Links to the Hindi song collections for the periods covered in this section:
1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1950s (All) 1950s GEMs
Note: I have made two YouTube playlists of Hindi song GEMs from the 1950s – see below for the links:
GEMs: 1950-1955 1956-1959
Commentary:
The 1950s mark the beginning of the Golden Age of Hindi cinema and music (which actually started a year earlier, in 1949).
1950, the first year of the decade, was a lean year for notable Hindi songs, almost as if the industry was taking a breather after 1949, which was a watershed in the history of Hindi music, as detailed here.
Starting in 1951, the creative process for Hindi music reached a whole new level, and the quality of the songs produced over the next three decades comprising the Golden Age was simply incredible. The following industry luminaries who had made their debut in the 1940s cemented their dominance during the 1950s:
- C. Ramchandra, Naushad, S.D. Burman, Shankar Jaikishen
- Geeta Dutt, Kishore Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar, Mohammed Rafi, Mukesh
- Hasrat Jaipuri, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Raja Mehdi Ali Khan, Rajendra Krishan, Shailendra, Shakeel Badayuni.
In addition to the above, the following music creators started to establish themselves in the 1950s:
- Asha Bhosle, Hemant Kumar (both as singer and composer), Mahendra Kapoor, Manna Dey, Suman Kalyanpur, Talat Mahmood
- Chitragupt, Kalyanji Anandji, Khayyam, Madan Mohan, O.P. Nayyar, Ravi, Roshan, Salil Chowdhury, Usha Khanna (the first commercially successful female music director in Hindi films)
- Indeevar, Jan Nissar Akhtar, Kaifi Azmi, Qamar Jalalabadi, S.H. Bihari, Sahir Ludhianvi.
The above roster reads like a Who’s Who of legendary music makers of the Hindi film industry, and most of them continued with their amazing work for the next two decades until the conclusion of the Golden Age.