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Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week we do a deep dive into a year in Pop music and culture and count down the top 10 records according to our recap of the weekly charts published at the time in Billboard, the music industry’s top trade mag.

This week on Chartcrush, we’re counting down 1944, the year America and its Allies turned the tide in World War II as the Soviets took back most of their own territory lost to the Nazis in ’41 and ’42, and the massive D-Day invasion of occupied France, June 6, opened up a second European front. And in the Pacific, by Fall, bombers were within range of Japan itself after the U.S. retook Guam and the Mariana and Palau Islands, and General MacArthur kept his promise to return to the Philippines.

No, the War wasn’t over yet, but by the end of 1944, victory was in sight. In New Mexico, J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team were busy cracking the code on the atomic bomb in the top-secret Manhattan Project.

Monumental times, but did you know that for most of World War II, ’42 to ’44, record labels couldn’t record musicians? Yeah, the musicians’ union was on strike! Crazy, right? American Federation of Musicians boss James C. Petrillo thought records and jukeboxes were gonna replace live entertainment and put musicians out of work.

Of course, that zero-sum-type reasoning, faulty on almost every level in a market economy; in music, records, radio and concerts reinforce each other so all the channels benefit. But the U.S. didn’t really have a market economy during the War with Feds controlling prices and wages and rationing almost everything.

Even after the National War Labor Board ruled against the AFM and President Roosevelt personally reached out asking Petrillo to cut it out because, c’mon, people gotta have their tunes in a War!, the strike continued for two years, until labels, one by one, agreed to cut musicians in on profits and pay performance royalties.

Petrillo did make one concession a year in to the strike: union members could record V-Discs for overseas troops, “V” for “victory. Strictly export-only, though; labels had to destroy the masters. So with the strike, live on the radio was the only way to hear the latest tunes. That, or going out. But after Pearl Harbor, Bands were losing players to enlistments and the draft, and once those Wartime shortages and rationing kicked in on things like gas, rubber for tires and other touring essentials, taking a 15- or 20-piece Band out on the road became a logistical nightmare.

And besides, cities had blackout restrictions so enemy bombers, ships and submarines couldn’t see targets at night. So it was literally lights out on the most vibrant Dance Club scene ’til Disco in the late ’70s.

The biggest of the Big Bandleaders, Glenn Miller, was clearing nearly $400 grand a week inflation adjusted, but just before the recording ban, he lobbied for a Captain’s commission to lead the Army Air Forces Band, and did that until his plane crashed over the English channel in late ’44.

Other Bands soldiered on best they could, but in L.A. Stan Kenton’s Orchestra was pushing the boundaries of what Swing Jazz even was, with a musically ambitious approach meant more for listening than for dancing. And once his label, the L.A.-based startup Capitol, settled up with Petrillo in October of ’43, Kenton’s records were national hits and inspired other Jazz players to branch out and get creative, which led to Be-Bop, Progressive Jazz and the end of Swing as America’s dominant Pop music by the end of the War.

Congress’ hefty Cabaret Tax on dancing establishments in ’44 was another nail in the coffin, and it stayed in effect all the way ’til 1965, long after America’s ballrooms had been converted to warehouses and bowling alleys.

#10 Bing Crosby – San Fernando Valley

Now Capitol wasn’t the first or biggest label to settle with the union and resume recording in ’43; Decca was, in September, so 59 of 1944’s top100 hits are on just that one label, Decca. They didn’t have as many Bands as other labels but they had the top Crooner going back to the early ’30s, and ’44 was his biggest year yet, with 11 of those 59 records. Kicking off our Chartcrush countdown of 1944’s biggest hits at #10 it’s Bing Crosby with “San Fernando Valley.”

Ah, the San Fernando Valley, Southern California’s sprawling suburb north of L.A. Folks had already started moving there in the ’30s but it was still pretty idyllic with its apricot and walnut orchards and citrus groves: an Earthly paradise to fire hopes and aspirations amid shortages, rationing and deprivation.

Unfortunately, after the War a few too many people took Bing Crosby’s advice and made the San Fernando Valley their home; the population quintupled from ’45 to ’60. We’ll be hearing from Crosby again here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1944.

#9 Martha Tilton – I’ll Walk Alone

But at #9, we have Capitol’s biggest hit of the year, the West Coast startup label that came to terms with Petrillo and the AFM in October of ’43, a month after Decca. The song by Jule Styne and Lyricist Sammy Cahn was in Universal’s all-star morale boost musical Follow the Boys and two different versions of it are among the top 10 records of ’44. That wasn’t uncommon in the ’40s when acts rarely wrote their own songs. Instead pro Songwriters wrote them, Publishers published them, and multiple labels scrambled to record versions with their artists under contract. Broadway and movies, the top source for hit songs.

It’s one of the many hits from the War years in which a gal reassures her lover fighting overseas that she’ll stay true to him. The version by the Singer who does it in the movie was the bigger hit even though this one hit the charts first and has musicians playing on it! More on that when we hear that other one later, but at #9, Martha Tilton’s version of “I’ll Walk Alone.”

“Liltin'” Martha Tilton first got known singing with Benny Goodman’s Band in the late ’30: the first Big Band to play Carnegie Hall. That was in ’38, and then she was the Singer on Goodman’s big 1939 hit, “And the Angels Sing.” That song, co-written by lyricist Johnny Mercer, and it was Mercer who signed Tilton as a solo act to the new label he was starting, Capitol Records.

Capitol’s very first recording session in the Spring of ’42 just a few months before the strike, was Tilton’s “Moon Dreams,” which wasn’t a hit, but “I’ll Walk Alone” sure was, especially on Armed Forces Radio’s 400 stations around the globe: estimated audience, 50 million-plus soldiers and civilians. Too bad Billboard wasn’t charting that.

Their Airplay charts have never included stations outside the United States, but before 1945, we can’t factor Airplay into our record rankings at all because the Airplay chart was only an alphabetical listing of song titles, not broken out by the different versions out on records.

Publishers needed to see “Radio Plugs” which included live on-air performances bundled together by title for royalty purposes. If Martha Tilton’s “I’ll Walk Alone” was bigger on Radio than the version still to come in our Chartcrush 1944 countdown that sold better and got more Jukebox plays, we’ll never know.

Tilton toured throughout the War in Comedian Jack Benny’s USO package, but unlike other Female Singers who became Pop icons in those years like Doris Day, Dinah Shore and Kitty Kallen, she didn’t score any big hits after the War.

#8 Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five – G.I. Jive

Sticking with Capitol for our #8 hit here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1944, we have another song from Follow the Boys, the movie “I’ll Walk Alone” was in, but here it’s the same artist who does it in the film, a Vocalist/Saxman/Bandleader who with this record became the first big R&B/Pop crossover act in chart history. “Father of R&B,” just one of the many titles he’s earned over the years.

Billboard started charting what it later renamed “Rhythm & Blues” in 1942 on its weekly “Harlem Hit Parade” top 10 record sales ranking, and he’d already notched five hits on that by ’44, but then in August of ’44, this one topped the Pop Jukebox chart for two weeks as well, and cracked the top 5 on Pop Best Sellers.

“King of the Jukebox,” another name he earned. At #8, Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five, doing a Johnny Mercer song (there’s that name again), “G.I. Jive.”

Louis Jordan’s “G.I. Jive,” #8 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1944’s top 10 Pop hits. Johnny Mercer’s own version of his clever light-hearted send-up of military life was also out backed by Capitol’s long-time House Orchestra led by Paul Weston, and it also scraped the charts, but Jordan’s blew it away, especially as I mentioned on the Jukebox chart, which was brand new in ’44: Billboard‘s ranking of records from a national weekly survey of jukebox operators.

It cost a nickel to play a song on a jukebox in the ’40s, roughly 90 cents in today’s money, and when operators went to collect the coins and switch out the records, they saw what tunes were being played and how often from the mechanical tallies on the machines.

Nearly a half million jukeboxes in America in 1944, so the chart was a key milestone, and rather than just fall back on Best Sellers like nearly every other source that ranks pre-Hot100 hits, our Chartcrush rankings are based on a combined weekly chart derived from all the available weekly Pop charts: Sales, Jukeboxes and (starting in ’45), radio DJ spins, with equal weight for each. And from that we can use the exact same algorithm to rank the year as we do for years after Billboard did its own chart consolidation in 1958 with the Hot100.

By the way, the flip-side of Louis Jordan’s “G.I. Jive” was also a massive Jukebox hit, #2 for three weeks in September: “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t (Ma’ Baby).” Jordan scored over three times as many R&B #1’s in the ’40s as his closest competitors on that chart, 17, and another nine Pop crossover hits. “Father of R&B” indeed!

