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Welcome! This is the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, and I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we do a deep dive into a different year in Pop and count down the top ten according to our recap of the weekly charts published at the time in Billboard, the music industry’s leading trade mag.

This week, we’re turning the clock back to 1950, a bridge between eras, and the charts tell the story. America’s World War II victory buzz, fading after five years, and the Baby Boom of ’46 and ’47? Cooling off as headlines turned grim.

In ’49, the Soviets tested their first A-bomb and China fell to communism. Then came June of 1950: war in Korea as North invaded South, dragging the U.S. into another hot conflict—this time against a shadowy, ideological enemy that wasn’t just “over there,” but creeping around right in our back yards.

In January, Alger Hiss—a big shot in the Roosevelt State Department—nailed for lying about his Soviet spy ties. Then a married couple, the Rosenbergs—Julius and Ethel—busted for passing atomic secrets. Suddenly, your new detached single-family home out in a suburb that barely existed five years ago? Feels a little less cozy and idyllic when you’re side-eyein’ your new neighbors over the picket fence. And every night, TV—brand-new itself—beamed Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, stoking that paranoia, saying communist infiltrators are everywhere.

Suburbs, spies, cold wars, nukes… TV: all that newness had Americans looking for solace, comfort and validation, and they found it—many of them—in nostalgia.

You know how during the Covid-19 pandemic, Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” from the ’80s was in the top ten for five weeks after appearing in Netflix’s Stranger Things? Well, in 1947 as the Cold War was coming into focus, a record from 1933 was #1 for 15 weeks, Ted Weems’ “Heartaches.” And at the same time, ’20s Singer Al Jolson, back in the top five with “Anniversary Song” just as three different top10 versions of “The Old Lamplighter” were finishing out their runs—an ode to gaslit streets (most towns had switched to electric during the war).

In ’48 it was Dixieland, throwback Jazz from the early ’20s: Pee Wee Hunt’s “Twelfth Street Rag,” #1 for six weeks, and in ’49, Western music topped the charts: Vaughn Monroe’s “Riders in the Sky (A Cowboy Legend),” #1 for 13 weeks, and right after, Frankie Laine locking down the top spot all Fall—15 straight weeks—with his two Western-themed hits “That Lucky Old Sun” and “Mule Train,” as Singing Cowboy Jimmy Wakely’s Novelty Duet “Slippin’ Around” with Margaret Whiting beckoned at #2 or 3.

And Hollywood leaned in. The Musical Annie Get Your Gun hit theaters in 1950 starring Actress (and Pop Star since the mid-’40s) Betty Hutton: Variety‘s #5 top-grossing film of 1950. And Westerns soon outnumbered all other movie genres combined. Moviegoers couldn’t get enough. The Wild West “Frontier Era” and the real Annie Oakley in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Shows, still within living memory for millions.

Big Band Swing also had a comeback of sorts in ’49 and ’50, and a music craze out of New York’s Greenwich Village had Decca Records’ new head of A&R doing end runs around his colleagues to sign a Vocal Group that, once they hit, had Billboard and Variety convening joint seminars with Musicologists to classify them. Were they Country? Pop? R&B? More on those as we count down the top hits from 1950 here on this week’s Chartcrush.

#10 Anton Karas – The Third Man Theme

But we’re kicking off at #10 with something new for 1950: a theme from an acclaimed film noir that unleashed, not just a new song and Artist, but an instrument no one had heard before. Its vibrating strings, the background of the film’s title sequence, and the London Records 45 says it right on the label “zither solo.”

It’s the first of two different versions of the theme in our countdown: the original heard in the film, by the Busker that Movie Director Carol Reed hired off the street outside a Vienna wine bar to do the film’s music. And it only notched one week at #1 in our Chartcrush ranking for 1950 that, as we do for all pre-Hot100 years, combines Billboard‘s three separate weekly Pop charts—Sales, Airplay and Jukeboxes—into a single Hot100-style weekly ranking, and from that we rank the year with the same algorithm as Hot100 years.

But it had 13 weeks in the top ten on that combined ranking thanks to 11 at the top of the Best-Sellers chart, which gets it into the countdown at #10: Anton Karas’ “The Third Man Theme.”

The Third Man, voted best British movie all-time by the British Film Institute in 1999, about a Writer who travels to Vienna for a job, only to learn upon arrival that the guy who hired him has just been fatally hit by a car crossing the street—and from there the plot thickens, with twists and turns aplenty. It’s the movie Roger Ebert said inspired him to become a critic.

