. In September 2017, Harwood left the show, again leaving just two presenters.

In the summerBlue Peter often challenges its viewers to earn all of their Blue Peter badges (with the exception of orange and gold) through five weeks, where the team look at each individual badge for a week, finishing with the limited time Sports badge which appears every summer with a different design. In the show before these weeks, the team show viewers how to make something to keep their badges in/on and continue the theme through the weeks, these have included the Badge Baton Relay in 2016, where badges stored within a baton tube and the Big Badge Boat Bonanza in 2017, where badges displayed on the iconic BP ship, a 2D model that can be made from paper.

Ahead of their Jubilee celebrations, Blue Peter introduced its first-ever Guest Editor to the show on 19 October 2017 which was children’s author Dame Jacqueline Wilson. Guest Editors have control for the day and plan what they what to show on their edition, as well as taking control behind the scenes.

2018 – Present

A special programme broadcast on 1 February 2018, marked Blue Peter’s 5000th edition. A brand new Diamond badge was revealed for the first time, designed by Henry Holland. This was only to be awarded within the special 60th year of 2018.

On 12 October 2017, it was revealed that outside of MediaCityUK, a Hollywood style walk of fame would be created with the names of famous people who have received a Gold Blue Peter badge. The walkway would lead up to the front of the studios and would help to mark 60 years of Blue Peter.

There were various celebrations across the UK for “The Big Birthday Year”. In January, a competition was launched to design Blue Peter‘s second birthday balloon to be flown. In May, the Millennium Time Capsule formally buried under the Millennium Dome, which was dug up accidentally in 2017 by builders went on tour with various past presenters around the country. A play, “Once Seen On Blue Peter”, ran at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August, with six former presenters appearing in it.

On 16 October 2018, a special one-hour live edition of the programme, entitled Blue Peter: Big 60th Birthday, was broadcast on CBBC. Guests included The Vamps, Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Ed Sheeran, who was presented with a gold Blue Peter badge. Former presenters returned for the show and contributed to the broadcast, including Leila Williams, Anita West, Valerie Singleton, Peter Purves, Lesley Judd, Sarah Greene, Peter Duncan, Janet Ellis, Yvette Fielding, John Leslie, Diane-Louise Jordan, Anthea Turner, Tim Vincent, Stuart Miles, Katy Hill, Romana D’Annunzio, Richard Bacon, Konnie Huq, Simon Thomas, Liz Barker, Zöe Salmon, Andy Akinwolere, Helen Skelton, Joel Defries and Barney Harwood. Matt Baker contributed a pre-recorded message and Mark Curry was represented by a lego model as he had to cancel his contribution due to ill health. The programme was repeated on BBC Two on 20 October. The celebration was also marked by other BBC programming, including The One Show hosted by Matt Baker and former Blue Peter contributor Gabby Logan, which featured Sarah Greene, Mark Curry, Simon Thomas and Konnie Huq; ITV’s Lorraine, where Greene appeared with Leila Williams and Anthea Turner; and BBC Breakfast which featured Lesley Judd. A documentary entitled Happy Birthday Blue Peter was broadcast that evening on BBC Radio 2. It was hosted by Barney Harwood and featured interviews with past and present presenters, as well as members of the production team. As part of the birthday celebrations, a new plant species was named “Blue Peter”. In February 2019 a gritter was named and decorated “Blue Peter”, unveiled by Russell.

On 3 June 2021, the show received a refresh with a new logo, title sequence, music and studio. This was the first major refresh since the show’s move to Salford in 2011. The studio is environmentally-friendly and is composed of upcycled materials from past studios.

On 24 June 2021, Russell announced that she would be leaving the show, after eight years. Her final show aired on 15 July 2021.

Blog Posts

Blue Peter: An Advent Crown For Christmas.

Notes And Links

Max Rahubovskiy on Pexels – The image shown at the top of this page is the copyright of Max Rahubovskiy. You can find more great work from the photographer Max by clicking the link above and you can get lots more free stock photos at Pexels.

Blue Peter – Official page on CBBC. The image at top of this page is the copyright of BBC.

Horror

What is there not to like about horror? It is an escapism from the real world and so damn cool. I love so much about it. This page concentrates on the Horror genre and anything I post about that can be seen in Blog Posts below.

I have been a fan of Horror, particularly Horror films since I was little. I have loved Universal classic monsters, for it is they that started my love of Horror off, even if they scared the hell out of me at first and I hid under my Mom’s arm or behind the settee at first watching them., ha ha. That changed the older I got.

If you mention anything to do with horror then it is inevitable Halloween is mentioned.

Growing up in England from a child to a teenager in the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s, Halloween was an American thing you saw on the telly. There was no dressing up and trick-or-treating, not in my family home anyway. Even when my kids were younger I never really bothered much about Halloween. It was just all too American for me and just liked the English traditions I was brought up with. They had fun wearing masks, bobbing for apples etc. but we never went out dressed up knocking on people’s doors. in fact, I don’t recall ever seeing anyone else do it either.

Nowadays all of the above is a common sight. I am no killjoy and I don’t knock anyone who really enjoys it. I admit it’s a fun thing for kids to do and a good excuse for a party for the adults which I have enjoyed going to in the past few years. When you have suffered from depression and anxiety for as long as I have, just to be included can be a lifesaver.

The main thing I like about Halloween is dressing up and the Horror theme to it. I have never celebrated Halloween in my life in the past because, since I was a kid, I have loved horror. Every day is Halloween for me, ha ha.

About Horror

Horror is a genre of fiction that is intended to disturb, frighten or scare. Horror is often divided into the sub-genres of psychological horror and supernatural horror, which are in the realm of speculative fiction. Literary historian J. A. Cuddon, in 1984, defined the horror story as “a piece of fiction in prose of variable length… which shocks, or even frightens the reader, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing”. Horror intends to create an eerie and frightening atmosphere for the reader. Often the central menace of a work of horror fiction can be interpreted as a metaphor for larger fears of a society.

Prevalent elements include ghosts, demons, vampires, monsters, zombies, werewolves, the Devil, serial killers, extraterrestrial life, killer toys, psychopaths, gore, torture, evil clowns, cults, cannibalism, vicious animals, the apocalypse, evil witches, dystopia and man-made or natural disasters.

The Raven by Gustave Dore.

This is an illustration of the 1884 edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. It is referring to the illustration “Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”

The History Of Horror

Before 1000

The horror genre has ancient origins, with roots in folklore and religious traditions focusing on death, the afterlife, evil, the demonic and the principle of the thing embodied in the person. These manifested in stories of beings such as demons, witches, vampires, werewolves and ghosts. European horror fiction became established through the works of the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans. Mary Shelley’s well-known 1818 novel about Frankenstein was greatly influenced by the story of Hippolytus, whom Asclepius revives from death. Euripides wrote plays based on the story, Hippolytos Kalyptomenos and Hippolytus. In Plutarch’s The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans in the account of Cimon, the author describes the spirit of a murderer, Damon, who himself was murdered in a bathhouse in Chaeronea.

Pliny the Younger (61 to circa 113) tells the tale of Athenodorus Cananites, who bought a haunted house in Athens. Athenodorus was cautious since the house seemed inexpensive. While writing a book on philosophy, he was visited by a ghostly figure bound in chains. The figure disappeared in the courtyard and the following day, the magistrates dug in the courtyard and found an unmarked grave.

Elements of the horror genre also occur in Biblical texts, notably in the Book of Revelation.

After 1000

The Witch of Berkeley by William of Malmesbury has been viewed as an early horror story. Werewolf stories were popular in medieval French literature. One of Marie de France’s twelve lais is a werewolf story titled Bisclavret.

The Countess Yolande commissioned a werewolf story titled Guillaume de Palerme. Anonymous writers penned two werewolf stories, Biclarel and Melion.

Much horror fiction derives from the cruellest personages of the 15th century. Dracula can be traced to the Prince of Wallachia Vlad III, whose alleged war crimes were published in German pamphlets. A 1499 pamphlet was published by Markus Ayrer, which is most notable for its woodcut imagery. The alleged serial killer sprees of Gilles de Rais have been seen as the inspiration for Bluebeard. The motif of the vampiress is most notably derived from the real-life noblewoman and murderer, Elizabeth Bathory, and helped usher in the emergence of horror fiction in the 18th century, such as through Laszlo Turoczi’s 1729 book Tragica Historia.