#7 Bing Crosby – I’ll Be Seeing You

OK, at #7 is another wistful ballad that found huge resonance during the War, its message of love and connection transcending separation, loss, time and distance, applicable not just to lovers, but to mothers, sons and daughters and of course the soldiers themselves overseas. But the song was written before the war, for a 1938 Broadway flop called Right This Way, which the song’s Lyricist Irving Kahal joked was the answer to the only question on people’s minds in the theater: “Where’s the exit?” Right this Way! Here again, Bing Crosby, the biggest, but not the only hit version of “I’ll Be Seeing You.”

Bing Crosby, “I’ll Be Seeing You” at #7 on our 1944 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Tragically, Irving Kahal didn’t live to see what he considered his best song become a hit. He died of a heart attack the year before in ’43 at just 38. But he did get to hear a 1940 version that was also a hit when Victor reissued it in ’44. The Tommy Dorsey Band’s with Frank Sinatra singing was on the charts 17 of the 24 weeks that Bing’s new version on Decca was.

Again, Bing’s label Decca could record at the end of ’43, but Victor and Columbia’s staring contest with Mr. Petrillo continued all the way to the end of ’44. They were able to hold out a little longer not just because they were the biggest record labels, but both also had deep-pocketed parent companies whose main business was radio: RCA with its NBC network was Victor’s; CBS was Columbia’s.

#6 Glen Gray and His Casa Loma Orchestra (vocal Eugenie Baird) – My Heart Tells Me (Should I Believe My Heart?)

At #6, a Band that’d had been around since the late ’20s and named themselves after a converted castle in Toronto where they played for eight months, and kept on using the name even after the place was seized by tax authorities and shut down at the start of the Depression.

By the Summer of ’33 they’d landed at the Glen Island Casino Resort north of New York City where they carved out a sweet spot between the swanky Dance music that was the default at such places, and the new Swing Jazz erupting out of Harlem. And CBS was beaming those performances out to a national network audience on their Camel Caravan broadcast a year before anyone had even heard of Benny Goodman, so the band gets a lot of the credit for taking Swing music mainstream. But the Bands that came to define the sound eclipsed them once it exploded later in the ’30s.

Still, they kept going and in ’44, this was the closest approximation on a record to Pinup and box office Queen Betty Grable’s performance of the song in the Technicolor musical Sweet Rosie O’Grady (Grable didn’t make records). At #6 it’s Glen Gray’s Casa Loma Orchestra featuring their new Girl Singer Eugenie Baird, “My Heart Tells Me.”

Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra with Eugenie Baird, “My Heart Tells Me” at #6, another Decca release that had a clear shot at the charts after the label was the first to come to terms with the musicians’ union and could record again.

For years, the Casa Lomans were a collective of talented players with no official leader, but Glen Gray took the conductor’s baton by acclamation in 1937 and by ’44 he’d trademarked the name, and Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra continued performing and releasing singles and albums on and off until Gray died in 1963.

#5 Dinah Shore – I’ll Walk Alone

At #5 we have the bigger of the two versions of the song we heard at #9 by Martha Tilton, and the only record on Victor in our countdown. Victor and Columbia, again, the longest holdouts in the two-year-plus Petrillo musicians’ strike. Labels had to get creative once their vaults ran dry. I mentioned Victor’s re-issue of their 1940 Tommy Dorsey/Frank Sinatra version of “I’ll Be Seeing You” after Bing Crosby’s new one on Decca was a hit. That worked out well, but another loophole, since Singers weren’t even in the union, labels could record a capella records.

Well once Bing Crosby’s “Sunday, Monday or Always” with the Ken Darby Singers and no Band hit #1 in the Fall of ’43, Vocal Groups were suddenly in high demand, both as standalone recording acts, and to back name Singers on records instead of Bands. And our #5 song was the last one of those that was a big hit, ironically right as Victor and Columbia were agreeing to Petrillo’s demands and getting Bands back in their studios.

Now movie studios weren’t affected by the strike, just record labels, so the version of the song in the film Follow the Boys by the same Singer has Orchestra backing, but for the record, she’s backed by an unnamed Mixed Chorus, and it handily beat Martha Tilton’s version of the song on Capitol even though that one as we heard back at #9, had an Orchestra! At #5, Dinah Shore’s version of “I’ll Walk Alone.”

Dinah Shore’s voice was too delicate for Big Bands, but she scored her first top 10 as a solo act in 1941, over two years before Frank Sinatra split from Tommy Dorsey and scored his first solo hits in ’43. By the way, those were also a capella records backed by Vocal Groups, just like Dinah’s version of “I’ll Walk Alone” we just heard at #5 here on our 1944 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

Her only hit in ’44, but things picked up again and when you add it all up, she was the ’40s decade’s top charting Solo Female.

“I’ll Walk Alone,” the song, had another big burst on the charts in 1952 after it was in the biopic With a Song in My Heart about Singer Jane Froman, who was crippled in a plane crash in Europe during the War. Froman’s own ’40s-sounding version charted, but ’52 was peak Crooner, so belter Don Cornell’s was the bigger hit.

#4 Jimmy Dorsey & His Orchestra (vocal Kitty Kallen) – Besame Mucho

At #4, yet another song introduced by Follow the Boys, the movie that also had Louis Jordan’s “G.I. Jive,” and Dinah Shore doing “I’ll Walk Alone.” It’s a Mexican bolero written in the early ’30s and in the movie it’s an instrumental done by Charlie Spivak and His Band, but three vocal versions made the charts in the Spring of ’44 and this one was #1 for seven weeks.

Most of the top Big Bands were on Victor or Columbia and couldn’t record due to the strike, but these guys were on Decca and could: the label’s only A-list Big Band before the strike, so of course no other Band came close on the charts in ’44: five top 10s during the year. It’s Jimmy Dorsey & Orchestra with a vocal duet—they were known for those—with longtime Male Singer Bob Eberly and newcomer Kitty Kallen, the first hit version of “Besame Mucho.”

“Besame Mucho,” Spanish for “Kiss Me a Lot.” The Beatles did it in their early sets in ’62 with Paul McCartney singing but the original hit was the one we just heard at #4 here on our 1944 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show: Jimmy Dorsey & Orchestra with Kitty Kallen, who’d just replaced newlywed Helen O’Connell as Bob Eberly’s duet partner.

Although two of Dorsey’s hits in ’44 had just Kallen on vocals, after Eberly got drafted, Kallen jumped ship for Trumpeter Harry James’ Band and had a big, big year in ’45 with seven chart hits including two that no Second World War Victory playlist would be complete without: “I’m Beginning to See the Light” and “It’s Been a Long, Long Time.”

#3 Harry James & His Orchestra (vocal Dick Haymes) – I’ll Get By (As Long as I Have You)

Harry James’ Band had been on a hot streak before the strike too, and in ’43 James got hitched to the Pinup movie star I mentioned earlier, Betty Grable, which made him even more famous, and two sides he and his Band recorded not just before the strike, but before the War were #1 hits in ’43 and ’44. In ’43 it was a reissue of “All or Nothing at All” sung by Frank Sinatra in 1939, which first came out in 1940 before either were superstars, but on the reissue, Columbia swapped the credits to make Sinatra the headliner since they’d just signed him up as a solo act.

And in ’44 Columbia scored big with a previously unreleased side with the Argentinian immigrant Singer who’d replaced Sinatra in the Harry James Band. He’d gone solo too during the strike and landed four a capella smashes in a row, all between July and November ’43, but for Decca, not Columbia, so Harry James got to keep his headliner status on that record. And those four a capella hits in ’43 were as big as the five of those that Sinatra did for Columbia at the same time. At #3 it’s Harry James & Orchestra featuring Dick Haymes, recorded in 1941, “I’ll Get by (As Long as I Have You).”

#1 the week the Allies’ turned the tide against the Nazis in Europe with the massive D-Day Invasion of occupied France, June 6, Harry James with Singer Dick Haymes “I’ll Get By,” #3 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1944’s top 10 hits. Yet another song featured in that all-star musical Follow the Boys, sung in the movie by Dinah Shore.

Harry James was classified 4-F ineligible for military service due to an old back injury, but still went for a second Army physical in ’44 and even dissolved his Band thinking he was about to go fight, but the draft board reaffirmed his 4-F status. Dick Haymes on the other hand was accused in print of dodging the draft by claiming nonbelligerent status as a citizen of neutral Argentina, but the draft board too classified him 4-F for hypertension.

By the way, Frank Sinatra didn’t serve either: 4-F for a perforated eardrum, but Army files that later came to light said it was because of emotional instability!

#2 Mills Brothers – You Always Hurt the One You Love

Now besides a capella, another way for labels to get around the musicians strike was to record a Singer accompanying him or herself on a simple instrument like a guitar or piano. Now post-1965 or so, that’d be a loophole big enough to drive a truck through, right? But in the ’40s that was unheard of in Pop, even rarer than Singers who wrote their own material.

Blues and Country, different story, but those primitive musical ghettoes were worlds apart from the glitz, glamor and sophistication of the society resorts and swanky hotel ballrooms where “real” musicians and Singers entertained genteel audiences. Blues and Country records sounded raw and crude, down ‘n dirty, like the folks who made ’em and the folks who bought ’em, and no one was trying to change that.