Anton Karas, the Viennese Street Busker, at first scoffed at the idea of doing a film score and got homesick while working on it in England, but it made him an international star—a Teen Princess Margaret among his biggest fans.

Again, we’re not done with “The Third Man Theme.” Karas’ topped Billboard‘s Best Sellers, but a less quirky, smoothed-out version with guitar—no zither—ruled on Jukeboxes for 11 weeks, and that’s still to come here on our 1950 Chartcrush countdown.

#9 Kay Starr – Bonaparte’s Retreat

Next up at #9, a Singer who cut her first records at just 16 filling in for Marion Hutton in Glenn Miller’s Band for two weeks in 1938, but it was another 12 years before she broke through as a Solo Act in 1950. The Polka “Hoop-De-Doo,” her first top ten in July, but Perry Como’s version grabbed the bigger slice of the chart action. Her only competition with this one, though, was version by Jazz Drummer Gene Krupa’s Band with a Male Vocalist, so she pretty much had a clear lane with the song and got 16 weeks in the top ten. At #9 it’s Kay Starr with “Bonaparte’s Retreat.”

“Bonaparte’s Retreat,” the second of Kay Starr’s 11 top tens through ’56, making her the #2 top-charting Female Solo Act of the ’50s, pre-Elvis. Her last big hit in ’56, “The Rock and Roll Waltz” was #1 the week “Heartbreak Hotel” debuted.

The song “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” a relic from the 1800s, but with a twist: Country Bandleader Pee Wee King and Fiddler Redd Stewart’s lyrics, which have the Singer wooing a girl while a Fiddler plays the old standard in the background. Does that sound familiar? Well, King recycled that narrative gimmick from his 1946 song “The Tennessee Waltz,” which Patti Page took to #1 on all three Billboard charts—Sales, Airplay, Jukeboxes—for eight straight weeks at the start of ’51, and simultaneously #1 on the Country and R&B charts to boot.

#8 Patti Page – All My Love (Bolero)

Page, the #1 Female Solo Act in the pre-Rock ‘n Roll Pop Singer (or Crooner) ’50s, and her breakout hit is up next in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1950. Her signature multi-tracked vocals—at first just a studio workaround when Mercury wouldn’t approve a Backup Singer: honed to perfection on previous discs back to ’48, but not this one, and it was still her first #1, for a week at Thanksgiving, just before “Tennessee Waltz” (with overdubbed harmonies aplenty) conquered the world.

At #8, it’s Patti Page’s version of a French tune with a bolero rhythm, new English lyrics and a snappy Tex-Mex arrangement, “All My Love.”

Clara Ann Fowler started out singing on the radio in high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma—dubbed “Patti Page” when she got her own 15-minute show sponsored by the local dairy, Page Milk. In town for a gig with the Band he managed, Jack Rael heard her scanning the radio dial in his hotel room, tracked her down, and next thing she’s in Chicago, on the air nationally, sitting in with the “King of Swing,” Benny Goodman, and signed to then-fledgling Mercury Records, where she stayed ’til 1962. And her partnership with Rael lasted nearly 50 years.

Her breakout hit “All My Love” we just heard at #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1950: eclipsed just weeks later by “Tennessee Waltz,” our #1 song of 1951. “I Went to Your Wedding” was 1952’s #6 song and “The Doggie in the Window“, #6 for ’53. That’s four straight years with a record in the top ten on the year—something only one other Act in the 20th century managed: Elton John in the mid-’70s.

#7 Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye (vocal, Don Cornell) – It Isn’t Fair

Now speaking of Benny Goodman and for that matter all the Big Swing Jazz Bands, the hits had gotten pretty scarce since the War, for reasons explored in other episodes: the ’42-’44 musicians’ strike, the rise of star Vocalists like Sinatra and Perry Como, wartime rationing, the draft, the federal cabaret tax on—not all venues, just ones that permitted dancing!

But Postwar, the booming economy and white picket fences out in the ‘burbs made Dance Bands even less relevant. What were you gonna do, Lindy Hop to a Hot Jazz record in your living room? And what looked better on your tiny black and white TV screen, a wide shot of a Bandstand or a glamorous Singer? C’mon!

Yet some Big Bands thrived: so-called “Sweet Bands” cranking out polished renditions of Pop tunes for radios, parlors and genteel gatherings, not dance halls, making bank on record royalties, network radio and extended hotel residencies.