Vlad The Impaler.

This is a portrait of Vlad Tzepesh (Vlad III). He was the inspiration for Count Dracula. Tzepesh ruled from 1455 – 1462 and 1483 – 1496.

18th Century

The 18th century saw the gradual development of Romanticism and the Gothic horror genre. It drew on the written and material heritage of the Late Middle Ages, finding its form with Horace Walpole’s seminal and controversial 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto. In fact, the first edition was published disguised as an actual medieval romance from Italy, discovered and republished by a fictitious translator. Once revealed as modern, many found it anachronistic, reactionary, or simply in poor taste but it proved immediately popular. Otranto inspired Vathek (1786) by William Beckford, A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1796) by Ann Radcliffe and The Monk (1797) by Matthew Lewis. A significant amount of horror fiction of this era was written by women and marketed towards a female audience, a typical scenario of the novels being a resourceful female menaced in a gloomy castle.

Horace Walpole by Joshua Reynolds.

Athenodorus by Henry Justice Ford.

Here Athenodorus confronts the Spectre. It is from The Strange Story Book by Leonora Blanche Lang and Andrew Lang.

19th Century

The Gothic tradition blossomed into the genre that modern readers today call horror literature in the 19th century. Influential works and characters that continue resonating in fiction and film today saw their genesis in the Brothers Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel (1812), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820), Jane C. Loudon’s The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827), Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), Thomas Peckett Prest’s Varney the Vampire (1847), the works of Edgar Allan Poe, the works of Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Each of these works created an enduring icon of horror seen in later re-imaginings on the page, stage and screen.

Mary Shelley By Richard Rothwell.

20th Century

A proliferation of cheap periodicals around the turn of the century led to a boom in horror writing. For example, Gaston Leroux serialised his Le Fantome de l’Opera (The Phantom Of The Opera) before it became a novel in 1910. One writer who specialised in horror fiction for mainstream pulps, such as All-Story Magazine, was Tod Robbins, whose fiction deals with themes of madness and cruelty. In Russia, the writer Alexander Belyaev popularised these themes in his story Professor Dowell’s Head (1925), in which a mad doctor performs experimental head transplants and reanimations on bodies stolen from the morgue, and which was first published as a magazine serial before being turned into a novel. Later, specialist publications emerged to give horror writers an outlet, prominent among them were Weird Tales and Unknown Worlds.

Influential horror writers of the early 20th century made inroads into these mediums. Particularly, the venerated horror author H. P. Lovecraft, and his enduring Cthulhu Mythos transformed and popularised the genre of cosmic horror, and M. R. James is credited with redefining the ghost story in that era.

The serial murderer became a recurring theme. Yellow journalism and sensationalism of various murderers, such as Jack the Ripper, and lesser so, Carl Panzram, Fritz Haarman, and Albert Fish, all perpetuated this phenomenon. The trend continued in the postwar era, partly renewed after the murders committed by Ed Gein. In 1959, Robert Bloch, inspired by the murders, wrote Psycho. The crimes committed in 1969 by the Manson Family influenced the slasher theme in horror fiction of the 1970’s. In 1981, Thomas Harris wrote Red Dragon, introducing Dr. Hannibal Lecter. In 1988, the sequel to that novel, The Silence of the Lambs, was published.

Early cinema was inspired by many aspects of horror literature and started a strong tradition of horror films and subgenres that continues to this day. Up until the graphic depictions of violence and gore on the screen commonly associated with 1960’s and 1970’s slasher films and splatter films, comic books such as those published by EC Comics (most notably Tales From The Crypt) in the 1950’s satisfied readers’ quests for horror imagery that the silver screen could not provide. This imagery made these comics controversial, and as a consequence, they were frequently censored.

The modern zombie tale dealing with the motif of the living dead harks back to works including H. P. Lovecraft’s stories Cool Air (1925), In The Vault (1926), and The Outsider (1926), and Dennis Wheatley’s Strange Conflict (1941). Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend (1954) influenced an entire genre of apocalyptic zombie fiction emblematized by the films of George A. Romero.

In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the enormous commercial success of three books – Rosemary’s Baby (1967) by Ira Levin, The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty, and The Other by Thomas Tryon encouraged publishers to begin releasing numerous other horror novels, thus creating a horror boom.

One of the best-known late-20th-century horror writers is Stephen King, known for Carrie, The Shining, It, Misery and several dozen other novels and about 200 short stories. Beginning in the 1970’s, King’s stories have attracted a large audience, for which he was awarded by the U.S. National Book Foundation in 2003. Other popular horror authors of the period included Anne Rice, Brian Lumley, Graham Masterton, James Herbert, Dean Koontz, Richard Laymon, Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, and Peter Straub.

Stephen King.

This photo of King was taken at the 2007 New York Comicon in America.

21st Century

Best-selling book series of contemporary times exist in genres related to horror fiction, such as the werewolf fiction urban fantasy Kitty Norville books by Carrie Vaughn (2005 onward). Horror elements continue to expand outside the genre. The alternate history of more traditional historical horror in Dan Simmons’s 2007 novel The Terror sits on bookstore shelves next to genre mash-ups such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), and historical fantasy and horror comics such as Hellblazer (1993 onward) and Mike Mignola’s Hellboy (1993 onward). Horror also serves as one of the central genres in more complex modern works such as Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), a finalist for the National Book Award. There are many horror novels for children and teens, such as R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps series or The Monstrumologist by Rick Yancey. Additionally, many movies for young audiences, particularly animated ones, use horror aesthetics and conventions, for example, ParaNorman. These are what can be collectively referred to as children’s horror. Although it is unknown for sure why children enjoy these movies (as it seems counter-intuitive), it is theorised that it is, in part, grotesque monsters that fascinate kids. Tangential to this, the internalised impact of horror television programs and films on children is rather under-researched, especially when compared to the research done on the similar subject of violence in TV and film’s impact on the young mind. What little research there is tends to be inconclusive on the impact that viewing such media has.

Related Genres

History of horror films.

List of horror fiction writers.

List of horror podcasts.

List of horror television programmes.

Horror Characteristics

One defining trait of the horror genre is that it provokes an emotional, psychological, or physical response within readers that causes them to react with fear. One of H. P. Lovecraft’s most famous quotes about the genre is “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”. This is the first sentence from his seminal essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature. Science fiction historian Darrell Schweitzer has stated, “In the simplest sense, a horror story is one that scares us” and “the true horror story requires a sense of evil, not in necessarily in a theological sense, but the menaces must be truly menacing, life-destroying, and antithetical to happiness.”

In her essay Elements of Aversion, Elizabeth Barrette articulates the need by some for horror tales in a modern world. She says, “The old fight or flight reaction of our evolutionary heritage once played a major role in the life of every human. Our ancestors lived and died by it. Then someone invented the fascinating game of civilization, and things began to calm down. Development pushed wilderness back from settled lands. War, crime, and other forms of social violence came with civilization and humans started preying on each other, but by and large daily life calmed down. We began to feel restless, to feel something missing, the excitement of living on the edge, the tension between hunter and hunted. So we told each other stories through the long, dark nights. when the fires burned low, we did our best to scare the daylights out of each other. The rush of adrenaline feels good. Our hearts pound, our breath quickens, and we can imagine ourselves on the edge. Yet we also appreciate the insightful aspects of horror. Sometimes a story intends to shock and disgust, but the best horror intends to rattle our cages and shake us out of our complacency. It makes us think, forces us to confront ideas we might rather ignore, and challenges preconceptions of all kinds. Horror reminds us that the world is not always as safe as it seems, which exercises our mental muscles and reminds us to keep a little healthy caution close at hand.”

In a sense similar to the reason a person seeks out the controlled thrill of a roller coaster, readers in the modern era seek out feelings of horror and terror to feel a sense of excitement. However, Barrette adds that horror fiction is one of the few mediums where readers seek out a form of art that forces themselves to confront ideas and images they “might rather ignore to challenge preconceptions of all kinds.”

One can see the confrontation of ideas that readers and characters would rather ignore throughout literature in famous moments such as Hamlet’s musings about the skull of Yorick, its implications of the mortality of humanity, and the gruesome end that bodies inevitably come to. In horror fiction, the confrontation with the gruesome is often a metaphor for the problems facing the current generation of the author.

There are many theories as to why people enjoy being scared. For example, people who like horror films are more likely to score highly for openness to experience, a personality trait linked to intellect and imagination.

It is a now commonly accepted view that the horror elements of Dracula’s portrayal of vampirism are metaphors for sexuality in a repressed Victorian era. But this is merely one of many interpretations of the metaphor of Dracula. Jack Halberstam postulates many of these in his essay Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He writes, “[The] image of dusty and unused gold, coins from many nations and old unworn jewels, immediately connects Dracula to the old money of a corrupt class, to a kind of piracy of nations and to the worst excesses of the aristocracy.”

Halberstram articulates a view of Dracula as manifesting the growing perception of the aristocracy as an evil and outdated notion to be defeated. The depiction of a multinational band of protagonists using the latest technologies (such as a telegraph) to quickly share, collate, and act upon new information is what leads to the destruction of the vampire. This is one of many interpretations of the metaphor of only one central figure of the canon of horror fiction, as over a dozen possible metaphors are referenced in the analysis, from the religious to the antisemitic.

Noel Carroll’s Philosophy of Horror postulates that a modern piece of horror fiction’s monster, villain, or a more inclusive menace must exhibit the following two traits which is a menace that is threatening (either physically, psychologically, socially, morally, spiritually, or some combination of the aforementioned) and a menace that is impure (that violates the generally accepted schemes of cultural categorisation.

The Irish Frankenstein by John Tenniel.

This illustration is from an 1882 issue of Punch and is anti-Irish propaganda. Tenniel conceives the Irish Fenian movement as akin to Frankenstein’s monster, in the wake of the Phoenix Park killings. Menacing villains and monsters in horror literature can often be seen as metaphors for the fears incarnate of a society.

Scholarship And Criticism

In addition to those essays and articles shown above, scholarship on horror fiction is almost as old as horror fiction itself. In 1826, the gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe published an essay distinguishing two elements of horror fiction, terror and horror. Whereas terror is a feeling of dread that takes place before an event happens, horror is a feeling of revulsion or disgust after an event has happened. Radcliffe describes terror as that which expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life, whereas horror is described as that which freezes and nearly annihilates them.

Modern scholarship on horror fiction draws upon a range of sources. In their historical studies of the gothic novel, both Devandra Varma and S.L. Varnado make reference to the theologian Rudolf Otto, whose concept of the numinous was originally used to describe religious experience.

Awards And Associations

Achievements in horror fiction are recognised by numerous awards. The Horror Writers Association presents the Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement, named in honour of Bram Stoker, author of the seminal horror novel Dracula. The Australian Horror Writers Association presents the annual Australian Shadows Awards. The International Horror Guild Award was presented annually to works of horror and dark fantasy from 1995 to 2008. The Shirley Jackson Awards are literary awards for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and dark fantastic works. Other important awards for horror literature are included as subcategories within general awards for fantasy and science fiction in such awards as the Aurealis Award.

Alternative Terms

Some writers of fiction normally classified as horror tend to dislike the term, considering it too lurid. They instead use the terms dark fantasy or Gothic fantasy for supernatural horror, or psychological thriller for non-supernatural horror.

Horror Films Since The 1890’s

Horror films of the 1890’s.

Horror films of the 1900’s.

Horror films of the 1910’s.

Horror films of the 1920’s.

Horror films of the 1930’s.

Horror films of the 1940’s.

Horror films of the 1950’s.

Horror films of the 1960’s.

Horror films of the 1970’s.

Horror films of the 1980’s.

Horror films of the 1990’s.

Horror films of the 2000’s.

Horror films of the 2010’s.

Horror films of the 2020’s.

For more Horror film lists click here.

Read more about Horror and notes etc. regarding the above post here.

The above articles and the rest of the images on this page were sourced from Wikipedia and are subject to change.

Blog Posts

Halloween Photos (Part 1).

Halloween Photos (Part 2).

Halloween Photos (Part 3).

Halloween Photos (Part 4).

Links

Alexas_Fotos on Pixabay – The image shown at the top of this page is the copyright of Alexas_Fotos. You can find more great work from the photographer Alexa and lots more free stock photos at Pixabay.

The image above of The Raven by Gustave Dore is via Wikipedia and is in the public domain.

The image above of Vlad the Impaler is unknown via Wikipedia and is in the public domain.

The image above of Horace Walpole by Joshua Reynolds is via Wikipedia and is in the public domain.

The image above of Athenodorus by Henry Justice Ford is via Wikipedia and is in the public domain.

The image above of Mary Shelley by Richard Rothwell is via Wikipedia and is in the public domain.

The image shown above of Stephen King is the copyright of Wikipedia user Pinguino Kolb. It comes with a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-SA 2.0 ).

The image above of The Irish Frankenstein by John Tenniel is via Wikipedia and is in the public domain.

Universal Pictures – U.K. official website.

Universal Pictures on YouTube.

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Universal Studios – Official website.

Universal Studios on YouTube.

Universal Studios on Facebook.

Universal Studios on Twitter.

Birmingham City

There is only one team in Birmingham worth supporting with true passion and Birmingham City is it. I have been supporting them since 1979 when Jim Smith was the manager. I was 13 at the time. He is my favourite manager to date. I am a blue nose ’til I die.

Although I do have a section for Sport on my website, I could not justify sticking the Blues as a subcategory of it. They have been and are an important part of my life growing up to the present day and as such deserves pride of place on its own in my website menu, joys, sorrows and all!

Read about them, and any memories regarding them in associated blog posts and my decades section as well.

For Blues fixtures, results and goalscorers for the current season click here.

There is information including kits, squads etc. for the current season in the Blog Posts at the bottom of the page.

About Birmingham City F.C.

Birmingham City Football Club is a professional football club based in Birmingham, England. Formed in 1875 as Small Heath Alliance, it was renamed Small Heath in 1888, Birmingham in 1905, and Birmingham City in 1943. The club play in the E.F.L. League One (the third tier of English football) in the 2024–25 season, following relegation from the Championship last season. The club’s nickname is Blues, after the colour of their kit, and the fans are known as Blue Noses.

As Small Heath, Blues have played in the Football Alliance before becoming founder members and first champions of the Football League Second Division. The most successful period in our history was in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. We achieved our highest finishing position of sixth in the First Division in the 1955–56 season and reached the 1956 F.A. Cup Final. Blues played in two Inter-Cities Fairs Cup finals, in 1960, as the first English club side to reach a major European final, and again the following year. We won the League Cup in 1963 and again in 2011. Birmingham has played in the top tier of English football for around half of their history. The longest period spent outside the top division was between 1986 and 2002, which included two brief spells in the third tier of English football, during which time we won the Football League Trophy twice.

St Andrew’s, renamed St. Andrew’s @ Knighthead Park in 2024 for sponsorship reasons (although many fans will still refer to it as St. Andrew’s as I will), has been our home ground since 1906.

Blues have a long-standing and fierce rivalry with Aston Villa.

Birmingham City F.C. Anthem

Keep Right On is one of the most well-known anthems in football, famously sung by Birmingham City fans.

Where Does The Song Come From?

The song originally came from Scotland. The song was written and sung by Sir Henry Lauder, a singer and a comedian. Lauder was very popular during the early 1900’s and he achieved international success.

The song was written and composed in 1924 by Lauder and William Dillon. The song was then released in 1925.

The song was inspired by personal tragedy. Lauder wrote the song after his son was killed in action during the First World War.

What Are The Lyrics?

For Lauder’s original Keep Right On, the lyrics went like this:

“Every road through life is a long, long road.

Filled with joys and sorrows too.

As we journey on how your heart will yearn.

For the things most dear to you.

With wealth and love ‘tis so.

But onward we must go.

Keep right on to the end of the road.

Keep right on to the end.

Though the way be long, let your heart be strong.

Keep right on round the bend.

If you’re tired and weary still journey on.

Till you come to your happy abode.

Where all you love and you’re dreaming of.

Will be there at the end of the road.

Keep right on to the end of the road.

With a big stout heart to a long steep hill.

We may get there with a smile.

With a good kind thought and an end in view.