But our Black Vocal Group at #2 had perfected a smooth, sensitive style heading into the ’40s after spending the ’30s scatting and beat-boxing on Novelty records. Very successfully, I might add, but the musicians’ strike gave them their shot at mainstream Pop glory, and they hit the bullseye, first with “Paper Doll,” the #1 song of 1943, and then nearly repeating at #1 on the year in ’44 with another record that was just vocals and guitar nearly a year after Decca could record full Bands again.

14 weeks in the top 5 on both the Best-Sellers and Jukebox charts, August to December and the #2 hit of 1944, it’s The Mills Brothers’ “You Always Hurt the One You Love.”

Another Black Vocal Group, The Ink Spots, had hit big in ’39, and inspired The Mills Brothers to hone the ultra-smooth Vocal harmony sound they unleashed on “Paper Doll” in ’43, then “You Always Hurt the One You Love,” #2 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1944.

Incidentally, the Ink Spots? Also still going strong in ’44 with their two top 5’s during the year, “I’ll Get by (As Long as I Have You)” and “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall” with Ella Fitzgerald.

#1 Bing Crosby – Swinging on a Star

Now I just got done telling you a minute ago how rare it was for Singers to write their own Pop songs in the ’40s, and it’s true: songwriting was for Songwriters; Singing was for Singers, and instruments, as Petrillo was constantly reminding everyone, were for musicians in the American Federation of Musicians. But the idea for our #1 song came from something the Singer said to his cranky 10-year-old son at a brainstorming dinner at his home with one of the Songwriters: “If you don’t go to school, you might grow up to be a mule.”

Well, Songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen liked that line so much that he took it to his partner Johnny Burke, and the resulting song, sung by the Singer who’d inspired it, was #1 on both Sales and Jukeboxes seven weeks mid-August to the end of September. We’ve already heard from him twice this hour; at #1, from his 1944 movie Going My Way, Bing Crosby with the year’s Oscar-winning Original Song, “Swinging on a Star.”

Bing Crosby’s “Swinging on a Star,” the #1 song here on our 1944 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Close harmony backing courtesy of The Williams Brothers, one of whom was 17-year old Andy Williams, who went on to notch seven top 10s from 1956 to ’63 and sings the streaming-era holiday perennial, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”

Also worth noting: even though Decca was no longer subject to the Recording Ban, they had a Vocal Group backing Bing on that record anyway, in addition to the Band, and that close-harmony Vocal sound that got popular during the strike persisted on Pop hits for years.

Bonus

So there you have them: the top ten records of 1944 according to our exclusive Chartcrush ranking we derived by combining Billboard‘s published weekly Sales and Jukebox charts into a single weekly chart, then ranking the year same as we do for every year including after the Hot100 debuted in 1958.

But in years like 1944, when multiple versions of songs charted, if you’re only looking at records you’re gonna miss songs that when you add up all the versions that charted, were among the year’s top 10 hits even if no one version was dominant enough to be in the top 10 records. Six of the top 10 songs of ’44 did have versions in the top 10 records and “I’ll Walk Alone” had two, but that leaves four that we didn’t hear a version of in our countdown, so in the time we have left we’re gonna go through those.

#13 Guy Lombardo – It’s Love-Love-Love

The #10 song of 1944 combining both of its versions that made the charts was a light-hearted romp from a movie called Stars on Parade that hit in the Spring of ’44 offering a definition of “love” for a generation about to celebrate its World War 2 victory and get on with the business of settling down and raising families.

The Four King Sisters had a strike-compliant a capella version out on Victor’s Bluebird subsidiary. That’s #46 on our ranking for 1944. But Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians’ version shakes out at #13. On Decca, featuring former Glenn Miller Band Singer Skip Nelson, “It’s Love-Love-Love.”

“The Sweetest Music This Side of Heaven,” as the Chicago Tribune described Guy Lombardo & The Royal Canadians in 1928. Had there been charts before 1940, “It’s Love-Love-Love” would’ve been something like their 22nd #1.

By ’44 they were five years in to their 33-year residency at The Grill Room in New York’s Roosevelt Hotel, where their New Years Eve performances became iconic. The party moved to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in the early ’60s and continued until 1976, the year before Guy Lombardo passed away and Dick Clark became the new showbiz face of New Years. The Lombardo Band’s version of “Auld Lang Syne,” though, still to this day the first thing you hear after the ball drops in Times Square.

#20 Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five – Is You Is or Is You Ain’t (Ma’ Baby)

The #8 hit of 1944 if our Chartcrush Top Ten ranked songs instead of records also had two charting versions: one by the guy who wrote it (remember, that was exceedingly rare on the Pop charts in the ’40s), and the other, Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, two of the decade’s top acts teaming up on the same record.

Well it was super close but thanks to its dominance on the Jukebox chart, the original won! #20 on our records ranking vs. #28 for Bing and the gals. I mentioned the song when we heard Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five’s “G.I. Jive” back at #8. It’s the flip-side of that record, “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t (Ma’ Baby).”

“Is You Is or Is You Ain’t (Ma’ Baby),” #8 on the year if we ranked songs instead of records; two versions on different labels out simultaneously battling it out on the charts, Louis Jordan’s on Capitol narrowly beating Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters on Decca.

#12 Andrews Sisters – Shoo-Shoo Baby

But it was the other way around with the two biggest versions of the song that’s #7 on the year when you combine all versions. Capitol had its hot new Female solo Singer Ella Mae Morse fresh from her string of hits with Freddie Slack’s Big Band. Hers is #18 on our 1944 records ranking. But Decca had, yep, The Andrews Sisters, whose version just misses our top ten records of the year at #12: “Shoo-Shoo Baby.”

Interestingly, The Andrews Sisters never put out an a capella record during the musicians’ strike. That was their first hit post-strike, “Shoo-Shoo Baby,” from the 1943 film they sang it in, Three Cheers for the Boys. The song was so popular that troops named a B-17 Flying Fortress after it, a plane that flew two dozen combat missions over Europe in ’44 and ’45.

#16 Dick Haymes & Helen Forrest – Long Ago (And Far Away)

And finally, when you add up the not two or three but five different charting records of this next song, it comes out the #5 song of the year even though the biggest version is only #16 on our 1944 records ranking. It’s Helen Forrest and Dick Haymes’ version of the Oscar-nominated song from the Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly film Cover Girl, “Long Ago (And Far Away).”

The first of seven hit Dick Haymes/Helen Forrest Duets for Decca Records over the next couple years, the biggest of the five charting versions of “Long Ago (And Far Away)” in 1944.

The song, also notable for being the first solo records by two of the mid-century’s top recording stars. Jo Stafford’s was on Capitol backed by her future hubby Paul Weston’s band, and Perry Como‘s was a capella with Mixed Chorus on Victor. And that, folks, is gonna have to be a wrap for our 1944 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Hey, if you like what you heard, be sure and visit our website, chartcrush.com for a written transcript of the show and a link to stream our podcast version online, plus snazzy extras like our full top 100 chart and interactive line graph of the actual chart runs of the top 10 songs. We do that for every year, ’40s to now, and it’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com. Thanks for listening, and don’t forget to tune in again next week, same station, same time, for another year, and another edition of Chartcrush.

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Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush we do a deep dive into a year in Pop music and culture and count down the top 10 songs according to our exclusive recap of the weekly charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re counting down 1970, which of course was the first year of “the 70s” on the calendar.

But the sounds and styles that most defined the decade like Glam Rock, Disco and Punk: not even a figment of anyone’s imagination yet. And until James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” hit #1 in October of ’70, then Carole King’s Tapestry album a few months later, no one without a crystal ball could’ve predicted how humongous the whole Singer-Songwriter thing was gonna get.

Ditto Country-Rock, despite signals from Bob Dylan, The Byrds, Linda Ronstadt and even the Stones and Beatles, and crossover novelties like Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” and Jeanne C. Riley’s “Harper Valley P.T.A.” The Eagles’ first hit “Take It Easy” wasn’t ’til ’72.

But other styles that defined the ’70s were already pretty well-established: Funk with James Brown, Sly & The Family Stone and The Isley Brothers; definitely Album-Oriented Hard Rock with Cream, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Iron Butterfly, Steppenwolf, Blue Cheer, Vanilla Fudge, Led Zeppelin; Progressive Rock (“Prog” for short): The Moody Blues, Donovan and Procol Harum. All those acts I named made the Hot100 with hits in those ’70s-defining styles before the end of the ’60s.

AM Top40, another very well-established genre thanks to the shunning of Teen-targeted Pop by the emergent counterculture press in the late ’60s. By ’68 and definitely by ’69, anyone still making records that didn’t cater to evolving Hippie sensibilities as first wave Boomers hit their mid-20s: dismissed as “Bubblegum” by the likes of Rolling Stone.