At #7, one of the quintessential Sweet Bands since the late ’30s, featuring a Singer who’d been with the Band since before the War, but gets a rare on-record namecheck here. He was already halfway out the door to start his solo career. Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye, vocal by Don Cornell, “It Isn’t Fair.”

“More sway than swing,” wrote the New York Times in Sammy Kaye’s 1987 obituary. Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye featuring Don Cornell on an update of a 1933 hit, “It Isn’t Fair,” #7 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1950’s top ten hits.

Now while Postwar Pop clearly favored Singers and “Sweet Bands,” Swing Jazz did stage a brief comeback on the charts in ’49 and ’50. Tommy Dorsey, back with two top tens in late ’49, and Ralph Flanagan, a newcomer channeling the ghost of Glenn Miller with eerie precision, and scoring 11 minor hits in 1950. Even Benny Goodman grazed the DJ chart with his version of “It Isn’t Fair.” Just a blip compared to the continuing success of Sweet Bands, but ten years after its heyday, Swing, finally getting a little retro-hip love from the tastemakers.

#6 Tony Martin – There’s No Tomorrow

At #6, a Movie Star/Crooner whose career stretched back to the mid-’30s—though it nearly derailed during the War when he got bounced from the Navy for trying to bribe his way into an officer’s rank. But fate had other plans. Drafted into the Army, he was assigned to Captain Glenn Miller’s Army Air Forces Band—like “stumbl[ing] into heaven through the side door,” he later said.

Now, like Kay Starr back at #9, Pop superstardom had eluded him for years, but not anymore. A song adapted from the Italian classic “O Sole Mio“—same tune that inspired Elvis’ “It’s Now or Never” a decade later—it’s Tony Martin’s “There’s No Tomorrow.”

Taking a cue from Vic Damone and Frankie Laine’s emotive hits in ’49, Tony Martin leaned in to the drama and flexed his pipes like never before on “There’s No Tomorrow,” 18 weeks in the top ten, January to April and #6 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1950.

And it led a parade of similar chart-toppers over the next few years by Eddie Fisher, Mario Lanza, Tony Bennett, Johnnie Ray, Al Martino—the era of operatic Male belt-it-out crooning, perfect for early TV and not equaled ’til the Female equivalent 40 years later with Whitney, Mariah, Celine and Toni Braxton in the ’90s.

In 1958, at a Friars Club Roast for Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, Comedian Harry Einstein (father of Albert Brooks and Bob “Super Dave” Einstein) suffered a fatal heart attack and Martin, put on the spot to sing, launched into “There’s No Tomorrow.” Yikes! His big ’51 hit, the playful “I Get Ideas” might’ve worked better.

But epic gaffes aside, Tony Martin stayed hitched to Actress/Dancer Cyd Charisse from 1948 until her death in 2008 a month after their sixtieth anniversary. File under successful showbiz marriages. Martin died in 2012 at age 98.

#5 Ames Brothers – Sentimental Me

At #5, another breakout act in 1950—and another first: the prototype, if you will, of the clean-cut White Male Vocal Groups that soon flooded the charts. Matching sweaters, starched smiles, at least one guy named Vic—and always, always four of them. Four Lads, Four Aces, Four Coins, Four Preps… Crew Cuts.

They were on a new label too: the first top tens for Coral Records, future launchpad of The McGuire Sisters, Buddy Holly, and Don Cornell, the Singer of our #7 song “It Isn’t Fair,” after his solo debut on RCA fizzled. The record was a double-sided hit. The Novelty shout-along “Rag Mop” on the A-side briefly hit #1 first, beating six competing versions including one by the aforementioned Ralph Flanagan Orchestra: the “Glenn Miller Sound” guys. But it was the flip that stuck around: sentimental, sweet, and smooth as a fresh dab of Brylcreem. At #5, it’s The Ames Brothers’ “Sentimental Me.”

The Ames Brothers, “Sentimental Me,” #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1950—the second (after “Rag Mop” on the A-side) of their over 30 chart hits in the ’50s, which include our #2 song of 1953, “You You You.”

And they were actual Brothers—Joe, Gene, Vic, and Ed—sons of Russian-Jewish immigrants in the Boston area. And they knew how to scratch America’s Nostalgia itch in 1950 just right: simpler times, sweeter songs—no global crises, no atomic chess; just clean harmony and a chorus to slow dance to at home with the lights down low.

#4 Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians (guitar, Don Rodney) – The 3rd Man Theme

OK, at #4, the last gasp of a chart phenomenon that’d happened every year since 1943: a song so big that more than one version of it made the year’s top ten records. In 1947, there were two! But it didn’t happen again after 1950, and 1957 was the last year the same song notched two versions the year’s top 100.

