If you’re looking for some spooky songs to play during Halloween (or leading up to), filmmaker Lindsay Holiday has created just the thing. She’s compiled 13 songs from the 20s and 30s about Halloween. Some of these songs sound like something out of a cartoon and others featured in films. The last one on the list was actually used in Stanley Kubrick‘s “The Shining.”
And here I was just thinking today that I wish there were as many Halloween songs as there were Christmas songs. Turns out I just had to look farther back than “The Monster Mash.”
The songs featured are:
“Hush Hush Hush,” Henry Hall 1932
“Heebie Jeebies,” Boswell Sisters 1931
“The Haunted House,” New Mayfair Dance Orchestra 1931
“Dancing The Devil Away,” Arden & Ohman Orch 1930
“Mysterious Mose,” Rube Bloom & His Bayoo Boys 1930
“Minnie The Moocher,” Cab Calloway 1931
“Spell of the Blues,” Frederick Vettel 1929
“Ghost of a Chance,” Ted Fio Rito 1933
“Them’s Graveyard Words,” Bessie Smith 1927
“The Nightmare,” Cab Calloway 1931
“Ghost Walk,” Borrah Minnevitch 1933
“Got The Jitters,” Don Redman & Orchestra 1933
“Midnight, The Stars and You,” Al Bowlly with Ray Noble’s Orchestra 1934
And if you enjoy that and want more of it, here’s a two hour compilation that includes songs up through the 1960’s.