The Great Band Era is a compilation album featuring Swing music from 1936-1945. Reader's Digest

Reader's Digest

Reader's Digest is a general interest family magazine, published ten times annually. Formerly based in Chappaqua, New York, its headquarters is now in New York City. It was founded in 1922, by DeWitt Wallace and Lila Bell Wallace...

 released the album in 1965. In 1988, the Recording Industry Association of America

Recording Industry Association of America

The Recording Industry Association of America is a trade organization that represents the recording industry distributors in the United States...

 certified 9 million sales of the album – making it one of the top selling albums ever within the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. The album was released as a ten LP album

LP album

The LP, or long-playing microgroove record, is a format for phonograph records, an analog sound storage medium. Introduced by Columbia Records in 1948, it was soon adopted as a new standard by the entire record industry...

 box set. The album included many swing favorites, as well as new recordings.

Promotion

Reader's Digest sent out a free promotional record before releasing the album. Voiced by Vaughn Monroe

Vaughn Monroe

Vaughn Wilton Monroe was an American baritone singer, trumpeter and big band leader and actor, most popular in the 1940s and 1950s. He has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for recording and radio.-Biography:...

, the record boasted that in The Great Band Era, RCA Victor

RCA Records

RCA Records is one of the flagship labels of Sony Music Entertainment. The RCA initials stand for Radio Corporation of America , which was the parent corporation from 1929 to 1985 and a partner from 1985 to 1986.RCA's Canadian unit is Sony's oldest label...

 sound engineers had "remove[d] all the irritating noise and scratchiness that was always present on the original records, even when they were brand new."

Music

The records contains mostly swing standards by major swing bands. It included an entire LP of "theme songs", or songs particularly associated or played exceptionally often by a band. Besides previous swing recordings, the album also contained some song versions released for the first time, including a version of Blues in the Night

Blues in the Night

"Blues in the Night" is a popular song which has become a pop standard and is generally considered to be part of the Great American Songbook. The music was written by Harold Arlen, the lyrics by Johnny Mercer, for a 1941 film begun with the working title Hot Nocturne, but finally released as Blues...

 by Tommy Dorsey

Tommy Dorsey

Thomas Francis "Tommy" Dorsey, Jr. was an American jazz trombonist, trumpeter, composer, and bandleader of the Big Band era. He was known as "The Sentimental Gentleman of Swing", due to his smooth-toned trombone playing. He was the younger brother of bandleader Jimmy Dorsey...

 and Jo Stafford

Jo Stafford

Jo Elizabeth Stafford was an American singer of traditional pop music and jazz standards and occasional actress whose career ran from the late 1930s to the early 1960s...

.

Sales

According to the RIAA, The Great Band Era sold over 9 million copies in the United States, making it one of the best selling-albums of all time within the country. In addition, the Australian Recording Industry Association

Australian Recording Industry Association

The Australian Recording Industry Association is a trade group representing the Australian recording industry which was established in 1983 by six major record companies, EMI, Festival, CBS, RCA, WEA and Universal replacing the Association of Australian Record Manufacturers which was formed in 1956...

 certified the album as gold in 1999.

Tracklist