Not that the makers of such records minded; “Sugar Sugar” by TV cartoon band The Archies, for example, was one of 1969’s biggest hits, #1 for four weeks. Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 debuted in 1970 and helped define Top 40 as a distinct genre, but it also gave Billboard a boost beyond just industry insiders as the general public got interested in charts for the first time.

And it’s good that they had their tunes because 1970 was an unmitigated bummer in the news. Literally the only positive national news story all year: the first Earth Day in April and a Look magazine feature unveiling the soon-to-be ubiquitous Ecology flag. But even that, it was easy to see and sarcastically mutter “oh great, just what we need, another angry protest movement telling me how to live and think!” with bombings by the far left Weather Underground just about every week, Black Panthers at peak membership ambushing cops in Oakland with grenades, and leaders visiting communist North Korea and China. And now Women, Gays, Chicanos, American Indians and even conservative hardhats getting their protest on.

’69 had had the successful Apollo 11 and 12 moon shots; ’70 had Apollo 13, the one where an oxygen fire two days in took out electrical and life-support and the crew had to loop around the moon and return to Earth without ever landing, subject of the Best Picture-nominated film starring Tom Hanks in ’95.

Other lowlights: a massive two week Postal strike in the Spring; an X-Rated film winning Best Picture at the Oscars (Midnight Cowboy), and Vietnam, of course, still raging with nearly 350,000 U.S. troops despite President Nixon’s promise to shift combat to the South Vietnamese.

And just as the shocking details of the 1968 My Lai massacre of villagers by U.S. troops were coming out, Nixon announces that the U.S. is gonna attack Viet Cong and NVA sanctuaries in neutral Cambodia just over the border with South Vietnam, which sent antiwar protesters into a frenzy. At Kent State in Ohio, the National Guard opened fire and killed four protesters, which inspired Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Ohio,” a top 20 hit.

#10 The Guess Who – American Woman

And that wasn’t the only or even the biggest protest hit on the year. At #10 as we kick off the countdown, one of the hardest rocking singles ever to hit #1, by a Canadian group up ’til then known for light Jazzy Pop (their ’69 hits “These Eyes,” “Laughing” and “Undun“). But in ’70 they took things in a more straightforward Rock direction, first on “No Time,” which got to #5, then this.

Writer Burton Cummings insists that it’s just a comment about the complicated, not-so-innocent girls he was meeting South of the Border (the Canadian border, that is). But with lyrics about “war machines” and “ghetto scenes,” people saw it as an indictment of America herself, and it hit #1 the week after Kent State and stayed on top three weeks. At #10 it’s The Guess Who’s “American Woman.”

The Guess Who, “American Woman,” #10 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1970’s top hits. Billboard had it at #3 on the year. It originated when Guess Who guitarist Randy Bachman started playing a riff tuning up at a gig. One by one the other guys joined in and Singer Burton Cummings spat out the first words that came into his head. Then after, they got wind that a kid taping the show for a bootleg had caught the whole thing, so they got him to hand over the tape and from that, they did the studio version we just heard, and it was the title track of their new album.

The Guess Who wasn’t the only late ’60s borderline MOR Pop group to achieve instant counterculture street-cred with a hit Rock single in 1970. Three Dog Night’s version of Randy Newman’s Novelty about a square at a stoner party, “Mama Told Me Not to Come,” also got to #1, for two weeks in the Summer. That one notches in at #14 on our Chartcrush 1970 ranking.

That those were bigger Hot100 hits than, say, Led Zeppelin’s #4 “Whole Lotta Love” (their biggest ever) highlights an issue with the charts in the early ’70s: acts that were selling tons of albums didn’t do very well on the Hot100, which charts singles. Billboard didn’t launch its Mainstream Rock Airplay-based chart ’til 1981, so before that, there’s no definitive ranking of Rock songs: quite the blind spot!

#9 Smokey Robinson & The Miracles – The Tears of a Clown

Motown had an amazing year in 1970. That’s mostly thanks to a spectacular debut that we’ll get into later in the show, but at #9, a surprise hit by a group that was on hold because Motown boss Berry Gordy, Jr. had promoted its leader to be an executive. The U.K. distributor wanted to release a new single though, so he asked the group’s U.K. fan club President to pick an old album cut, and the one she chose became their first U.K. #1, so naturally it got a U.S. release as well and the same thing happened here: their first U.S. #1.

Now an awful lot had changed in music between ’67 and ’70, but there were early signs of the massive Nostalgia wave that crested in the early-’70s. Campy ’50s cover band Sha Na Na killing it at Woodstock: that was one, and a long-buried Motown gem hitting #1 was another, albeit more subtle.

With not a whiff of the Norman Whitfield Psychedelic Soul sound Motown led with in the late-’60s, it’s a throwback to the label’s already fading mid-’60s vibe before the ’67 Detroit Riots got Gordy thinking about moving out to L.A. At #9 it’s Smokey Robinson & The Miracles’ “The Tears of a Clown.”

Smokey Robinson & The Miracles’ “Tears of a Clown” at #9 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1970s biggest hits. It wasn’t the only song with that classic mid-’60s Motown sound to top the charts in ’70. The legendary Songwriting and Production team Holland-Dozier-Holland largely responsible for that sound had split from Motown to start their own label, Invictus, and their #3 hit with Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold” in the Summer also had that throwback sound. That one was #10 on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 for 1970.

But don’t go looking for “Tears of a Clown” on there because it hit too late in the year to be counted. #1 for two weeks in mid-December, past Billboard‘s November 28 cutoff for its 1970 ranking.

That made two years in a row that a major Motown hit got stiffed in Billboard‘s year-end rankings. In ’69, Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” #1 for seven straight weeks over the holidays ’68 to ’69: #86 on the ’69 year-end chart. But factor its full chart run in the calendar year it scored most of its chart action, which is our Chartcrush ranking method, “Grapevine” comes out the #1 song of ’69. And “Tears of a Clown” is #9 for 1970. Safe to assume that Motown was a little frosted at Billboard ’69 to ’70.

#8 Edwin Starr – War

At #8, a more modern-sounding Motown hit written and produced by the aforementioned Norman Whitfield; co-written by Barrett Strong, first recorded by The Temptations for their Psychedelic Shack album, which also came out in 1970. But Motown balked at putting out their version as a single despite antiwar activists begging them to, fearing a backlash of Temptations’ fans, Motown’s most popular Male group.

Enter the Singer with a tough style and James Brown-influenced Soul shout who’d gotten to #6 in early ’69 with “Twenty Five Miles,” but was starting to look like a one-hit wonder after almost a year and a half without a hit. “Hey, I’ll record that song,” he said, and with nothing to lose and everything to gain, Motown said “OK” and here’s the result. At #8 it’s Edwin Starr’s “War (What Is It Good For?).”

Speaking of James Brown, he had quite a year in ’70: six Hot100 hits including his top 20s “Sex Machine” and “Super Bad,” but it was Edwin Starr with his Funky, straight-to-the-point shouter “War” that wound up being the funkiest thing to top the Hot100 during the year, with the possible exception of Sly & The Family Stone’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” #1 for two weeks in February. “War” held down the top spot for three weeks in August.

Edwin Starr followed up with the even blunter “Stop the War Now” at the end of the year, which got to #26, but Starr never cracked the top 40 again. His last Hot100 entry? A Disco record, “H.A.P.P.Y. Radio” in ’79.

#7 The Beatles – Let It Be

So as Winter turned to Spring in 1970 America was in a somber mood looking ahead to the new decade, and in case the headlines aren’t enough, just look at the top of the Hot100. For six weeks from the end of February to the beginning of April, a hymn-like song we’re gonna hear later was #1, immediately followed for the next two weeks by another hymn-like record that we’re gonna hear right now at #9: the lead single (and title single), from the last album by, to this day, the best-selling and top charting act in Hot100 history.

Just the day before it hit #1 in April, Paul McCartney had some more bad news for the world: The Beatles were breaking up. At #9 it’s “Let It Be.”

“Let It Be,” The Beatles at #9 as we count down the top 10 hits of 1970 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Really a Paul McCartney solo effort: his Beatles bandmate John Lennon, who wasn’t very enthusiastic about much of anything Paul was doing in those years, introduces it on the Let It Be album with a snarky comment in falsetto that gently mocks the song’s hymnlike religious overtones.

Fans at the time assumed the Mary in “Let It Be” was the mother of Jesus, but actually, Paul had had a dream in ’69 as The Beatles were struggling to continue working together, in which his late mother whose name was Mary, had reassured him that everything is going to be OK, and to just let it be.

There was one more Beatles single after “Let It Be.” “The Long and Winding Road” got to #1 for two weeks in June: another somber McCartney song. And that was it for The Beatles’ run on the Hot100 from 1964 to 1970.

