Kay Kyser - The Kay Kyser Hits Collection 1935-48 (2019)

Kay Kyser was a bandleader and radio personality who was hugely popular and maintained a high profile from the mid-'30s through to the early '50s, his radio show incorporating a music quiz under the title of Kay Kyser's Kollege of Musical Knowledge which he introduced as The Ol' Perfessor, giving rise to his image where he appears wearing a mortar-board and academic gown. His orchestra's music, always featuring a variety of resident vocalists, most notably Sully Mason, Harry Babbit, Ginny Simms and Georgia Carroll, as well as saxophonist Jack Martin, stayed firmly in the middle ground of easy-listening popular taste, and did not try to compete with the hot swing orchestras of the era, with a style which barely changed while the fashions of jazz and other areas of pop evolved around him, including sentimental or patriotic wartime hits, novelty material and classic ballads. This great-value 73-track 3-CD set consists entirely of hit records, comprising recordings which are listed as having appeared in one version or another of the popularity charts during the 1930s before the introduction of the Billboard record sales chart in 1940, and after that in the Top 20 of the Billboard chart. It naturally features his No. 1 hits The Umbrella Man, Three Little Fishes, Jingle Jangle Jingle, Ole Buttermilk Sky and Woody Woodpecker, plus many other memorable and evocative Top 5 classics which capture the zeitgeist of the fifteen years or so which spanned WWII and its aftermath.