Love's Gonna Be Rationed

The Song Spinners sing a close-harmony version of this wartime tune in this soundie.

Soundies were precursors of the music videos that play on MTV. They were meant to be played on a sort of video jukebox called the Mills Panoram. You could find them in bars, diners, night clubs. Put a dime in and you got a random song from a ten-song playlist. Mills and other companies would issue new playlists weekly, so from 1940 through 1946, there were more than 2,000 songs recorded on these three-minute musical films. Some starred well known entertainers, like Cab Calloway. Some featured performers just starting out, like Doris Day and Ricardo Montalban.