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"Beautiful music" compliant?

J

johnbasalla

Did, or could, the following songs make it at Beautiful Music radio?

(Stan) Getz/(Atrud) Gilberto: "The Girl From Ipanema". A major hit in 1964.
Some instrumental versions could work. The original album version is longer and has vocals by Astrud's husband near the start. She sings most of the song, however.

Hagood Hardy: "The Homecoming". The song was used for, at least, the pilot film for "The Waltons", (1975-1976).

Peggy Lee: "Fever". I question this one as the attitude of the song seems to be out-of-step with the always nice attitude of "Beautiful Music". What about other instrumental versions?

Sounds Orchestral: "Cast Your Fate To The Wind", A 1965 Top 10 Pop hit.
On the Sounds Orchestral album, there are two other songs that immediately made me think of "Beautiful Music".
 
Are you asking if these songs by the original artists were aired on Beautiful Music, or whether versions with the standard lush string arrangements were created and aired?
 
Re: Haygood Hardy’s “The Homecoming.”

This song had nothing to do with The Waltons TV series. While the original Walton’s TV movie was titled “The Homecoming,” the movie’s score (as well as the music of the later series) was written by Jerry Goldsmith. While the success of the 1971 TV movie resulted in a 1972 weekly series, there was no pilot episode of The Waltons in the traditional sense of network television.

As for the song, it was originally written by Mr. Hardy as a 1972 television commercial jingle for a tea company. Hardy then included it as part of his 1975 album.

And to the original question, yes it was very much a part of the beautiful music format.
 
johnbasalla said:
Sounds Orchestral: "Cast Your Fate To The Wind", A 1965 Top 10 Pop hit.
On the Sounds Orchestral album, there are two other songs that immediately made me think of "Beautiful Music".
Click to expand...
Is one of them "Trains and Boats and Planes"? I hardly ever listened to Beautiful Music radio, but that song and "Cast Your Fate" seemed to be playing every time I did. Or maybe it was their constant presence in supermarket music that I'm remembering.
 
Ma “Contrarian” Gee said:
Re: Haygood Hardy’s “The Homecoming.”

This song had nothing to do with The Waltons TV series. While the original Walton’s TV movie was titled “The Homecoming,” the movie’s score (as well as the music of the later series) was written by Jerry Goldsmith. While the success of the 1971 TV movie resulted in a 1972 weekly series, there was no pilot episode of The Waltons in the traditional sense of network television.

As for the song, it was originally written by Mr. Hardy as a 1972 television commercial jingle for a tea company. Hardy then included it as part of his 1975 album.
Click to expand...
Joel Whitburn's book, "Top Pop Singles" 1955-1996" says, underneath the song's title, "From the made-for-TV pilot move "The Waltons" starring Richard Thomas".
 
Ma “Contrarian” Gee said:
Joel Whitburn was wrong.
Click to expand...
That's certainly a possibility as could be sources, like Wikipedia, that don't say it was part of the pilot. The best bet is to get a copy of the movie on DVD out of a library, and then know for sure. Regardless, it's not that important to the main thrust of this discussion. Thank you for confirming that the song was part of the Beautiful Music format.
 
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CTListener said:
Is one of them "Trains and Boats and Planes"? I hardly ever listened to Beautiful Music radio, but that song and "Cast Your Fate" seemed to be playing every time I did. Or maybe it was their constant presence in supermarket music that I'm remembering.
Click to expand...
Remember that there were lots of covers of songs that fit Beautiful Music. In my "Música en Flor" program service I had several version of "The Girl from Ipanema", all instrumental. Most of the other songs had "covers" either custom recorded for that format or on instrumental albums.

"Cast Your Fate to the Wind" had many covers. I do not recall any for "Fever" though.

Heck, one of the syndicators even did an instrumental of "Stairway to Heaven" and there were several of "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" so anything was possible.

I was always waiting for the Percy Faith version of the National Anthem.
 
Respectfully, John. It’s more than a possibility. And I don’t need to rent the video. Perhaps some background was needed in my answer.

I remember at 12 years old sitting with my family watching the 1971 TV movie “The Homecoming." My dad was not an emotional man. So, seeing my father cry as Andrew Duggan walked into the Walton home with the family Christmas gifts told me that this was something impactful to him. The memory of that rare emotion from my father still impacts me 54 years later. My dad had few Christmas traditions. An annual viewing of “Homecoming” either over the air or on VHS was one of them. It always impacted him in that same way. My dad never quite mastered a VCR. Yet after his death, finding his VHS copy of “Homecoming” still sitting in the VCR made obvious what he last watched on video.