But as 1970 came to an end, the last #1 song of the year was… not the first solo single by a former Beatle, but the first #1 solo single by a former Beatle: George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord.” And the same week it hit #1 on the Hot100, McCartney took The Beatles off life support when his lawyers filed suit to officially dissolve the group. McCartney had announced his split in April, just as “Let It Be” was hitting #1.

#6 The Jackson 5 – I Want You Back

OK, we’re down to #6, and remember that spectacular Motown chart debut I mentioned earlier? Well this was the one that started it all, first entering the charts November 15 of 1969, then working its way up to #1 January 31: their very first single. It only had one week on top, but that’s all it took to be the first of four consecutive #1s by the group. No other act had more consecutive #1s out of the gate like that until Mariah Carey’s fifth single, “Emotions,” topped the chart in 1991. At #6 it’s the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back.”

Now The Beatles weren’t the only top-charting ’60s group that broke up in 1970, The Supremes also did. But Lead Singer Diana Ross’ solo career, still on Motown, was off to a shaky start. Her first solo single “Reach Out and Touch Somebody’s Hand” only got to #20 in June. DJs threw her a lifeline when they turned “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” off her album into a massive hit and Motown’s single edit went to #1 in September.

But it also didn’t hurt that Motown had titled the Jackson 5’s first album Diana Ross Presents… And they had her introduce them on several big TV appearances, so everyone thought that Diana Ross had personally discovered 1970’s hottest new group. “I Want You Back,” #6 here on our 1970 edition of Chartcrush: the first of two of the Jackson 5’s record-setting four consecutive #1s in our top10 countdown. The other, still to come.

#5 Carpenters – (They Long to Be) Close to You

But now, another first of two, this time a powerhouse Pop Songwriting Duo with two hits among the top 10 on the year, Burt Bacharach and Hal David. In ’68, Herb Alpert had taken their song “This Guy’s in Love with You” to #1 for four weeks even though he couldn’t really sing. The record just worked, and Alpert was a big enough name to pull it off, with dozens of instrumental hits and best-selling albums with his outfit The Tijuana Brass in the ’60s.

Well, Bacharach and David thought Alpert might be able to repeat that with a song they’d written in the early ’60s. He gave it a shot and wasn’t crazy about it, but he thought the song was perfect for a brother-sister Duo he’d just signed to his A&M label. Their first album and single had flopped so this was make or break, and obviously it was “make” because the record shot to #1 in just its seventh week and is our #5 song of 1970. Billboard has it at #2 on the year: siblings Richard and Karen, The Carpenters, “Close to You.”

Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” the first of twelve top 10s for Karen and Richard Carpenter over the next five years, but interestingly, no more Bacharach/David compositions.

The Carpenters’ success helped bridge an already narrowing gap between the rapidly-changing Easy Listening and Pop radio formats about to be inundated by Singer-Songwriters.

Karen’s reedy, intimate 3-octave contralto was a fresh new sound on all formats though in 1970, and was a major influence for, among many others, Agnetha Fältskog of ABBA and Madonna, whose debut album came out in 1983 which is the same year Karen died at just 32 of anorexia, which put a needed spotlight for really the first time on eating disorders.

#4 The Partridge Family – I Think I Love You

At #4 we have the early ’70s’ top charting made-for-TV act, with their first hit which, like The Monkees’, was a hit with Teens from the moment the TV show premiered as part of ABC’s Fall lineup. The single sold five million in record time and it was #1 in just seven weeks, same as “Close to You” and even faster than the nine weeks it took The Monkees debut “Last Train to Clarksville” in the Fall of ’66.

The half-hour sitcom on Friday nights was about a family act trying to make it in the music biz, inspired by actual family act The Cowsills from Rhode Island, who’d scored three top 10s in the ’60s. But they couldn’t act, so instead, producers assembled a cast centered around stage and screen veteran since the ’50s Shirley Jones and her real-life stepson David Cassidy, who sings lead on the show and on the record. At #4 it’s The Partridge Family’s “I Think I Love You.”

The Partridge Family’s “I Think I Love You” at #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1970, another one like “Tears of a Clown” that missed Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 altogether because only the first eight of its 19 weeks on the chart were counted. The rest, including one at #1 and seven in the top 10: after that November 28 cutoff date for the chart year.

The song first appeared in episode eight of the sitcom, in which a skunk stows away on the family’s colorful Piet Mondrian-inspired tour bus and leaves their stage clothes smelling, well, skunky.

David Cassidy, the biggest Teen heartthrob in an era of Male heartthrobs, his 16 and Tiger Beat pullout posters on countless Teen girls’ bedroom walls and school locker doors. He was never really down with that, though, so for Hippie cred he posed nude from the waist up for a cover of Rolling Stone in ’72 just as season two of The Partridge Family was about to start Summer reruns.

#3 Simon & Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water

So back at #7 when we heard “Let It Be,” I mentioned that it replaced another somber, reflective hymn-like song that’d been #1 the previous six weeks, and that one is up next at #3.

The world had been looking pretty scary since Woodstock and the moon landing. Nothing but bad headlines, escalating war and social tensions and apocalyptic songs like Creedence’s “Bad Moon Rising” and Zager & Evans’ “In the Year 2525” providing the soundtrack.

Things definitely hadn’t calmed down, but it was a new decade, so time to reflect and pray for words of wisdom from Mother Mary as in The Beatles’ “Let It Be” and, our #4 song, a “Bridge over Troubled Waters.” Billboard had it as the #1 song of 1970 but two records beat it in our Chartcrush ranking, Simon & Garfunkel.

“Bridge over Troubled Water,” #3 as we count down the top ten songs of 1970 here on this week’s Chartcrush, one of Simon & Garfunkel’s last hits before they too split up in 1970, maybe the best-realized example ever of producer Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound,” even though Spector himself had nothing to do with making the record.

It was the title track of their 1970 album, never intended as a single, but the label, Columbia, disagreed and Pop radio played it despite its mood and five minute length.

Simon had insisted that Garfunkel sing what turned out to be his most successful song, but later regretted that. “Now I’m going to reclaim my lost child,” he’d say before doing it on his 2018 farewell tour.

They both had successful solo careers, Simon and Garfunkel did, especially Simon, and they did several one-off reunions over the years, notably their free concert in New York’s Central Park in 1981, which drew half a million and became a double-Platinum album, an HBO special and a bestselling home video.

#2 The Jackson 5 – I’ll Be There

OK, our #2 song is the second of the two hits in our countdown by 1970’s top chart debut, the group from Gary, Indiana with the 11-year-old kid singing lead, whose first four singles on Motown all hit #1. “I Want You Back,” which we heard at #6: that was first on the calendar, their breakout hit in January; then “ABC” in the Spring, “The Love You Save” in mid-Summer and our #2 song in the Fall, the biggest hit of their career.

Here again, brothers Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and 11-year-old Michael Jackson: the Jackson 5, a record produced by one guy, Hal Davis, Motown’s West coast boss out in L.A. and the group’s mentor since they signed with Motown, not the four guys including Berry Gordy, Jr. that comprised “The Corporation,” credited with writing and producing their other 1970 hits. At #2 it’s the Jackson 5, “I’ll Be There.”

The Jackson 5 were a brothers act under the tutelage of their strict, demanding father, Joe Jackson. Sisters Rebbie, LaToya and Janet, who turned 9 in 1970, had to wait ’til the mid-’70s to make their debuts on their TV variety show The Jacksons.

Ten Jackson siblings in all, and too many chart hits to count between all of them. But Michael, the most successful, and Janet a surprisingly close second on total chart points through the years. “I’ll Be There,” #2 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1970. It was #3 on Billboard‘s last chart for their 1970 chart year, with five weeks left to go in its run, and adding those back in makes it the #2 song of the year, not #7 where Billboard had it.

#1 B.J. Thomas – Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head

Well, we’re down to #1, and it’s yet another hit whose ranking on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 suffered from part of its chart run being outside their 1970 chart year. Its first nine weeks were in late 1969, which in later years would’ve counted, but not in 1970. Billboard has it at #4, but adding those weeks back in and factoring its full chart run makes it 1970’s #1 hit.

It’s the second of the two Bacharach/David songs in the countdown. The Carpenters’ “Close to You” at #5, the other. And I’m highlighting that because Burt Bacharach and lyricist Hal David defined a unique style of breezy, jazzy melodic Pop that was everywhere at the turn of the decade: TV, radio, movies, clubs, lounges, parties, even restaurants: like the default music.

Producers in ’68 tapped them to score the neo-Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman, which ended up being a pop culture phenomenon, and the song they wrote for a playful, romantic interlude panned by critics as totally out of place in the movie was memorable for that exact reason.

At first they had Ray Stevens in mind to sing it, but he was about to unleash his Summer replacement variety show on NBC and its theme song, “Everything Is Beautiful,” so at longtime hitmaking collaborator Dionne Warwick’s suggestion, they went with the Singer whose “Hooked on a Feeling” had just hit. At #1 it’s B.J. Thomas doing Bacharach and David’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”

“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” B.J. Thomas, Chartcrush’s #1 song on our countdown of 1970’s top hits. Dozens of cover versions from a who’s who of Pop Singers new and old appeared once Butch Cassidy blew up in theaters and it was a hit, but only B.J. Thomas’ charted.