The music biz was shifting, away from Tin Pan Alley Publishers, Composers and “plug songs” to recordings as definitive works: shaped by Performers, Producers, Labels—even Hollywood studios. “Tennessee Waltz” was the last song to sell over a million copies of sheet music, and in ’63 Billboard pulled the plug on its Honor Roll of Hits chart that ranked songs—not records—tallying all versions plus sheet music sales.

Back at #10 we heard the Anton Karas original from the movie—the one that topped the Sales charts and started a zither craze. At #4, the one with guitar that also sold well but absolutely dominated on Jukeboxes. Speaking of “Sweet Bands” soldiering on into the ’50s, it’s Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians’ smoothed-out version of “The 3rd Man Theme.”

Bandleader Guy Lombardo’s version of “The Third Man Theme,” #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1950. Haunting and mysterious in the film, but in Lombardo’s hands? Silky-smooth and ballroom-ready—noir interpreted from the bandstand of the Roosevelt Hotel!

And no surprise that it was the bigger hit. Until Anton Karas’ original, it was almost unheard of for the actual version of a song in a movie to even be released as a single in the U.S., let alone crack the top ten. Different story across the pond, though: in the U.K., Karas’ was out as “The Harry Lime Theme” and even more ubiquitous. So much so, in fact, that if you caught Peter Jackson’s Beatles doc Get Back, you saw the Fab Four casually jamming it in the studio, in 1969.

#3 Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye (vocal, Tony Alamo and The Kaydets) – Harbor Lights

At #3, a familiar standard by 1950, published in Britain in ’37 and two American versions were minor hits. Then it turned up as the theme to John Ford’s 1940 seafaring Drama The Long Voyage Home. But in 1950, it went full Hawaiian: gauzy harmonies and a sleepy steel guitar that had folks swapping Cold War jitters for sunny daydreams and coconut-scented breezes.

It’s Sammy Kaye again, now on Columbia after 12 years with RCA, and with a different Singer—remember, Don Cornell went solo after cutting “It Isn’t Fair.” At #3, “Harbor Lights.”

“Harbor Lights,” Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye’s second hit in our countdown, vocal by Tony Alamo—not the rhinestone-studded cult leader and convicted child sex trafficker, just a Crooner who, unfortunately, had the same name.

Kaye and his Band had been doing the song for years on his radio show Sunday Serenade, and his record left six others in the dust, topping the Jukebox chart for four weeks and Best-Sellers for two.

Hawaiian sounds had first wowed crowds all the way back in 1915 at The Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, and then again in 1938, after “Sweet Leilani” from the Musical Waikīkī Wedding starring Bing Crosby won Best Song at the Oscars.

But all wrapped in Postwar studio gloss, Kaye’s version fed a nation hungry for lush, faraway sounds—and just a year later, Capitol Records’ House Arranger/Conductor Les Baxter’s Ritual of the Savage LP launched a whole genre that scratched the itch through the hi-fi ’50s and beyond: Exotica. More on Baxter in a few.

#2 Gordon Jenkins and His Orchestra and The Weavers – Goodnight Irene

But first, the record Billboard named 1950’s #1, but here our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, it’s #2—just a hair behind our #1, which had a couple more weeks in the top ten. Seven weeks at #1 on all three Billboard charts, driven by the same hunger for rootsy sounds that powered 1949’s Cowboy-themed hits.

That crowd got something new in 1950 thanks to Decca Records’ new top A&R man—a guy from Webster Groves, Missouri known for lush, cinematic orchestrations, whose own debut LP Manhattan Tower in ’46 was a spoken-word song cycle about a glamor-struck Midwesterner dazzled by New York.

Now living the dream in the Big Apple for real, he comes under the spell of the hottest Act down in hip Greenwich Village and is eager to sign them. But his colleagues at the label? Not so much—including Dave Kapp, the brother of Decca’s founder. So he brings the Group in to one of his own sessions and gives himself top billing on the record. Sneaky! And it’s a huge hit—what a coup! Just one problem: it’s 1950 and the group? Well, they’re Communists!

At #2 it’s Gordon Jenkins & Orchestra and The Weavers, a song they learned from Bluesman Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter who’d been spending a lot of time in the Village since his release from the Louisiana State Pen, “Goodnight Irene.”

