You’re listening to Nelson Riddle and His Orchestra with Drive In, a Capitol 78.
Richard Hollingshead learned a lot from his test run of his big idea. He went through various incarnations of the first drive-in at his home in Camden New Jersey, starting with cars lined up one after another and a single speaker behind the screen. Which, obviously, didn’t work. He gradually arrived at disparate spacing, elevated in the back, and the sound delivery would evolve to the in-car speakers we use today. Or, the last time you were at a drive in. His invention saw the light of day, or dusk, in 1933.
Nelson Riddle is recognized as one of the foremost arrangers in popular music history. According to WNYC’s Jonathan Schwarz, “Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong and Nelson Riddle stand, in my judgement, at the spine of American popular music”
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