An innocent, happy song but also “an exhortation to keep going in the face of tragedy,” as Financial Times Arts writer Peter Aspden put it, summing up its appeal to harried, paranoid Americans at the start of the ’70s.

Bonus

And that’s our top ten for 1970 according to our Chartcrush Countdown Show ranking. To review, three songs that didn’t make Billboard‘s year-end top ten make ours when counting full chart runs instead of just weeks within a discrete “chart year.” Those again are Smokey Robinson & The Miracles’ “Tears of a Clown” at #10, The Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” at #6 and The Partridge Family’s “I Think I Love You” at #4. But those coming in to our top ten bumps three out from Billboard‘s, so to be thorough, let’s look at those.

#18 Freda Payne – Band of Gold

At #10, Billboard had the Holland-Dozier-Holland production for their new Invictus label after splitting from Motown, the trio’s most successful post-Motown song about a woman sleeping alone on her wedding night: Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold.”

“Band of Gold” peaked at #3 and shakes out as our #18 song of 1970. Freda Payne went way back with Lamont Dozier to childhood in Detroit. She was a successful Jazz singer in New York with two albums out and getting work on Broadway, but Dozier persuaded her to come to Invictus and try R&B.

#21 Rare Earth – Get Ready

And speaking of the Motor City, it also had a thriving Rock scene in the ’60s, and the hometown R&B label, Motown, even signed one band and scored a hit. Billboard‘s #8 song of 1970, #21 on our Chartcrush ranking, was Rare Earth’s “Get Ready.”

Rare Earth’s album version of “Get Ready” is 22 minutes, but editing out the extended solos gets it down to a Pop-friendly three minutes. The Temptations had done “Get Ready” in 1966, but it only got to #29.

#11 Diana Ross – Ain’t No Mountain High Enough

And finally, at #6 Billboard had the record I mentioned earlier that calmed nerves about Diana Ross making it as a solo act after her first post-Supremes record stalled on the charts. It’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.”

Another song previously charted by a Motown act, “Ain’t No Mountain” had gotten to #19 as a Marvin Gaye/Tammi Terrell duet in ’67, but the totally re-imagined version on Diana Ross’ first solo album in 1970, once radio got a hold of it, unexpectedly became her first #1 after leaving The Supremes. It just misses our Chartcrush Top Ten at #11.

And with that, we’re gonna have to wrap up our 1970 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. If you like what you heard and want more, be sure and visit our website, chartcrush.com for a written transcript of the show and link to stream the podcast version on Spotify, plus outta sight extras like our full top 100 chart and interactive line graph of the actual chart runs of the top 10 songs. We do that for every year, ’40s to now, and it’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com.

I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Thanks for listening, and don’t forget to tune in again next week, same station and time, for another year, and another edition of Chartcrush.

::end transcript::

::start transcript::

Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we do a deep dive into a year in Pop music and culture, and count down the top 10 songs according to our exclusive recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in Billboard, the music industry’s leading trade mag.

This week on Chartcrush, we’re turning the clock back to 2001, technically the first year of the 21st century, since there was no year zero, which actually seems more fitting given events, especially 9/11/2001 when Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four domestic flights and flew them into the North and South towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in DC, and a fourth crashed in rural Pennsylvania after passengers thwarted the hijackers.

The consensus is that 9/11 marked the end of the “cultural ’90s” and the start of the ’00s, but boundaries between cultural decades are never black and white, and many of the ’00s defining features were already in play. The Battle of the Boy Bands heating up in ’98; then Britney Spears at the end of that year. Total Request Live on MTV. And HBO’s Sex in the City premiering that Summer. One blogger pinpoints that as “the precise moment the ’90s were summarily impaled on a fur-covered Manolo Blahnik stiletto.”

Extreme political partisanship, another feature of the ’00s coming out of the impeachment of Bill Clinton, also in ’98, and heading in to ’01, the aftermath of the 2000 election when the Supreme Court had to stop recount officials with magnifying glasses in Democrat counties looking for enough dimpled or hanging or pregnant punch card chads to swing razor-thin Florida and the election from George W. Bush to Al Gore.

’01, also the year a court pulled the plug on Napster, the original filesharing app, and its 60 million users downloading mp3 songs ripped by other users from their CDs and shared on the platform. At one school, students in dorms were using 61% of the university’s internet bandwidth downloading free music on their 56K dialup modems, as much the hard drives on their Dell and Gateway Power PCs could hold. And all of that, completely under Billboard‘s radar.

In his Year in Charts feature at the end of the year, Billboard‘s resident chart guru at the time, Fred Bronson noticed that what was being played on Pop and R&B radio and in Dance Clubs had never been more out of sync with the singles people were buying. Airplay and Club Play Top tens, many of them, barely registering on Sales charts if at all.

At the end of ’98 that same issue had forced Billboard to dump its 41-year-old Hot100 rule that disqualified Airplay-only hits not out as singles. But in ’01 single sales were down 40% in just one year, and less than a quarter what they were in 1997. And labels were releasing fewer and fewer of them to get fans to spring for full albums, but that only made legally-dubious filesharing more attractive to fans.

The industry’s Secure Digital Music Initiative went down in flames in May of ’01 after a team of hackers cracked their proposed watermark in a high-profile tech challenge. But it was already pretty clear that labels were never gonna be able to compensate gadget-makers and internet providers enough for what they stood to lose hitting the brakes on the free music gravy train. Napster’s demise, it turned out, just a bump in the road, as other peer-to-peer sharing platforms kept cropping up like whack-a-moles throughout the ’00s.

In October of ’01, Apple debuted the iPod. Tagline: “1,000 songs in your pocket.” All free, of course; the iTunes Store with its 99 cent legal mp3 downloads didn’t debut ’til 2003, and didn’t impact the charts ’til 2005. Apple sold 125,000 first gen iPods during the ’01 holiday season, MSRP $399.

Now, again, since downloads didn’t register on Billboard’s charts, we’ll never know how the ten songs in our Countdown line up with what was on music fans’ Winamp playlists and Diamond Rio mp3 players. Airplay, by far the biggest factor on the Hot100 in ’01. But with that caveat, let’s dive in.

#10 Joe feat. Mystikal – Stutter

At #10 we have the R&B Singer who scored the #7 song of 2000 with his slow-burning “I Wanna Know” from the coming-of-age flick The Wood. He brought in New Jack Swing producer Teddy Riley to produce the standout slow-burner on his third album, but it was this remix of that song, also for a movie (the buddy action flick Double Take) that became his first #1, for four weeks in late Winter. Featuring growly New Orleans Rapper Mystikal, it’s Joe with “Stutter.”

Joe featuring Mystikal, the remix version of “Stutter,” #10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 2001’s biggest hits. Billboard ranked it #14 on the year, possibly because the weeks it was #1 in February and March were below average for sales and/or radio listenership. Just a guess; we don’t have access to the underlying data, so we can only go by chart positions.

Anyway, Joe cooled off on the Hot100 after ’01, his only top20 entry after “Stutter,” his feature singing the hook on G-Unit’s #15 hit in ’03, “Wanna Get to Know You.” Mystikal returned to the top ten in ’02 though, Rapping on Ludacris’ #15 hit “Move,” but in ’03 he pled guilty to sexually assaulting and extorting his hairstylist and got six years. That’s interesting because Mystikal was bald!

#9 matchbox twenty – If You’re Gone

At #9 is another repeat top 10 entry from the Rock band that scored 2000’s #9 hit, “Bent,” the lead single from their Y2K album Mad Season. But their biggest coup in 2000 was Frontman Rob Thomas singing the year’s #1 hit as the featured Singer on Rock god Santana’s “Smooth,” one of the biggest chart hits of all time, #1 for 12 straight weeks, which catapulted the band to the top of the Post-Grunge heap heading into the ’00s. At #9, the second straight hit off Mad Season, it’s matchbox twenty with “If You’re Gone.”

Unlike “Bent,” matchbox twenty’s “If You’re Gone” never got to #1; it topped out at #5 in late January. But again, chart longevity, often the factor that gets songs ranking high on yearly rankings, and “If You’re Gone” was on the chart 42 weeks.

There were a lot of those in ’01: five of the songs in our Chartcrush 2001 countdown never hit #1. The next two singles from matchbox twenty’s quadruple Platinum Mad Season album failed to crack the top40, and the lead from their next set, More Than You Think You Are only got to #29. Uh oh. But the second, “Unwell” got them back into the top 10 in the Summer of ’03.

