The Roof 1933

A poor seamstress girl sours on her engagement to a grocery deliveryman after seeing her sister's abusive marriage. Trying to help her sister pay for a divorce lawyer, she turns to a rich playboy she met at work.

It was a musical cocktail born in a marketing meeting: Two parts easy listening, one part jazz, a healthy dollop of conga drums, a sprinkling of bird calls, and a pinch of textless choir. Serve garnished with an alluring woman on the album jacket for best results. Liberty Records co-founder Si Waronker called it Exotica; the soundtrack for a mythical air conditioned Eden, packaged for mid-century, tiki torch-wielding armchair safariers. In the five years after Exotica—Martin Denny’s 1957 landmark Liberty debut—arrived, hundreds of other ethnographic forgeries washed up in record racks all over the U.S., bearing titles like Sophisticated Savage, Sacred Idol, Chant of the Jungle, Polynesian Paradise, Exotic Paradise, Taboo, Primitiva, Forbidden Island, Afrodesia, Hypnotique, Percussion Exotique, and a barrel’s worth of other portmanteaus. “All of those ica and itiva endings I came up with because I thought I was being cute,” Waronker said. “And I don’t know why, but nobody got wise.”

It was a musical cocktail born in a marketing meeting: Two parts easy listening, one part jazz, a healthy dollop of conga drums, a sprinkling of bird calls, and a pinch of textless choir. Serve garnished with an alluring woman on the album jacket for best results. Liberty Records co-founder Si Waronker called it Exotica; the soundtrack for a mythical air conditioned Eden, packaged for mid-century, tiki torch-wielding armchair safariers. In the five years after Exotica—Martin Denny’s 1957 landmark Liberty debut—arrived, hundreds of other ethnographic forgeries washed up in record racks all over the U.S., bearing titles like Sophisticated Savage, Sacred Idol, Chant of the Jungle, Polynesian Paradise, Exotic Paradise, Taboo, Primitiva, Forbidden Island, Afrodesia, Hypnotique, Percussion Exotique, and a barrel’s worth of other portmanteaus. “All of those ica and itiva endings I came up with because I thought I was being cute,” Waronker said. “And I don’t know why, but nobody got wise.”

Burl Ives parlayed his talent as a folksinger into a wide-ranging career as a radio personality and stage and screen actor. He made his Broadway debut in the Rodgers & Hart musical The Boys from Syracuse in 1938, had his own radio show by 1940, and made his major-label recording debut in 1944. His first charting single was 1948's "Blue Tail Fly" with the Andrews Sisters, and he soon took traditional folk tunes like "Lavender's Blue (Dilly Dilly)" and "On Top of Old Smoky" to the U.S. Top 20.