Your Hit Parade (Time-Life Music)

Your Hit Parade -- was a 41-volume series issued by Time-Life during the late 1980s and early 1990s, spotlighting popular music from the pre-rock era years of 1940-1954, and non-rock and roll songs from 1955 through mid-1960s.

Much like Time-Life's other series chronicling popular music, volumes in the "Your Hit Parade" series covered a specific time period, including single years in some volumes and stylistic trends in others. Each volume was issued on a compact disc, cassette or (on volumes issued through 1990) 2-LP vinyl record set. Individual volumes contained 24 tracks, and represented the highlighted time period's most popular and noteworthy tracks. Also included was a booklet, containing liner notes written by some of the most respected historians of the genre, photographs of the artists, and information on the songs (writers, performers and peak position on Billboard magazine's Best Sellers chart (or, for songs released in 1958 onward, the Hot 100)).

History

Your Hit Parade was first issued in the spring of 1988, with the first volume in the series titled Your Hit Parade: 1951. Many of the era's biggest singers -- The Andrews Sisters, Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Frankie Laine, Guy Lombardo, Patti Page, Frank Sinatra and others—had their biggest hit songs included in the series at one point or another.

As was the case with Time-Life's other series, Your Hit Parade was advertised in television and magazine advertisements, and direct mail. The series was available by subscription (by calling a 1-800 number); those who purchased the series in that fashion received a new volume roughly every other month (on the format of their choice), and had the option of keeping the volumes they wanted.

Each volume was also offered for individual sale. When the series was fully issued, a customer could purchase the entire series at once (or a group of albums, as packaged by Time-Life as part of a promotion), often at a discounted price.

New volumes in the original continued to be issued through 1993, the final one being a volume titled Your Hit Parade: Golden Goofers (an album of novelty songs from the 1940s through 1968). A Christmas Memories album was issued in 1992, and compilations from the original series were released through 2001.

Time-Life continued to offer Your Hit Parade through the early-2000s (decade), after which it was replaced by other series.

In 1999, Time-Life issued two "budget" box sets, each containing three CDs or cassettes of 12 songs each, for retail sale. These were titled Your Hit Parade: Greatest Hits of the '40s & '50s and Your Hit Parade: Velvet Voices.

The series

As with many of Time-Life Records' multi-volume releases, the volumes were not issued in a logical, sequential order by date or era of the subject. In the track information section, the volumes will be listed sequentially by era; the following list is the order in which the volumes were released.

Original series

1988

1989

1990

1991

1992

1993

Later compilations

From 1996 to 2001 Time-Life Music issued various compilations which, for the most part, were composed of tracks which were already included in the original 41 albums. The first four items listed below were identical in appearance to the original series and were available for individual sale upon release. The last eight items below used somewhat different artwork and constitute two 3-CD sets (12 tracks per disc, with set-discs also available individually) which were available in the retail market.

1996

1997

1999

2001

External links

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