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 4
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Forty tracks. Forty years. One song per year.
Episode 4 of 40 Years of Schoolin’ moves from 1950 to 1989 along less obvious routes — Cajun laments, Western swing, early avant-jazz, hi-fi futurism, teenage garage noise, folk pushed to breaking point, dub mutations, post-punk machinery and late-’80s DIY misbehaviour.
These are not canonical histories or greatest-hits shortcuts. Some of these records were widely heard; many barely travelled beyond their region, label, or moment. Taken together, they trace how music kept mutating anyway — through accident, obsession, cheap tape, stubborn belief and the occasional wrong turn that turned out to be right.
One year at a time.