“Goodnight Irene,” Gordon Jenkins and The Weavers at #2, with the flip, “Tzena Tzena Tzena,” a respectable #21 on our Chartcrush 1950 ranking. But just before they debuted on the charts in July, the hammer dropped: Pete Seeger, one of 151 media personalities outed in Red Channels, the blueprint for the Hollywood blacklist, first published in the anticommunist journal Counterattack in June, literally the same week North Korea invaded the South and the Cold War turned hot.

Back in ’46, the new hardline General Secretary of the American Communist Party had called for party members to use art as a “weapon in the class struggle,” and Seeger had answered with the bi-coastal activist song collective People’s Songs. And his earlier group The Almanac Singers had been so outspoken that a major New York paper ran the headline “Commie Singers Try to Infiltrate Radio” after they sang on network radio in ’42.

Country music legend Tex Ritter had been part of the Greenwich Village scene in the late ’40s and later told The New York Times: “It got to the point there for a few years where it was very difficult to tell where Folk music ended and Communism began.”

Still, the blacklist didn’t bite right away; The Weavers notched two more top tens in ’51. But airplay faded, gigs dried up, and by ’53 they were so radioactive, Decca didn’t just drop them—they scrubbed their entire catalog. And aside from a splashy Weavers reunion at Carnegie Hall post-McCarthy in ’55, the whole Folk genre stayed on life support until “Tom Dooley” in 1958 by the squeaky-clean Kingston Trio.

#1 Nat “King” Cole – Mona Lisa

Well, we’ve been counting down the top ten hits of 1950 here on this week’s Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, and we’re down to #1: the first year-end chart topper by a Black Artist since The Ink Spots’ “The Gypsy” in 1946, per our Chartcrush rankings.

It’s the biggest hit version of 1950’s Oscar-winning Best Song, from Paramount’s Captain Carey, U.S.A.—like The Third Man, a film noir set in Postwar Europe, starring Alan Ladd as an ex-intelligence officer hunting a traitor. In flashbacks, a Street Accordionist plays the haunting melody when German patrols appear.

All the labels rushed out versions, but none of the other six that charted even cracked the top ten. This one dominated, with nine weeks at #1 on our blended Sales, Airplay, and Jukebox ranking—and another nine at #2 stuck behind “Goodnight Irene.” It was close, but at #1, it’s Nat “King” Cole’s “Mona Lisa.”

Nat “King” Cole’s “Mona Lisa” at #1 on our Chartcrush countdown of 1950’s top hits: his second appearance in a year-end top ten. “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons,” our #7 song of 1947, when he was billed as The King Cole Trio, his Jazz Combo. And his first solo hit, “Nature Boy,” just misses our 1948 countdown at #11.

Believe it or not, Cole never set out to be a Singer, just a Jazz Pianist. But the story goes, a drunk patron at a bar in L.A. goaded him into singing during a set, and the tune he picked, “Sweet Lorraine,” became his first record.

Of the dozen or so versions of “Mona Lisa” cut in 1950, Songwriter Jay Livingston was very clearly partial to Nat’s. Not only did he pitch him the song to record (for the B-side of his latest single); together they hit the promo circuit, hand-delivering copies to radio stations, and that hustle flipped the script: “Mona Lisa” was the hit, and the A-side Capitol was pushing didn’t even chart.

By the way, Les Baxter I mentioned earlier: the credited Arranger/Conductor on “Mona Lisa,” as on numerous other Capitol releases, but word is, all he did was wave that baton. The plush, hypnotic arrangement, cooked up by his young protégé: future Sinatra collaborator Nelson Riddle.

Bonus

Well there you go: the top ten songs of 1950 according to our Chartcrush recap of Billboard‘s weekly Sales, Airplay and Jukebox charts. Again, our ranking derived by combining those three pre-Hot100 charts into a Hot100-style chart, then applying the same method we use for Hot100 years to rank the songs.

But going back to the source—Billboard‘s three published year-end Pop charts for 1950—there were records that made the top ten on two out of the three, yet missed the top ten on our Chartcrush ranking. So since we have some extra time, let’s shine a little light on those.

#15 Gary Crosby and Friend with Matty Matlock’s All-Stars – Play a Simple Melody

…starting with the one that notches in at #15 on our ranking, but Billboard had it at #8 on its year-end Jukebox chart, and #5 Sales: reviving a 1914 Ragtime number from Irving Berlin’s very first Broadway score, Watch Your Step.

