Today’s subject is music without words.

The instrumental has been popular on and off throughout the history of rock music, particularly at the beginning.

As it happens, the first record I purchased was an instrumental, Rhythm Heritage’s “Theme from S.W.A.T.”:

The record, which got to number one, did better than the TV series, which was canceled after one season.

Anyone who’s played in a high school marching band has probably played all of these instrumentals:

The challenge with instrumentals is that it’s hard to find them if you don’t know the title. As far as I know, there is no software that allows you to hum the song into your computer to identify the name of the song.

A few acts were known for nothing but instrumentals:

Other groups have used instrumentals (technically different songs) as the open for better-known songs:

Some groups have used instrumentals to show off the playing skills of their members:

Movies and TV shows were the source of instrumentals that sold records as well, either in their original or adapted versions:

Billy Preston played on the Beatles’ “Get Back.” Though his biggest hit was “Nothing from Nothing,” he did two instrumentals that got radio airplay, both with an outer space theme:

These next two are from groups that did record songs with words, but they decided to extend themselves with interesting instrumentals (particularly the second one):

Many radio or TV stations used instrumentals as bumper or theme music. For instance, WLS in Chicago used these two instrumentals for, respectively, top-of-the-hour music and contest music:

CBS-TV used these as theme music for its “CBS Sports Spectacular”:

Music from within movies (that is, songs other than the themes) can make great sports music too:

This piece just scratched the surface of rock instrumentals, so we’ll end by demonstrating the heights or depths to which someone — even one person — recording an instrumental can go to: