A tribute to old Hindi film music. Songs of the 30s through the 60s.

Miscellaneous

Film Songs From Firmament

February 5, 2020

Guest article by DP Rangan (DP Rangan is by far the most prolific guest writer on SoY, and among its most senior members. If he is appearing after a long gap, I am partly responsible for it as a couple of his articles have been in my folder for a while. I had already scheduled […]

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‘Vandya Vande Mataram’: The story of a Song Perennial

January 26, 2020

Guest article by N Venkataraman to celebrate 70th Anniversary of the Republic (During our days of innocence we learnt in the school that ‘Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka Jaya He’ was our ‘National Anthem’ and ‘Vande Mataram’ was our ‘National Song’, both of equal reverence, and we sung both with equal fervour on special occasions. When […]

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Surrogate Songs

January 13, 2020

Music and dance became an integral part of our films right from the first talkies, as our sources for initial films were Parsi Theatre, or Marathi Natya Sangeet which had music galore, or Mythologicals in which apsaras entertained in the Devlok. These gradually evolved into usual romantic stories, with a third angle thrown in at […]

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Romancing the Route 66

January 1, 2020

Wishing the readers a very Happy New Year with some nostalgia about Americana I became aware of the name ‘Route 66’ after I started blogging, but my dream of driving cross-country through small-town America goes back about three decades when I was a graduate student at Yale. As a country boy landed in the big […]

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Ek bangala bane nyara

July 17, 2019

Having a shelter over one’s head is one of the basic needs of humans. Having one’s own house used to be the lifetime’s dream. It happened only once at the time of retirement when one pooled in all the savings to make this investment. But this meant buying sand, cement, steel, stone-chips, cables, tiles, bathroom, […]

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Songs of Yore completes nine years

June 7, 2019

After about the fifth year, I have been approaching each anniversary of the Songs of Yore with some apprehension whether it has been able to hold the readers’ interest and maintain quality. As I look back on the ninth year completing today, I am quite satisfied, and a great deal of the credit goes to […]

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Chorus Songs in the Hindi Films of Yore: Part 3

May 26, 2019

Guest article by Shalan Lal (After the earlier two articles covering the 1930s and 1940s, Shalan Lal concludes her three-part thesis on chorus songs with the Golden Decade of the 1950s. As we have come to expect from her, these articles do not merely present the representative songs of the period, but also take us […]

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Chorus Songs in the Hindi Films of Yore: Part 2

May 14, 2019

Guest article by Shalan Lal (In the first part of her three-part dissertation on chorus songs in the films of yore, Shalan Lal covered the first decade of the 1930s, dominated by three major studios: The New Theatres of Calcutta, Bombay Talkies of Bombay and Prabhat Film Company of Poona. This was published on 2 […]

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Chorus Songs in the Hindi Films of Yore: Part 1

May 2, 2019

Guest article by Shalan Lal (Readers are aware, when Shalan Lal writes on a topic she writes a research paper as if for an academic seminar, even if it is for a blog like ‘Songs of Yore’. She does a similar comprehensive work to discuss the chorus songs of the films of yore. This is […]

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व्याकरण, उच्चारण और उत्पीड़न

April 22, 2019

Phonetic and grammatical violence in songs Once Raja Bhoj went around his kingdom to see for himself the condition of his subjects. Seeing a frail woodcutter burdened by the weight of the log on his head, the king asked him solicitously, “किम्‌ ते बाधति भारम्‌?” Does the weight hurt you? The anguished woodcutter replied somewhat […]

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