browngirl

One thing that occurs to me is that with older musicals, there's selection bias: you're getting songs that have lasted/caught on for decades. Musicals from the same year as The Sound of Music include Gypsy and Fiorello, which I knew about because my father liked to sing one of the songs from it, but also First Impressions, Juno, Lock up Your Daughters, Redhead, and Saratoga. (This is just from poking around Wikipedia, which is good for that sort of list; my memories of such things aren't good for "when did that come out?" rather than giving me some lyric snippets from Fiorello.)