All You Need Is Love: The Story of Popular Music

It is generally assumed that American popular music comes from the coastal regions of Africa; that the slaves brought drums to the United States; that jazz originated, somehow, in...

Thanks to the hit movie, “The Sting”, everyone reckons they know about Ragtime. But do they? This Episode includes the oldest known piece of film (1898) showing what the cakewalk...

This episode takes a look at the origins of jazz and challenges the theories that it is a black music form which was created in New Orleans. Featuring contributions and footage fro...

Exploring the origins of the blues, with contributions and performance recordings by Memphis Slim, Ray Charles, Muddy Waters, Billie Holiday and BB King.

The history of suggestive songs and their vaudeville and music hall beginnings, with artists featured including Judy Garland, Liberace, Mae West, Edith Piaf and Marlene Dietrich.

The story of Tin Pan Alley, where hit records were made to order and the first sightings of the popular music industry emerged. With contributions by Bing Crosby and Perry Como. S...

The story of the musical, an art form that emerged from vaudeville, operetta, burlesque and the British music hall. Featuring a script by Stephen Sondheim.

This episode tells the story of swing. Featuring archive footage and contributions from Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Benny Goodman and Woody Herman.

In the late forties, white record companies labelled commercial black music “race music”. Eventually, Jerry Wexler, then working at Billboard magazine as a reporter, thought of th...

Country music was, originally, home-made music. It described the births, marriages and deaths that happened in every community. It celebrated love, just as it bemoaned the ill-fo...

After Nashville had raped American country music, it might seem that the folk traditions this music embodied had been lost. Not so, because these traditions had a purpose other th...

The story of rock n roll begins and ends in Memphis, Tennessee, in the tiny studio of record producer Sam Phillips. He tells of how he discovered Elvis Presley and of the struggle...

“They were very scruffy” recounts Allan Williams, the Beatles’ first manager, as he describes the Beatles’ early escapades in Hamburg and Liverpool Soon Brian Epstein appeared on...

The sixties began, according to Eric Burdon as “a party”. “The aim of all of us, Hendrix, The Who, The Stones” Burdon goes on, “was to ball every chick in sight”. Unfortunately,...

This Episode takes place almost entirely on stage; fans are always seen from the performer’s point of view. Thus, we begin to feel and experience first hand the pressures being pu...

The film opens at a pop festival. Drug-smoking is very much in evidence. “These fellows will answer to God” says the Rev Jack Wyrtzen, “for all the pollution and evil they have s...