#8 Eve feat. Gwen Stefani – Let Me Blow Ya Mind

Next at #8, a Philly MC who was Dr. Dre’s top prospect on his Aftermath label until he decided to focus his attention on Eminem instead. She landed on her feet though as the sole Female in original growly Rapper DMX’s Hip-Hop collective The Ruff Ryders. In ’99 she became only the third Female Rapper to score a #1 album, after Lauryn Hill and Foxy Brown, and then this was her Hot100 breakthrough in ’01, produced by Dr. Dre. No hard feelings there!

She had to fight her fellow Ruff Ryders for it, but she got her way inviting No Doubt Frontwoman Gwen Stefani in to sing the chorus: only her second chart appearance as a solo act. And the record peaked at #2 the week Alicia Keys’ “Fallin'” hit #1. It’s Eve with Gwen Stefani, “Let Me Blow Ya Mind.”

Eve’s “Let Me Blow Ya Mind” at #8 on our 2001 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. In ’02 she brought in the Singer who’d kept that song from getting to #1, Alicia Keys, for the advance lead single from her next album, Eve-Olution, and that one, “Gangsta Lovin’,” also got to #2, kept from #1 by Nelly and Kelly Rowland’s “Dilemma.”

Well, she returned Gwen Stefani’s favor in ’04 with the Rap verse on “Rich Girl,” and then, wouldn’t ya know it, she shows up on Kelly Rowland’s #7 R&B hit “Like This” in ’07: Eve’s final top10 on any chart. But she was already ubiquitous on screens: the Barbershop movie, reality show guest spots, hosting documentaries, recurring roles on scripted shows, you name it. And starting in the mid-’10s, daytime talk: The Real on Fox, and then The Talk on CBS.

#7 StainD – It’s Been Awhile

Now there were a lot of Rock bands scoring big Hot100 hits from ’99 to ’01: Creed, Limp Bizkit, Foo Fighters, Rage Against the Machine, Kid Rock, 3 Doors Down, Nine Days, Papa Roach, Crazy Town, Linkin Park, Incubus. And those are just the ones from the Heavier side of things.

And then these guys at #7 out of Springfield, Massachusetts whose Frontman made the Hot100 as a solo act before his band did. Just a couple months before, but still. Aaron Lewis and Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst’s “Outside” made the chart in January ’01; then Lewis’s “Country Boy” with Country legends George Jones & Charlie Daniels hit in March, and then this song by the band. They’re the only act in the countdown whose album was also among Billboard‘s top 10 albums of the year, Break the Cycle. At #7, StainD, “It’s Been Awhile.”

Aaron Lewis and StainD connected with an audience craving a new level of vulnerability and emotional transparency in Pop lyrics, and with “It’s Been a While” it’s easy to see why. But in the Summer of ’02, that got its own genre as Jimmy Eat World and Avril Lavigne scored their first hits, Weezer ditched their Grungy sound on their ’01 Green Album, and the confessional Pop-Punk called Emo outlasted Lewis and StainD’s Post-Grunge by several years.

Now “It’s Been a While” only notches in at #14 on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 for ’01. That’s because their cutoff date for the ’01 chart year to give themselves time make their press deadline for the year-end issue was the last week in November, and “It’s Been a While” stayed on the chart 14 weeks after that. But adding those weeks back in and counting its full chart run as we do for every song on Chartcrush, it comes out #7.

#6 Janet – All for You

At #6, a chart veteran: her 23rd top ten hit since 1986, and her tenth #1. Critics in the ’90s had been comparing her singing unfavorably to the likes of Whitney, Mariah, Celine and others who’d raised the bar for Pop vocal chops, even though that’d never really been her thing. But since her previous album in ’97, soaring Pop Power Ballads had been sidelined by Teen Pop, Celine Dion on hiatus, and Whitney and Mariah taking things down a notch and chasing Hip-Hop street cred with a more urban sound.

So now in her mid-30s with the Pop ecosystem looking better for her than it had in years, she was poised to surge again, and surge she did, with the longest-running #1 of the year: seven weeks in the Spring. At #6 it’s Janet Jackson (officially going just by “Janet” since ’97), “All for You.”

Janet, “All for You,” #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2001. Miss Jackson was newly single and ready to mingle in ’01. The split from hubby, Mexican Dancer, Songwriter and Video Director Rene Elizondo, Jr. after nine years of marriage had come as quite a shock to fans; but not because they were breaking up, but because no one had known they were even married until he filed for divorce in 2000; it was a secret! But ’01 was party time, and it comes across on “All for You.”

If you heard Chic’s “Good Times” listening to that, good ear, and reviewers at the time heard it too. But not quite! The sample courtesy of Janet’s longtime Producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis is from a Dance hit from 1980 that rips off Chic’s “Good Times:” “Glow of Love” by anonymous Italian Disco producers Change. Janet had never heard of it, but Jam and Lewis had the right idea.

Janet followed up with the “Ventura Highway“-sampling “Someone to Call My Lover,” which got to #3 in late Summer. And never made the top10 again! Just before her next album Damita Jo dropped in ’04, her Superbowl halftime “Nipplegate” wardrobe fiasco with Justin Timberlake, and CBS Chairman Les Moonves banned her from Viacom-owned MTV, VH1, a ton of radio stations and even the Grammy Awards which were on CBS a week later. That oddly obsessive vendetta continued until Moonves himself was ousted from CBS, peak #metoo, in 2018.

#5 Train – Drops of Jupiter

Now I mentioned at the top of the show Billboard‘s Fred Bronson noticing at the end of ’01 how the Airplay and Sales charts were diverging. Well another thing he noticed: the opposite was happening with the Mainstream and Modern Rock charts: more and more artists and songs in common between the two.

Translation? Alternative now was Mainstream. Our #5 song had almost identical placements on those two year-end charts, but it had its best showing on the Hot100 which also factored Pop radio and Sales. It took its sweet time climbing to its peak at #5 for two weeks at the end of June, but once there it stayed in the top 10 for 14 weeks, and came up just one week shy of having the longest chart run of the year. Their top 20 chart debut “Meet Virginia” in ’98 had gotten their name out there, but this made them superstars; it’s Bay Area Rockers Train with “Drops of Jupiter.”

Train’s big breakthrough hit “Drops of Jupiter,” #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2001, mistaken by some at the time for a long-lost Elton John song, and that was no accident! Elton’s Arranger since his first hits in 1970, Paul Buckmaster, did the strings. And how about that piano!

Train Frontman Tom Monahan wrote the song about his mom’s long losing battle with lung cancer, and it won Best Rock Song at the Grammys. Train mostly retreated to the Adult Pop Airplay charts through the rest of the ’00s, but surprised everyone in 2010, peak Electro-Dance, when their rootsy ukulele jam “Hey, Soul Sister” got all the way to #3.

#4 Jennifer Lopez feat. Ja Rule – I’m Real

At #4 we have the first of two back-to-back #1s by the same artist that got Billboard to change its rules about what qualifies as a “remix” on the Hot100. As head of Def Jam Records in the ’90s Sean “Puffy” Combs (later P. Diddy) had pioneered the strategy of releasing Hip-Hop remixes of R&B songs. With both versions out there, a song could get played on Mainstream Pop and R&B radio and edgier stations in urban markets, but Billboard would treat it as the same song, so the airplay for all the versions combined into a single entry on the Hot100.

OK, that makes sense. But what if you released two completely different songs with the same title and just called one of them a “remix?” Would Billboard still combine them on the Hot100? Well as it turns out, yes. And as it also turns out, the same artist, label and remix collaborators can get away with that twice, and both times score #1 hits, before Billboard finally says (as their reviewer did say, in print, about the second of those back-to-back #1s): “you gotta be kidding me,”

At #4, ’01’s “it” New York rapper Ja Rule with his “Murder remix” (in fact a completely different song from the Dance Pop number on the album) of Jennifer Lopez’s “I’m Real.”

Not too many pop culture personalities in ’01 bigger than Jennifer Lopez. In ’97 she’d scored as an Actress starring in the biopic Selena, and then rode the 1999 Latin Invasion wave to Pop stardom with her debut album and its #1 hit “If You Had My Love.” Her green Versace dress at the 2000 Grammys was Google’s top search and the reason they created Google Images.

Then at the beginning of ’01 she became the first woman to have both the #1 movie and the #1 album at the same time when The Wedding Planner co-starring Matt McConaughey hit theaters the same week her second album dropped.

The album debuted at #1 but reviews were mixed, its lead single failed to hit #1, the second barely cracked the top 20, and the album was dropping like a rock. What to do? Hip-hop remix! So they brought in New York’s hottest new Rapper. But instead of remixing anything, Ja Rule and his label, Irv and Chris Gotti’s Murder, Inc. Records, wrote and produced two completely new tracks, with J. Lo contributing vocals.

But check it out: then J. Lo’s label, Sony/Epic, released them, one after the other, with the same titles as two of the songs on the album, just tacking on “Murder Remix.” “I’m Real,” which we just heard at #4, was first; then “Ain’t It Funny,” which was the #9 song of 2002. After that Billboard changed its rule to only allow remixes with the same melody to combine for chart positions.

