
40 Years of Schoolin'
40 Years of Schoolin’ is a journey through forty songs — one for each year, 1950 to 1989 — retold with stories, stray facts, and sidelong glances at the world that made them. Each episode reshuffles the decades: country beside jazz, doo-wop beside Ugandan funk, all threaded by time, sound, and a dry sense of ideas.
Hosted by Ben Cornish, 40 Years of Schoolin’ mixes storytelling, music history, and a touch of the surreal. It’s less a countdown than a count along — from cracked 78s to neon-lit synths, all finding their place on one long spinning reel.
40 Years of Schoolin'
40 Years of Schoolin - Episode 1
Welcome to the first episode of 40 Years of Schoolin’, a journey through four decades of recorded sound — one song for every year from 1950 to 1989.
This isn’t a history lesson; it’s a wandering path through the strange, brilliant corners of 20th-century music — the hits, the misses, and the forgotten experiments that shaped what came next. Each track tells a small story: from Boston jazz clubs and Navajo chants to Jamaican riddims, Parisian poets, and Sheffield dream-pop.
Hosted and narrated by Ben Cornish, this opening chapter starts quietly with Charlie Mariano’s cool jazz “Sweet and Lovely” and ends in New Orleans with the Neville Brothers’ soul-shaking take on “With God on Our Side.” Along the way there are detours through Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s space blues, Betty Wright’s teenage funk, Breton harp mysticism, anarchist punk, and the birth of synthpop.
You’ll hear context, trivia, and the occasional unsolicited opinion — but the music always leads.
For those who prefer the uninterrupted musical version, a companion Mixcloud edition features all forty tracks back-to-back, without narration.
40 songs. 40 years. One strange, sprawling story of recorded sound.
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