We can cut short many a mile.

So let courage every day.

Be your guiding star always.

Keep right on to the end of the road.

Keep right on to the end.

Though the way be long, let your heart be strong.

Keep right on round the bend.

If you’re tired and weary still journey on.

Till you come to your happy abode.

Where all you love and you’re dreaming of.

Will be there at the end of the road.

Keep right on to the end of the road.

Keep right on to the end.

Though the way be long, let your heart be strong.

Keep right on round the bend.

If you’re tired and weary still journey on.

Till you come to your happy abode.

Where all you love and you’re dreaming of.

Will be there at the end of the road.”

Keep Right On To The End Of The Road by Harry Lauder.

When Did Birmingham City Adopt It Into The Terraces?

Keep Right On arrived into the terraces of St Andrews in the mid-1950’s.

Blues were on our way to Leyton Orient in the fourth round of the F.A. Cup and manager Arthur Turner got the squad to sing the anthem as a pre-match ritual to calm the nerves before a big game.

Birmingham City legend Alex Govan, a winger who played for Blues during the 1950’s, introduced the team to Lauder’s famous song as the club went on to reach the FA Cup final in 1956.

Since then, the song has been adopted as the club’s anthem and the rest is history.

Govan once said to BBC WM: “We always had a sing-song on the coach wherever we went away from home… And Arthur Turner turned and said “Come on Alex, give us something from Scotland.””

“I couldn’t sing “I belong to Glasgow”, he continued, “so I sang “Keep right on to the end of the road”, it was the easiest one to sing… The fans heard us through the windows and it’s been magic ever since.”

As we all know, Keep Right On, has fans’ hairs standing up on the backs of their necks whenever it is belted around St Andrews. You have to be there to truly experience the magic of it all.

Two great examples of this anthem at its finest were before the Carling Cup final in 2011, and after Paul Caddis scored the equaliser against Bolton at the then-named Reebok Stadium, which saved Blues from relegation to League One on the final day of the season.

Birmingham City Legend Alex Govan.

What Are The Lyrics Of The Chant Sung By The Fans?

As you go through life it’s a long, long road.

There’ll be joys and sorrows too.

As we journey on we will sing this song.

For the boys in royal blue.

We’re often partisan.

We will journey on.

Keep right on to the end of the road.

Keep right on to the end.

Though the way be long.

Let your heart beat strong.

Keep right on to the end.

Though you’re tired and weary.

Still journey on.

Till you come to your happy abode.

Where all the love you’ve been dreaming of will be there.

Where?

At the end of the road.

Birmingham.

Birmingham City fans singing Keep Right On To The End Of The Road before The Carling Cup Final Kick-Off.

The History Of Birmingham City F.C.

The Early Years: 1875 – 1943

Birmingham City was founded as Small Heath Alliance in 1875, and from 1877 we played our home games at Muntz Street in Small Heath, Birmingham. The club turned professional in 1885 and three years later became the first football club to become a limited company with a board of directors, under the name of Small Heath F.C. Ltd. From the 1889 – 90 season Blues played in the Football Alliance, which ran alongside the Football League. In 1892, Small Heath, along with the other Alliance teams, was invited to join the newly formed Football League Second Division. We finished as champions, but failed to win promotion via the test match system. The following season promotion to the First Division was secured after a second-place finish and test match victory over Darwen. The club adopted the name Birmingham Football Club in 1905 and moved into their new home, St Andrew’s, the following year. Matters on the field failed to live up to their surroundings. Birmingham was relegated in 1908, obliged to apply for re-election two years later, and remained in the Second Division until after the First World War.

Frank Womack’s captaincy and the creativity of Scottish international playmaker Johnny Crosbie contributed much to Birmingham winning Blues a second Division Two title in 1920–21. Womack went on to make 515 appearances, a club record for an outfielder, over a twenty-year career. 1920 also saw the debut of the 19-year-old Joe Bradford, who went on to score a club record 267 goals in 445 games and won 12 caps for England. In 1931, manager Leslie Knighton led the club to their first FA Cup Final, which they lost 2–1 to Second Division club West Bromwich Albion. Though Birmingham remained in the top flight for 18 seasons, we struggled in the league, with much reliance placed on England goalkeeper Harry Hibbs to make up for the lack of goals, Bradford excepted, at the other end. Blues were finally relegated in 1939, the last full season before the Football League was abandoned for the duration of the Second World War.

Second Division Champions Small Heath F.C. in 1893.

Post-War Success: (1943 – 1965)

The name Birmingham City F.C. was adopted in 1943. Under Harry Storer, appointed manager in 1945, the club won the Football League South wartime league and reached the semifinal of the first post-war F.A. Cup. Two years later Blues won our third Second Division title, conceding only 24 goals in the 42-game season. Storer’s successor Bob Brocklebank, though unable to stave off relegation in 1950, brought in players who made a major contribution to the club’s successes of the next decade. When Arthur Turner took over as manager in November 1954, he made them play closer to their potential, and a 5 – 1 win on the last day of the 1954 – 55 season confirmed Birmingham City as champions. In our first season back in the First Division, Birmingham achieved our highest league finish of sixth place. We also reached the F.A. Cup final, losing 3 – 1 to Manchester City in the game notable for City’s goalkeeper Bert Trautmann playing the last 20 minutes with a broken bone in his neck. The following season the club lost in the F.A. Cup semi-final for the third time since the war, this time beaten 2 – 0 by Manchester United’s Busby Babes.

Birmingham became the first English club side to take part in European competition when they played their first group game in the inaugural Inter-Cities Fairs Cup competition on the 15th of May 1956. We went on to reach the semi-final where we drew 4 – 4 on aggregate with Barcelona, losing the replay 2 – 1. We were also the first English club side to reach a European final, losing 4 – 1 on aggregate to Barcelona in the 1960 Fairs Cup final and 4 -2 to A.S. Roma the following year. In the 1961 semi-final, Blues beat Internazionale home and away and no other English club won a competitive game in the San Siro until Arsenal managed it in 2003. Gil Merrick’s side saved their best form for cup competitions. Though opponents in the 1963 League Cup final, local rivals Aston Villa, were pre-match favourites, Birmingham raised their game and won 3 – 1 on aggregate to lift their first major trophy. In 1965, after ten years in the top flight, we returned to the Second Division.

Investment, Promotion And Decline: (1965 – 1993)

Businessman Clifford Coombs took over as chairman in 1965, luring Stan Cullis out of retirement to manage the club. Cullis’s team played attractive football which took Blues to the semi-finals of the League Cup in 1967 and of the F.A. Cup in 1968, but league football needed a different approach. Successor Freddie Goodwin produced a team playing skilful, aggressive football that won promotion as well as reaching an F.A. Cup semi-final. Two years later, the club raised money by selling Bob Latchford to Everton for a British record fee of £350,000, but without his goals, the team struggled. Sir Alf Ramsey briefly managed the club before Jim Smith took over in 1978 (the year I started supporting them). With relegation a certainty, the club sold Trevor Francis to Nottingham Forest, making him the first player transferred for a fee of £1 million. Francis had scored 133 goals in 329 appearances over his nine years at Blues.

Smith took Birmingham City straight back to the First Division, but a poor start to the 1981 – 82 season saw him replaced by Ron Saunders, who had just resigned from Aston Villa. Saunders’ team struggled to score goals and was relegated in 1984. Blues bounced back up the following season. Saunders quit after F.A. Cup defeat to non-League team Altrincham, staff were laid off, the training ground was sold, and by 1989 Birmingham was in the Third Division for the first time in their history.

In April 1989 the Kumar brothers, owners of a clothing chain, bought the club. A rapid turnover of managers, the absence of promised investment, and a threatened mass refusal of players to renew contracts were relieved only by a victorious trip to Wembley in the Associate Members’ Cup. Terry Cooper delivered promotion, but the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I.) put the Kumars’ businesses into receivership. In November 1992 B.C..C.I.’s liquidator put up for sale their 84% holding in the football club.