Decca Records’ Dave Kapp—yes, the same executive who tried to block Gordon Jenkins from signing The Weavers—convinced the label’s biggest name since the ’30s to cut a few tracks with his 17-year-old son, and the song’s cheeky generation-gap lyrics were perfect. Billed simply as Gary Crosby and Friend, here’s “Play a Simple Melody.”

And the Friend? Of course, Gary Crosby’s dad, Bing—who’d known “Play a Simple Melody” since he was a kid. Now 47, Bing had weathered the early ’30s Crooner backlash that sidelined rivals like Rudy Vallée and Russ Columbo, cruised through the Sinatra and Como Bobbysoxer crazes of the ’40s, and notched eight top tens in the postwar ’40s to stay on top.

But “Simple Melody,” and its flip “Sam’s Song:” his last hurrah on the hit parade—ironically, uncredited. His name wasn’t even on the record! By the end of 1950, the big-voiced Belters were moving in, and then came Rock ‘n Roll. Bing’s final charting hit that wasn’t “White Christmas?” That was in 1957.

#14 Teresa Brewer with The Dixieland All Stars – (Put Another Nickel In) Music! Music! Music!

Next in our bonus segment of big 1950 hits that didn’t quite crack our Chartcrush top ten: #14 on our list, but all the way up at #6 on Billboard‘s year-end Sales and Jukebox charts. So why the gap? Well, it was only #27 on the year-end DJ chart. The lyrics, too racy for radio: 1950’s Pop “bad girl” Teresa Brewer. Her breakthrough “Music! Music! Music!”

“Put another nickel in!” followed by “I’d do anything for you!” Oh, you bet that raised some eyebrows in 1950! Gene Rayburn may’ve been the only one playing it on the air—yeah, that Gene Rayburn, before Match Game a morning-drive DJ on WNEW in New York, who got Teresa Brewer to cut it, mostly to prove he had the clout to turn any record into a hit—even a throwaway B-side of a Dixieland Novelty number by an unknown Teen!

#13 Eileen Barton with The New Yorkers – If I Knew You Were Comin’ (I’d’ve Baked a Cake)

Next up: #13 on our Chartcrush ranking, but #5 on Billboard‘s year-end Jukebox chart and top ten Airplay. It missed on the Sales chart: the small National label couldn’t keep up with demand—and anyway, it was already playing in every diner and five-and-dime, so who needed the record?

A bouncy Novelty with a wink big enough to jerk a soda fountain—yet radio still played it! It’s former vaudeville and radio child star since age three, now all grown up at 24: Eileen Barton, “If I Knew You Were Comin’, I’d’ve Baked a Cake.”

Not just a hit, a full-blown catchphrase—”cake” became shorthand for flirty domesticity, echoed since in everything from M*A*S*H to Muppets to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Eileen Barton never cracked the top ten again, but how do you follow a record that had Housewives blushing and Frat Boys howling—over cake?

#11 Red Foley – Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy

And finally in our Chartcrush 1950 bonus segment of hits that made Billboard‘s year-end top ten lists but missed our countdown, a Country record that cracked the code on the Pop charts months before “Goodnight Irene” made Folk mainstream.

Not a Pop Singer dabbling like Vaughn Monroe or Frankie Laine—this was a Grand Ole Opry star since the ’30s, recording in Nashville with a pedal steel and Owen Bradley producing. That’s as Country as it gets! Numbers 8 and 4 on Billboard‘s year-end Sales and Jukebox charts, respectively, it’s Red Foley’s “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy.”

Thigh slap percussion mimicking a popping shine rag on Red Foley’s “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy,” the first true Country-Pop crossover hit. So I guess we can forgive the label, Decca, for putting out Bing Crosby’s version at the same time and probably costing Foley a top ten placement on Billboard‘s year-end DJ chart, where it was #16.

Stations squeamish about Hillbilly twang also had Frank Sinatra and Phil Harris‘ versions on other labels. Those also cracked the top ten on the weekly DJ chart, but none could touch Foley’s in stores and on jukes, so on our Chartcrush ranking that factors all three Billboard charts, it’s 1950’s #11 hit.

Well that’s all we have for you here on our 1950 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Hey, if you have a minute and like what you heard this hour, head over to our website, chartcrush.com, for a transcript of the show and link to stream the podcast version, plus genned-up extras like our full top100 chart and interactive line graph of the Billboard chart runs for the top ten hits. Which we do for every year, 1940s to now, and it’s all on that website, again, chartcrush.com. Thanks for listening and tune in again next week, same station, same time, for another year and another edition of Chartcrush.

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