On the air over the years I played the Hagood Hardy song “The Homecoming” countless times. I know the song. Over the years I’ve watched the TV movie “The Homecoming” countless times. I know with full confidence that what Whitburn wrote is wrong. I’m sorry if I’m being too abrupt in how I state this. But for me that 1971 TV movie is an important part of my youth and my memories of my father. I emotionally felt the need to correct Whitburn’s mis-information. My apologies if doing so is considered un-needed, unimportant or out of line.
 
johnbasalla said:
Peggy Lee: "Fever". I question this one as the attitude of the song seems to be out-of-step with the always nice attitude of "Beautiful Music".
Click to expand...
"Je t'aime... moi non plus" would be out of step if you could understand the lyrics, but that didn't stop BM stations from playing a 101 Strings instrumental version of it... as heard at 27:00 in this video with an old couple arguing. The wife complains that she never gets a chance to play the stereo system, and the husband responds by saying "I'm going to buy you a nice color TV".

 
kevtronics said:
"Je t'aime... moi non plus" would be out of step if you could understand the lyrics, but that didn't stop BM stations from playing a 101 Strings instrumental version of it...
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I played the original Jane Birkin and Serge Gainbourg on my Top 40 stations in Ecuador, and there were soon various instrumental versions by orchestras like Frank Pourcel and Paul Mauriat, all coming from France.

is the Pourcel version.

is the Mauriat version.

Both of these really show how soft the Beautiful Music format was in that era.
 
kevtronics said:
"Je t'aime... moi non plus" would be out of step if you could understand the lyrics, but that didn't stop BM stations from playing a 101 Strings instrumental version of it...
Click to expand...
I think you can get a fairly good understanding even if you can't understand the lyrics... :rolleyes:

davideduardo said:
I played the original Jane Birkin and Serge Gainbourg on my Top 40 stations in Ecuador, and there were soon various instrumental versions by orchestras like Frank Pourcel and Paul Mauriat, all coming from France.

Both of these really show how soft the Beautiful Music format was in that era.
Click to expand...
I was a teenager in Greece when that song came out. It was banned not only from the radio, but record stores couldn't sell it (legally) so you had to have "connections."
 
There were three major French orchestras that put out a lot of BM instrumentals. The aformentioned Paul Mauriat ("Love Is Blue"), Franck Pourcel, and finally Raymond Lefevre, who had a minor top-40 hit with "Soul Coaxing."
 
I have the same question about “Love’s Theme” by Love Unlimited Orchestra. Was the original version ever played on Beautiful Music stations in the ‘70s? The strings would fit right in, but I’m not sure about the funky backbeat.
 
RMarino said:
I have the same question about “Love’s Theme” by Love Unlimited Orchestra. Was the original version ever played on Beautiful Music stations in the ‘70s? The strings would fit right in, but I’m not sure about the funky backbeat.
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I worked for a station in 1977-78 that subscribed to TM's Beautiful Music format and distinctly remember that we had both the original and a cover version by the "TM Orchestra" on the uptempo reels (which were called "Change" for some reason).
 
RMarino said:
I have the same question about “Love’s Theme” by Love Unlimited Orchestra. Was the original version ever played on Beautiful Music stations in the ‘70s? The strings would fit right in, but I’m not sure about the funky backbeat.
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Some stations I think went with as is, depending on how "edgy" they wanted to sound. A lot of styles of music, including what was called easy listening at the time, had disco influences. Even Tony Orlando and Dawn had some disco-influenced pop tunes.
 
Ed Nielson said:
I think it depended on how edgy a station wanted to be. I've heard pieces by the Hollyridge Strings that would be considered "cutting edge" for a BM format.
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Again, recalling my experience with TM: We had three categories of music ... one vocal (which always had actual soft pop/rock hits as the first 12 cuts so those would play during morning drive ... we were always instructed to start a new reel in that category at 6:00am), and two instrumental. I already described the "Change" reel ... the other was "Slush" which had the most dreary downtempo songs you could imagine.

TM had different "clocks" for different dayparts. By quarter hour:

6-9am and 3-6pm: CH-CH-V-CH-CH
9am-3pm, 6-10pm, 1-6am: CH-SL-V-SL-CH
10pm-1am: CH-SL-SL-SL-CH
 
I definitely remember hearing "The Girl from Ipanema" and "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" on Detroit's 97.1 WJOI (IIRC a Bonneville affiliate in the late '80s), though in retrospect I'm not sure if the latter was the Sounds Orchestral version or perhaps the original by Vince Guaraldi (of the "Peanuts" specials fame). I'm pretty sure "Love's Theme" was on the playlist as well.
As far as disco goes, one of the most bizarre B/EZ covers I ever heard was the (I assume) Bonneville custom version of "Stayin' Alive."
As for Whitburn, he's made his mistakes. I seem to recall a previous version of his Top AC Hits book where the title index listed "When a Man Loves a Woman" (Michael Bolton's Percy Sledge cover) and Carrie McDowell's "When a Woman Loves a Man" as the same song. As anyone who listened to nighttime Quiet Storm radio in Detroit (Carrie McDowell was a white R&B/dance singer signed to Motown) in the late '80s will tell you, they are NOT the same song. More recent editions where he started listing the songwriters make this more clear.
 
CCBInMI said:
As for Whitburn, he's made his mistakes.
Click to expand...

An acquaintance of mine has worked for Record Research for many years now, and stayed on after Joel's death to continue the business along Joel's daughter. He tells me there are several deliberate errors in the books, so that if someone tried to "pirate" the books by copying the information verbatim for an allegedly "new" book, it would be easily proven by the inclusion of those entries.
 


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