Sale And Reconstruction: (1992 – 2007)

The club continued in administration for four months, until Sport Newspapers’ proprietor David Sullivan bought it for £700,000, installed the then 23-year-old Karren Brady as managing director and allowed Cooper money for signings. On the last day of the season, the team avoided relegation back to the third tier, but after a poor start to the 1993–94 season, manager Terry Cooper was replaced by Barry Fry. The change did not prevent relegation, but Fry’s first full season brought promotion back to the second tier as champions, and victory over Carlisle United in the Football League Trophy via Paul Tait’s golden goal completed the lower-league Double. After one more year, Fry was dismissed to make way for the return of Trevor Francis.

Reinforced by players with top-level experience, including Manchester United captain Steve Bruce, Francis’s team narrowly missed out on a play-off position in 1998, and three years of play-off semi-final defeats followed. Blues reached the 2001 League Cup final against Liverpool at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium. Birmingham equalised in the last minute of normal time, but the match went to a penalty shoot-out which Liverpool won. By October 2001, lack of progress had made Francis’s position untenable and after a 6–0 League Cup defeat to Manchester City, he left by mutual consent. Bruce’s return as manager shook up a stale team. He took them from mid-table to the play-offs and beat Norwich City on penalties in the final to secure promotion to the Premier League.

Motivated by the inspirational Christophe Dugarry, Birmingham’s first top-flight season for 16 years finished in mid-table. Loan signing Mikael Forssell’s 17 league goals helped Blues to a top-half finish in 2003 – 04, but when he was injured, the 2004 – 05 team struggled for goals. In July 2005, chairman David Gold said it was time to start talking about being as good as anyone outside the top three or four with the best squad of players for 25 years.

Injuries, loss of form, and lack of transfer window investment saw us get relegated in a season whose lowlight was a 7 – 0 F.A. Cup defeat to Liverpool. Jermaine Pennant and Emile Heskey left for record fees, and many others were released, but Bruce’s amended recruitment strategy, combining free-transfer experience with young hungry players and shrewd exploitation of the loan market, brought automatic promotion at the end of a season which had included calls for his head.

Manager Steve Bruce at a pre-season tournament at Weiden, Germany in 2004.

Bruce led Birmingham City to promotion to the Premier League in 2002 and 2007.

The Chinese Years (2007 – 2023)

In July 2007, Hong Kong-based businessman Carson Yeung bought 29.9% of shares in the club, making him the biggest single shareholder, with a view to taking full control in the future. Uncertain as to his future under possible new owners, Bruce left in mid-season. His successor, Scotland national team manager Alex McLeish, was unable to stave off relegation but achieved promotion back to the Premier League at the first attempt. Yeung’s company completed the takeover in 2009, and the team finished in ninth place, our highest in 51 years. In 2011, we combined a second League Cup, defeating favourites Arsenal 2 – 1 with goals from Nikola Zigic and Obafemi Martins and securing qualification for the Europa League, with relegation back to the second-tier, after which McLeish resigned to join Aston Villa.

Birmingham narrowly failed to reach the knockout rounds of the Europa League and the play-off final. With the club in financial turmoil and under a transfer embargo, manager Chris Hughton left. Under Lee Clark, Blues twice retained our divisional status, albeit through Paul Caddis’s 93rd-minute goal in the last match of 2013 – 14 to avoid relegation on goal difference, but continued poor form saw him dismissed in October 2014. Gary Rowett stabilised the team and led us to two tenth-place finishes before being controversially dismissed by new owners Trillion Trophy Asia in favour of the pedigree of Gianfranco Zola, who would aid the club’s strategic, long-term view to take the club in a new direction.

Two wins from 24 matches under Zola left Birmingham needing two wins from the last three games to stay up, which they achieved under the managership of Harry Redknapp. Redknapp lasted another month, his former assistant Steve Cotterill five months, leaving successor Garry Monk another (ultimately successful) relegation battle. Despite budgetary restrictions and a nine-point deduction for breaches of the League’s Profitability and Sustainability (P&S) rules, Blues finished 17th in 2018 – 19. However, Monk was sacked in June after conflict with the board. He was succeeded by his assistant, Pep Clotet, initially as caretaker. In the 2019 – 20 season, a season that was suspended from March to June 2020 due to COVID, the club once again avoided relegation despite a 14-match winless run at the end of the season and the threat of a further points deduction. Academy product Jude Bellingham was sold to Borussia Dortmund in the summer for a club-record deal reported to be worth up to £30 million, after which Aitor Karanka lasted eight months as head coach before being replaced by former Birmingham player Lee Bowyer. After 16 months and yet another relegation struggle, amid rumours of an imminent takeover, Bowyer was replaced by John Eustace.

America Control (2023 – Present)

After two takeover attempts fell through, Shelby Companies Ltd, a subsidiary of US-based Knighthead Capital Management and fronted by that company’s co-founder Tom Wagner, purchased a controlling stake in the club and full ownership of the stadium on the 13th of July 2023.

In early October, with the team in the play-off places, John Eustace was sacked as manager. In a move that echoed Gary Rowett’s replacement by Gianfranco Zola seven years prior, the board stressed the need for a winning mentality and a culture of ambition across the club and a new appointment with responsibility for creating an identity and clear no-fear playing style. After former England international player Wayne Rooney‘s two wins from 15 matches left Birmingham in 20th place, Tony Mowbray was appointed manager. His need for medical leave brought the interim appointment of Gary Rowett, whose 11 points from the last eight games was not enough to prevent relegation to League One after 29 years at a higher level. On the 6th of June, 2024, Blues announced that our new manager would be Chris Davies who was previously at Tottenham Hotspur as their assistant manager.

Click here to read more about the start of the New Era of Birmingham City in 2023.

Colours And Badge

The Small Heath Alliance members decided among themselves that their colours would be blue. In the early days, they wore whatever blue shirt they had. The first uniform kit was a dark blue shirt with a white sash and white shorts. Several variations on a blue theme were tried and the one that stuck was the royal blue shirt with a white V, adopted during the First World War and retained until the late 1920’s. Though the design changed, royal blue remained. In 1971 Blues adopted the penguin strip (royal blue with a broad white central front panel) which lasted five years. This is probably most Blues fans, of a certain age’s favourite kit (it certainly is mine). Since then we have generally worn plain, nominally royal blue tops, though the actual shade used has varied. Shorts have been either blue or white, and socks usually blue, white or a combination. White, yellow, red and black, on their own or in combination, have been the most frequently used colours for the away kit.

There were aberrations: the 1992 kit, sponsored by Triton Showers, was made of a blue material covered with multicoloured splashes. The home shirt has only once featured stripes. In 1999, the blue shirt had a front central panel in narrow blue and white stripes.

You can view all of Birmingham City’s football kits past and present here.

When the club changed its name from Small Heath to Birmingham in 1905 it adopted the city’s coat of arms as its badge, although this was not always worn on the Blues tops. The 1970’s penguin top carried the letters B.C.F.C. intertwined at the centre of the chest. The Sports Argus newspaper ran a competition in 1972 to design a new badge for the club. The winning entry, a line-drawn globe and ball, with a ribbon carrying the club’s name and date of foundation, in plain blue and white, was adopted by the club but not worn on playing shirts until 1976, after the design was granted by the College of Arms in 1975. The design recorded at the College did not include the ribbon and was blazoned as a football ensigned by a terrestrial globe proper. This was granted as a heraldic badge to the English Football League and was licensed to Birmingham City. An experiment was made in the early 1990’s with colouring in the globe and ball but was soon abandoned.

The first sponsor to have its name on the shirt was Birmingham-based brewery Ansells in 1983. They withdrew in mid-1985, and the shirts went unsponsored until January 1987, when Co-op Milk paid a five-figure sum to have its name displayed until the end of the season, which was a relief to the club not only financially; the vice-chairman claimed that as a “big club… people expect us to have a shirt sponsor and we have been lagging behind”. Later sponsors included car retailer P.J. Evans/Evans Halshaw (1988 – 1989), Mark One (1989 – 1992), Triton Showers (1992 – 1995), Auto Windscreens (1995 – 2001), Phones 4u (2001 – 2003), Flybe (2003 – 2007), F&C Investments (2007 – 2011), foreign exchange company RationalFX (2011 – 2012), lifestyle and leisure business EZE Group (2012 – 2013 and 2015 – 2016), e-cigarette company Nicolites (2013 – 2014), mobile payment enabler Zapaygo (2014 – 2015), 888sport (2016 – 2019) and Irish bookmaker BoyleSports (2019 – 2023). L.A. based sports brand Undefeated is the current sponsor (2023 – ) which is supplied by Nike.

