New Orthophonic High Fidelity

I have had a difficult time taking my nose out of a highly entertaining book that examines the best-selling American LPs of the 1950s.
Charlotte Greig's "100 Best-Selling Albums of the 50s" has provided some revelatory insights, smashing some myths I had believed about music.
Perhaps like many late-era Baby Boomers or Generation Xers, I have always associated "1950s popular music" with images of leather-jacketed teenagers with towering pompadours and Gretsch electric guitars.
Record sales statistics do not lie, however, and in truth rock and roll occupied a decidedly non-mainstream place among America's music fans.
With the notable (and historic) exception of Elvis Presley, rock and roll was an "underground" musical style which could not crack the Top 100 of best-selling albums. It is a misconception of the present-day that rock and roll ruled the album record racks of the 1950s. Teenagers may have purchased singles by Fats Domino, Bill Haley and others, but the price of a long-playing album must have been beyond their means.
Rock's influence on popular music would eventually prove pervasive, but not until a large number of money-spending teenagers arrived in the early 1960s and began purchasing Beatles' records.
Instead, most of the album buyers of the 1950s sought soothing sounds.
Among the other revelations of Greig's book:
* Apart from Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue," what we think of as "true jazz" did not sell very well (and even Kind of Blue has sold most of its copies after 1960). Instead, soft-jazz concoctions associated with Jackie Gleason and "exotica" albums of mood music shipped hundreds of thousands of copies.
* Everybody bought broadway and movie soundtrack albums. Everybody bought
"sing-along-with Mitch" records, too.
* Frank Sinatra truly ruled. He produced 10 of the top 100 best-selling albums of the 1950s. Others who sold crate-loads of records in the 50s included Harry Belafonte, Mantovani, The Kingston Trio, Tennessee Ernie Ford and Johnny Mathis.
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