Kits

Click here to see the current Birmingham City kits.

Small Heath Alliance’s first football kit from 1875.

Birmingham City’s club badge.

Stadiums

Small Heath Alliance played their first home games on waste ground off Arthur Street in Bordesley Green, Birmingham. As interest grew, we moved to a fenced-off field in Ladypool Road, Sparkbrook, where admission could be charged. A year later, we moved again, to a field adjoining Muntz Street, Small Heath, Birmingham, near the main Coventry Road, with a capacity of about 10,000. The Muntz Street ground was adequate for 1880’s friendly matches, and the capacity was gradually raised to around 30,000, but when several thousand spectators scaled walls and broke down turnstiles to get into a First Division match against Aston Villa, it became clear that it could no longer cope with the demand.

Director Harry Morris identified a site for a new ground in Small Heath, Bordesley Green, Birmingham, some three-quarters of a mile from Muntz Street towards the city centre. The site was where a brickworks once operated. The land sloped steeply down to stagnant pools, yet the stadium was constructed in under twelve months from land clearance to the opening ceremony on Boxing Day 1906. Heavy snow nearly prevented the opening; volunteers had to clear the pitch and terraces before the match, a goalless draw against Middlesbrough, could go ahead. The ground is reputed to have been cursed by gypsies evicted from the site; although gypsies are known to have camped nearby, there is no contemporary evidence for their eviction by the club.

The original capacity of St Andrew’s was reported as 75,000, with 4,000 seats in the Main Stand and space for 22,000 under cover. By 1938 the official capacity was 68,000, and February 1939 saw the attendance record set at the fifth round FA Cup tie against Everton, variously recorded as 66,844 or 67,341. On the outbreak of the Second World War, the Chief Constable ordered the ground’s closure because of the danger from air raids; it was the only ground to be thus closed and was only re-opened after the matter was raised in Parliament. It was badly damaged during the Birmingham Blitz: the Railway End and the Kop as a result of the bombing, while the Main Stand burnt down when a fireman mistook petrol for water.

The replacement Main Stand used a propped cantilever roof design, which meant fewer pillars to block spectators’ view of the pitch. Floodlights were installed in 1956 and officially switched on for a friendly match against Borussia Dortmund in 1957. By the early 1960’s a stand had been built at the Railway End to the same design as the Main Stand, roofs had been put on the Kop and Tilton Road End, and the ground capacity was down to about 55,000.

Resulting from the 1986 Popplewell Report into the safety of sports grounds and the later Taylor Report, the capacity of St Andrew’s was set at 28,235 for safety reasons, but it was accepted that the stadium had to be brought up to modern all-seated standards. After the last home game of the 1993 – 94 season, the Kop and Tilton Road terraces were demolished (fans took home a significant proportion as souvenirs) to be replaced at the start of the new season by a 7,000-seat Tilton Road Stand, continuing round the corner into the 9,500-seat Kop which opened two months later. The 8,000-seat Railway Stand followed in 1999; ten years later, this was renamed the Gil Merrick Stand, in honour of the club’s appearance record-holder and former manager, but the Main Stand has still to be modernised. In 2019, the club website listed the stadium capacity as 29,409.

In 2004 a proposal was put forward to build a sports village comprising a 55,000-capacity City of Birmingham Stadium, other sports and leisure facilities, and a super casino, to be jointly financed by Birmingham City Council, Birmingham City F.C. (via the proceeds of the sale of St Andrew’s) and the casino group Las Vegas Sands. The feasibility of the plan depended on the government issuing a licence for a super casino, and Birmingham being chosen as the venue, but this did not happen. The club have planning permission to redevelop the Main Stand, but the club and council continued to seek alternative sources of funding for the City of Birmingham Stadium project.

In 2013, the Birmingham City Supporters’ Trust’s application for listing St Andrew’s as an Asset of Community Value (ACV, a building or other land whose main use furthers the social well-being or social interests of the local community and where it is realistic to believe it could do so in the future) under the Localism Act 2011 was approved by Birmingham City Council. This requires any proposed sale to be notified to the Council and provides for a six-month moratorium on that sale to allow the Trust and other community groups to submit their own bid. In 2018, the club’s owners agreed to a three-year sponsorship deal under which the name became St Andrew’s Trillion Trophy Stadium. This would be changed back to St. Andrews in 2021. In 2024 Blues made an announcement that they had entered into a multi-million pound, multi-year naming rights agreement with Shelby Companies Limited, which is majority-owned by Knighthead and certain other minority investors, including seven-time Super Bowl champion and entrepreneur, Tom Brady. It is the largest commercial agreement in the Club’s history. Under the terms of the deal, the Club’s stadium was re-named St. Andrew’s @ Knighthead Park. The Club’s Wast Hills training ground was renamed The Knighthead Training and Academy Grounds and a new fan entertainment zone @ Knighthead Park, will be built, situated on Club-owned land close to the Tilton and Main Stand at the Stadium. These will be launched before the end of the 2023/24 Season.

On the 9th of April, 2024, Blues announced Knighthead’s acquisition of the 48-acre former Wheels site in Bordesley Park, East Birmingham, bringing their total land holding to more than 60 acres, excluding St. Andrew’s @ Knighthead Park. This is a key step toward creating a vibrant Sports Quarter and a new world-class stadium.

A New Look St. Andrew’s

In the first four weeks of owning Birmingham City, which included 100% of St. Andrew’s, Tom Wagner, Knighthead and Shelby Companies made it clear they were going to improve everything to do with Blues, on and off the pitch going forward. They did more for morale for Blues in the first four weeks since they took over than the previous Chinese owners ever did in sixteen years.

The stadium got a much-needed new look in that time that included a giant badge that lights up along with the new lettering and two large screens on either side of it. and what a fantastic improvement it turned out to be.

The following photos were taken before Blues first home game of the 2023/24 season against Leeds United.

Inside the new look St. Andrews showing the improved giant screen.

Inside the new look St. Andrews.

Outside the new look St. Andrews showing the new giant badge and lettering.

Inside the new look St. Andrews.

Inside the new look St. Andrews showing the improved dug-out seats.

Inside the new look St. Andrews showing the improved player’s tunnel.

Inside the new look St. Andrews showing the improved player’s changing room.

Buckingham Group

Despite all the brilliant work that has been done above, the contractor, Buckingham Group, responsible for working on the lower tiers of the Tilton and Kop stands (which include safe standing) had gone into administration. It was announced by Blues on the 17th of August, 2023. You can read about it here.

Supporters

Birmingham fans consider our main rivals to be Aston Villa, our nearest neighbours geographically, with whom we contest the Second City derby. Lesser rivalries include fellow West Midlands clubs Wolverhampton Wanderers and West Bromwich Albion.

Blues supporters are generally referred to as Blue Noses in the media and by the fans themselves. A piece of public sculpture in the form of a ten-times-life-size head lying on a mound near St Andrew’s, Ondré Nowakowski’s Sleeping Iron Giant, has been repeatedly painted with blue paint on its nose. Between 1994 and 1997, the club mascot took the form of a blue nose, though it is now a dog named Beau Brummie (which had first appeared on our football programmes back in the 1960’s) , a play on the name Beau Brummell and Brummie, the slang word for a person from Birmingham.

A number of supporters’ clubs are affiliated with the football club, both in England and abroad. An action group was formed in 1991 to protest against chairman Samesh Kumar, the club blamed an internet petition for the collapse of the purchase of player Lee Bowyer in 2005, and antipathy towards the board provoked hostile chanting and a pitch invasion after the last match of the 2007 – 2008 season, but when the club was in financial difficulties, supporters contributed to schemes which funded the purchase of players Brian Roberts in 1984 and Paul Peschisolido in 1992. A supporters’ trust was formed under the auspices of Supporters Direct in 2012.

There have been several fanzines published by supporters. Made in Brum, first issued in 2000, was the only one regularly on sale in 2013. The Zulu began some years earlier and ran for at least 16 seasons.

Our fans’ anthem is Keep Right On (as mentioned above).

Birmingham City’s mascot Beau Brummie.

Birmingham City fans during the club’s first away appearance in the group stage of the UEFA Europa League in 2011.

Ownership

Small Heath F.C. became a limited company in 1888. Its first share issue was to the value of £650. The board was made up of local businessmen and dignitaries until 1965, when the club was sold to Clifford Coombs. By the mid-1980’s the club was in financial trouble. Control passed from the Coombs family to former Walsall F.C. chairman Ken Wheldon, who cut costs, made redundancies, and sold off assets, including the club’s training ground. Still unable to make the club pay, Wheldon sold it to the Kumar brothers, owners of a clothing chain. Debt was still increasing when matters came to a head; the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) put the Kumars’ businesses into receivership. The club continued in administration for four months until Sport Newspapers’ proprietor David Sullivan bought the Kumars’ 84% holding for £700,000 from BCCI’s liquidator in March 1993. Birmingham City plc, of which the football club was a wholly owned subsidiary, was floated on the Alternative Investment Market (A.I.M.) in 1997 with an issue of 15 million new shares, raising £7.5 million of new investment. It made a pre-tax profit of £4.3M in the year ending on the 31st of August 2008.

In July 2007, Hong Kong businessman Carson Yeung, via the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (S.E.H.K.)-listed company Grandtop International Holdings Limited (G.I.H.), bought 29.9% of the plc from its directors. Although his intention to take full control of the club initially came to nothing, G.I.H. completed the purchase in October 2009 at a total cost of £81.5M, re-registered the club as a private company, and renamed the holding company Birmingham International Holdings (B.I.H.).

Trading in B.I.H. shares was suspended in June 2011 after Yeung’s arrest on charges of money laundering. Publication of financial results was repeatedly delayed, which led the Football League to impose a transfer embargo, and offers for the club were entertained from 2012 onwards. After Yeung resigned his positions with both club and company in early 2014, share trading resumed, and following his conviction, efforts intensified to dispose of the club, which had to be done piecemeal in order to retain B.I.H.’s share listing.

Going into 2015, the Football League made public their concerns over Yeung’s attempts to impose his choice of directors on the B.I.H.L. board despite his conviction disqualifying him from exerting influence over a club. Relationships became increasingly factional, as illustrated by the failure of three directors, including the club’s de facto chief executive Panos Pavlakis, to gain re-election, followed the next day by their reinstatement. On the 17th of February, 2015, the board voluntarily appointed receivers from accountants Ernst & Young to take over management of the company. Their statement stressed that no winding-up petition had been issued and the company was not in liquidation.

In June 2015, the receivers struck deals with the previous major shareholders such that legal action against them would be dropped in return for their agreement not to obstruct any transfer of ownership to their preferred bidder, the British Virgin Islands-registered investment vehicle Trillion Trophy Asia (T.T.A.), wholly owned by Chinese businessman Paul Suen Cho Hung, who in turn agreed that the company would not be sold on within two years. The process was completed in October 2016, leaving T.T.A. owning 50.64% of BIH’s share capital, a level of ownership that required them to make an offer for the remainder.

To keep the company running, T.T.A. arranged loans which it settled with discounted shares to the same value; the process of creating such shares diluted the percentage holding of all shareholders. Attempts to diversify the company’s holdings to make it less reliant on the football club were similarly funded. To reduce the club’s losses in light of breaches of the EFL’s Profitability and Sustainability Regulations, the stadium was sold for £22.8 million to Birmingham City Stadium Ltd, a new company wholly owned by the football club’s parent, and would be leased back to the club. In December 2020, 21.64% of the club and 25% of Birmingham City Stadium were sold to Vong Pech’s Oriental Rainbow, and in April 2021, the remaining 75% of the stadium was sold.

A June 2022 attempt to purchase the club by a group fronted by former Watford F.C. owner Laurence Bassini, involving financier Keith Harris and money loaned by David Sullivan, came to nothing. A consortium led by fashion industry businessman Paul Richardson and Argentine former footballer Maxi López announced in July that they were close to completing the purchase of a stake in the club, and later confirmed that they were providing operating funds, but pulled out in December citing a failure to agree revisions to the original terms of agreement. In April 2023, Richardson, López and their proposed chief executive, former Charlton Athletic chairman Matt Southall, were sanctioned by the EFL after admitting to breaching regulations by taking effective control of the club without approval.

In April 2023, Birmingham Sports Holdings confirmed letters of intent had been signed to sell 24% of Birmingham City plc shares held by themselves and the 21.64% owned by Oriental Rainbow, as well as the whole of Birmingham City Stadium Ltd, to a then-unnamed potential purchaser, definitive agreements to be reached within a two-month exclusivity period. The purchaser was named Shelby Companies Ltd, a subsidiary of asset management company Knighthead Capital Management fronted by Tom Wagner, Knighthead’s co-founder and co-C.E.O. The agreements were subject to approval by the English Football League (E.F.L.), which was forthcoming in early June, and by the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (H.K.S.E.), and an extraordinary general meeting (E.G.M.) on the 13th of July, 2023, voted overwhelmingly to accept. Although B.S.H. retains 51% of the shares, Wagner confirmed that Shelby was responsible for the operations of the club moving forward and that nothing about the way the transaction is structured would prevent them from obtaining the long-term goals they have for the club.

On the 14th of July, 2023, Wagner installed Garry Cook as C.E.O. of the club. A lifelong Birmingham City fan, Cook said, “The landscape of Birmingham is continuing to positively change. It’s young, multicultural and dynamic. It is time for the football club that bears its name, and shares its values, to add to this exciting story. With the support of Tom and the Knighthead team, and in partnership with the city of Birmingham, we aim to be world-class in everything that we do.”

On the 3rd of August, 2023, it was announced that N.F.L. legend Tom Brady would become a minority owner and chairman of a new advisory board at the club, in partnership with Knighthead Capital Management L.L.C.

Honours

Birmingham City’s honours include the following:

Second Division / First Division / The Championship (level 2):

Champions:

1892 – 1993, 1920 – 1921, 1947 – 1948, 1954 – 1955.

Runners-up:

1893 – 1994, 1900 – 1901, 1902 – 1903, 1971 – 1972, 1984 – 1985, 2006 – 2007, 2008 – 2009.

Play-off winners:

2001 – 2002.

Third Division / Second Division (level 3):

Champions:

1994 – 1995.

Runners-up:

1991 – 1992.

F.A. Cup:

Runners-up:

1930 – 1931, 1955 – 56.

Football League Cup:

Winners:

1962 – 1963, 2010 – 11.

Runners-up:

2000 – 2001.

Inter-Cities Fairs Cup:

Runners-up:

1958 – 1960, 1960 – 1961.

Associate Members’ Cup / Football League Trophy:

Winners:

1990 – 91, 1994 – 95.

Birmingham Senior Cup:

Winners:

1905.

Small Heath first entered the Birmingham Senior Cup in 1878 – 79 (ten years before the foundation of the Football League) and won for the first time in 1905, defeating West Bromwich Albion 7 – 2 in the final. Its importance declined with the increase in League fixtures, and from 1905 – 1906 onwards, Birmingham fielded teams containing reserve-team players.

Football League South (wartime):

Champions:

1945 – 1946.

Preparatory to the Football League resuming in 1946 – 1947, the First and Second Division clubs from the last pre-war season were divided geographically between the Leagues North and South for 1945 – 46. Going into the last day of the season, Aston Villa were top of League South but had finished their programme two points (one win) ahead of the chasers but with a worse goal average. Charlton Athletic was second, above Birmingham by 0.002 of a goal. While Charlton could only draw at home to Wolverhampton Wanderers, Birmingham won away at Luton Town, so claimed the title by 0.3 of a goal.

Birmingham City’s trophy cabinet showing the Carling Cup.

Records And Statistics

Read more about Records And Statistics here.

Blues achieved our highest finishing position, of sixth in the top flight, in the 1955 – 1956 First Division. Frank Womack holds the record for Birmingham league appearances, having played 491 matches between 1908 and 1928, closely followed by Gil Merrick with 485 between 1946 and 1959. If all senior competitions are included, Merrick has 551, less closely followed by Womack’s 515 which is the record for an outfield player. The player who won the most international caps while at the club is Maik Taylor with 58 for Northern Ireland.

The goalscoring record is held by Joe Bradford, with 249 league goals, 267 altogether, scored between 1920 and 1935; no other player comes close. Walter Abbott holds the records for the most goals scored in a season, in 1898 – 99, with 34 league goals in the Second Division and 42 goals in total.

The club’s widest victory margin in the league was 12 – 0, a scoreline which they achieved once in the Football Alliance, against Nottingham Forest in 1899, and twice in the Second Division, against Walsall Town Swifts in 1892 and Doncaster Rovers in 1903. They have lost a league match by an eight-goal margin on eight occasions: twice in the Football Alliance and five times in the First Division, all away from home, and once at home, beaten 8 – 0 by A.F.C. Bournemouth in the Championship in 2014. Our record F.A. Cup win was 10 – 0 against Druids in the fourth qualifying round of the 1899 competition; their record F.A. Cup defeat was 7 – 0 at home to Liverpool in the 2006 quarter-final.

Birmingham’s home attendance record was set at the fifth-round F.A. Cup tie against Everton on the 11th of February, 1939. It is variously recorded as 66,844 or 67,341. The highest transfer fee received for a Birmingham player is, according to the Sky Sports website, a guaranteed £25 million up front received in July 2020 from Borussia Dortmund for Jude Bellingham, which made him the most expensive 17-year-old in world football. The deal also included add-ons worth several millions more. The highest fee paid is £6.3m for Croatian midfielder Ivan Šunjić, who joined from Dinamo Zagreb in July 2019.

Retired Numbers

In appreciation of Jude Bellingham’s contribution in a short time with the first team. Bellingham was the club’s youngest debutant, at 16 years and 38 days, and the youngest goalscorer, he completed a full season before becoming Birmingham’s record transfer and the world’s most expensive 17-year-old, showing what can be achieved through talent, hard work and dedication while retaining a caring, humble and engaging off-the-field demeanour. The club retired his number 22 shirt to remember one of their own and to inspire others.

Managers And Coaches

Click here to see the current manager of Birmingham City.

You can read about Birmingham City’s managers and coaches past and present in-depth by clicking here.

Players And Staff

Players

You can read about Birmingham City players’ past and present in-depth by clicking here.

First Team Squad

Click here to see the current first team of Birmingham City and their squad numbers

Staff

Click here to see the current staff of Birmingham City.

Reserves And Academy

For full information on Birmingham City’s Reserves and Academy players click here.

Birmingham City Women

For full information on Birmingham City’s Women’s team click here.

Birmingham City Ladies mascot Belle Brummie.

Club Officials

Owners

As of the current date.

Birmingham Sports Holdings Ltd – 51.7%

Shelby Companies Ltd – 45.96%

Board

As of the current date.

Chairman:

Tom Wagner.

C.E.O:

Garry Cook.

Directors:

Matthew Alvarez.

Andrew Shannahan.

Kyle Kneisly.

Wenqing Zhao.

Gannan Zheng.

Chairman Of The Advisory Board: Tom Brady.

Directors: Matthew Alvarez, Andrew Shannahan, Kyle Kneisly, Laura Torrado, Wenqing Zhao and Gannan Zheng.

Read more from the Birmingham City page on Wikipedia here.

Blog Posts

Birmingham City: Blues History.

Birmingham City: First Team Squad For The 2024/25 Season.

Birmingham City: Fixtures, Results And Goal Scorers For The 2024/25 Season.

Birmingham City: January Transfers For The 2024/25 Season.

Birmingham City: Kits For The 2024/25 Season.

Birmingham City: News For The 2024/25 Season.

Birmingham City: Our 2023/24 Season In Review.

Birmingham City: Summer Transfers For The 2024/25 Season.

Birmingham City: Staff For The 2024/25 Season.

Birmingham City: The 2023/24 Season Archive.

Birmingham City: Trevor Francis.

Birmingham City: Videos For The 2024/25 Season.

Birmingham City: Welcome To New Manager Chris Davies.

Notes And Links

The above information was sourced from the Birmingham City Wikipedia page except for “Birmingham City F.C. Anthem” which was sourced from the Birmingham Mail’s Birmingham City page.

Wikipedia content is subject to change.

The Birmingham City club logo shown at the top of this page is the copyright of Birmingham City F.C. and came from their social media pages.

The Home Kit photos are copyright of Birmingham City F.C. and came from their official website.

The Small Heath F.C. champions team photo from 1893 above is copyright unknown and came from Wikipedia.

The Steve Bruce photo from 2004 above is in the public domain and came from Wikipedia. It is copyright of Wikipedia user Struway.

The photo above of Beau Brummie is copyright of B.C.F.C and came from the Blues Store Online.

The photo above of Belle Brummie is copyright of B.C.F.C and came from the Blues Store.

The Small Heath F.C. original 1875 kit image from above is copyright of Historical Football Kits Birmingham City page.

The photo above of St. Andrews is copyright of photographer Slobozhansky and came from Wikimapia.

The photo above of St. Andrews in 2005 is copyright of photographer Struway and came from Wikipedia.

The photo above of Birmingham City away fans in 2011 is copyright of photographer Ratipok and came from Wikipedia.

The photo above of Birmingham City’s trophy cabinet is copyright of photographer Lokomotive74 and came from Wikipedia. You can view more of his or her great work here.

Birmingham City F.C. – Official website.

Birmingham City on Facebook – This is their official Facebook page.

Birmingham City on Twitter – This is their official Twitter page.

Birmingham City on YouTube – This is their official YouTube page.

Blues Store Online – Birmingham City’s official club store online.

List of Birmingham City F.C. seasons – List of seasons, including league division and statistics, cup results, top scorer and average league attendance from 1878 to the present day.

Birmingham Mail – Official website. The Birmingham Mail is a newspaper based in Birmingham, England but distributed around Birmingham, the Black Country, Solihull and parts of Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Staffordshire.

Historical Football Kits – Official website. They have a very detailed and comprehensive graphic archive of football kits available including every team from the English and Scottish Leagues.

Wikipedia – Official website. Its purpose is to benefit readers by acting as a widely accessible and free encyclopedia that contains information on all branches of knowledge. Funded and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia consists of freely editable content whose articles also provide numerous links to guide readers to related pages with more information.

Wikimapia – Official website. Wikimapia is a multilingual open-content collaborative map, where anyone can create place tags and share their knowledge. Their goal is to describe the whole world by compiling as much useful information about all geographical objects as possible, organising it, and providing free access to their data for the public domain.

2020’s

The Decade My Recovery Began

On November the 11th, 2020 my 2nd Granddaughter Millie was born. She was followed a week later on the 21st November 2020 with the birth of my 3rd granddaughter Sky. Sadly a month later I lost another beloved pet, my dog Rosie who passed away suddenly on the 11th of December, 2020. With that tragic event to go along with all the tragic events of the previous decade and my living environment seeming impossible to sort out I knew I had to try and move because living at Crossfield Road, Kitts Green was slowly killing me.

In 2021 I finally managed to downsize from a very lonely 3 bedroomed house to a homely 1 bedroom bungalow I have been wanting for years but had no chance of getting. Hitting 55 was the best thing that could have happened to me in a long time! At last, I had moved back home to Shard End, my spiritual home. Obviously, I won’t say where for security reasons. I don’t think I would be here to write this if I had not moved so soon after Rosie’s passing, I truly believe that. Steadily and slowly I am rebuilding my life, minimising as much stress as I can. My Mom would have wanted that for me. It is sad that she can’t see where I live now but I know she is pleased with me. I still have mental health problems, they are part of me, it is a medical condition but it is one I shall try to keep under control the best I can. I will have my bad days as well as good ones but thankfully the darker days that wanted me to totally give in are better under control.

For the first time in a very long time, I feel content and I had forgotten since I left school what that felt like.

On January the 15th, 2022 my 3rd Granddaughter Aurora was born. Despite this wonderful event, the year’s start is mixed with very dark thoughts that haunt me. I struggle more with my depression and anxiety during the winter months. I hope my mind gets better soon because it is not in a good place right now. Moving may have solved one problem for me but unfortunately, the feeling of loneliness eats away at me and winter does not help one bit.

My memorable memories of this decade so far are the birth of Millie, Sky and Aurora and moving to my bungalow with lots more to come I am sure.

Television Programmes Index

Blue Peter.