By the way the “I’m Real” Murder Remix was the #1 song the week of 9/11, and when they reissued J. Lo’s album with the Murder remixes included, it shot back into the top ten after bottoming out at #107. Crazy!

#3 Alicia Keys – Fallin’

Now as I said talking about Janet Jackson, Pop and R&B Divas like Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey were incorporating more of Hip-Hop’s attitude and sound into their work in the late ’90s. But labels also wanted new blank slates who could embody that hot new hybrid, and the one at #3 was a perfect candidate: experienced Writer/Producer, classically-trained Pianist, great voice, sexy look, and a born-and-raised New Yorker, so she’d lived and breathed Hip-Hop since she her toddler years.

Of course Clive Davis snapped her up, the A&R legend who discovered Whitney in the ’80s. And since she wasn’t yet a star, Clive was able to sneak her out the door with him after his longtime company Arista Records threw him overboard in 2000 to bring in L.A. Reid as CEO. That despite Davis spending a bunch of Arista’s cash in ’98 to buy her out of her previous contract with Columbia, including all the songs she was working on there.

This was one of them, and in his new start-up label, J, Davis uncharacteristically gave her full freedom to develop her songs and make her records as she saw fit, unlike Columbia, who wanted her doing Teen Dance Pop. At #3 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2001, Alicia Keys’ debut, “Fallin’.”

Not only was Alicia Keys’ debut single “Fallin'” #1 on the Hot100 for six weeks; it won the Record and Song of the Year Grammys, and Alicia was Best New Artist. Her follow-up single “A Woman’s Worth” got to #7, then her feature I mentioned earlier on Eve’s “Gangsta Lovin’,” a #2 later in 2002. But her sophomore album released in late ’03, Diary of Alicia Keys, made her one of the ’00s top stars with its three top ten hits in ’03 and ’04, and also in ’04, her #1 duet with Usher on his Confessions album, “My Boo.”

#2 Lifehouse – Hanging by a Moment

Now recall that Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” only got to #5, but it still makes our Top Ten Countdown thanks to its 53 weeks on the chart. Well our #2 song didn’t get to #1 either, but it had 54 weeks and peaked at #2, kept out of the top spot for three weeks by Christina Aguilera, Lil’ Kim, Mýa, and P!nk’s update of “Lady Marmalade” for the Baz Luhrmann big screen Jukebox Musical phenomenon Moulin Rouge, that starred Nicole Kidman and Ewen McGregor.

That 54 week chart run made it Billboard‘s #1 song of ’01, but one song beats it on our Chartcrush ranking, and I’ll explain in a minute, but first, at #2 it’s Lifehouse’s “Hanging by a Moment.”

Lifehouse from L.A., their Hot100 debut “Hanging by a Moment,” the #2 song here on our 2001 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. That melodic Post-Grunge sound, certainly not limited to Lifehouse and StainD, whose “It’s Been a While” we heard at #7. It was ubiquitous on Rock radio in the early ’00s and it drew a lot of fire from fans and critics alike for its sameiness across artists and songs.

Lifehouse opened for red hot matchbox twenty on a 14-date tour in March, and by the end of that, “Hanging by a Moment” was in the top 20. Their follow-up singles went nowhere but in the Fall the WB network used Lifehouse’s song “Everything” in the pilot of their new Teen-targeted Superman prequel series Smallville, which went on to be a huge hit on TV, and by the fourth season after repeated uses, Lifehouse appeared as themselves playing their song “You and Me” in a poignant prom night scene, which helped keep it on the charts even longer than “Hanging by a Moment” and make it the #8 song of 2005.

#1 Mary J. Blige – Family Affair

And that gets us down to our #1 song on our Chartcrush ranking for 2001. Again, Billboard had “Hanging by a Moment” atop its year-end Hot100, but as happens way more often than you’d think, huge hits get buried in their rankings, and only because of when during the year they were hits.

Our #1 song debuted at the end of July, hit #1 in November and was still #1 on November 24, which was the last week Billboard counted in its 2001 ranking. And it stayed #1 for two more weeks in December and on the chart ’til May of ’02. All that, factored into Billboard‘s 2002 chart year, so they have the song at #31 for ’01 and #17 for ’02.

At Chartcrush though, again, with the luxury of hindsight, not having to get a magazine issue printed and mailed before New Years, we count every song’s full chart run, and rank it in whichever of the calendar years it had the majority of its chart action, and doing that reveals this to have been the biggest hit of 2001. At #1, Mary J. Blige’s “Family Affair.”

“Family Affair,” Mary J. Blige’s first #1 and first top ten since “Not Gon’ Cry” in early ’96, produced by Dr. Dre, his first #1 as a Producer after getting so close just months earlier with Eve and Gwen Stefani’s “Let Me Blow Ya Mind,” which we heard back at #8.

Mary was coming off two more mainstream-targeted albums in the late ’90s as the Pop Diva tide was yielding to more Hip-Hop influenced R&B sounds. They sold well, those albums, but didn’t produce any big hits, and like Janet Jackson, Blige in 2001 was newly single, having just ended her abusive six year relationship with Jodeci’s K-Ci Hailey. The title of her ’01 album said it all: No More Drama, and “Family Affair” was its lead single, a brighter, more upbeat sound than the tortured confessionals that’d made her famous in the early ’90s.

Bonus

Well there you have ’em: our Chartcrush top ten songs of 2001 factoring every song’s full run. But the year-straddling hits “Family Affair” and StainD’s “It’s Been a While” coming in to our top ten along with Joe and Mystikal’s “Stutter” displaces three songs from Billboard‘s year-end top ten. Of those, Destiny’s Child’s “Independent Women, Part 1,” their #10 song, was a 2000 to ’01 year-straddler that comes out 2000’s #2 song doing things the Chartcrush way, so it’s in our 2000 episode. But the other two were legit 2001 hits bumped from our top ten, so to be thorough, let’s run through those.

#12 Lenny Kravitz – Again

Billboard‘s #9 song comes out #12 on our ranking: yet another Rocker that didn’t get to #1. It peaked at #4, for six straight weeks. But it hung out in the top 10 for 14 weeks. Lenny Kravitz’s “Again.”

Lenny Kravitz’s first top 10 on the Hot100 since “It Ain’t Over til It’s Over” in ’91, but he scored four on the Mainstream Rock chart in that time, and his Greatest Hits set released in 2000 sold boatloads. “Again” was the new song on that.

#14 Dido – Thank You

So after the Chumbawamba and Spice Girls in ’97, Brits got pretty scarce on the U.S. charts: only eight top tens by British acts between then and when James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful” hit #1 and broke the logjam in ’06. But Billboard‘s #8 song of 2001 was an exception thanks to Eminem sampling its first verse in his critically acclaimed late 2000 hit “Stan.” We have the song at #14 on the year, Dido’s “Thank You.”

Dido, one of the bestselling artists of all time in her native U.K., and one of the few British acts to impact the Hot100 in the early ’00. “Thank You” peaked at #3 for three weeks in the Spring while Janet’s “All for You” was #1. It did top the Adult Contemporary chart though, for four weeks, and she was back in ’04 with another top 20 hit, “White Flag.”

Well that’s a wrap for our 2001 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Thanks for listening and hey, if you like what you heard, you’re gonna want to check out our website, chartcrush.com, for a written transcript and link to the podcast version of the show, plus our full Top 100 chart, interactive chart run line graph and other kickin’ extras. We do that for every year we count down, ’40s up to now, and it’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com. It’s a different year every week, so be sure and tune in again next week, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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::start transcript::

Welcome! This is the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show and I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we dive deep into a year in Pop music and count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in Billboard, the music industry’s top trade mag and chart authority. This week on Chartcrush we’re counting down 2018, the year Billboard threw the full weight of the Hot100 behind on-demand streaming on platforms like Spotify, Apple and Amazon.

2017 was the real pivot year though: the first double-digit percent year-over-year revenue increase for the music biz in 20 years after the mp3 filesharing apocalypse in the ’00s, and when Hip-Hop/R&B officially became music’s top genre, according to Nielsen, the ratings people in charge of collecting the data for Billboard‘s charts since 1991. But Billboard‘s update of its Hot100 calculus in ’18 sealed the deal. Seven of the songs in our top 10 songs, by or featuring Rappers, up from three in ’17.

Hip-Hop, already the biggest streaming genre thanks to its outsized popularity among Millennials, aged 22 to 37 in 2018 comprising the vast majority of streaming’s user base. So as streaming eclipsed other formats, Hip-Hop eclipsed other genres.

But for the first time, with streaming, Hip-Hop’s mixtape scene was getting counted: the proving ground where new and established artists put out remixes, mashups and other non-album material for the street. In 2006, the RIAA had estimated 30 to 50 million mixtape CDs a year changing hands, just before the feds started raiding shops and CD mills to shut it down and the whole thing migrated to blogs on the Web. Those also got busted eventually, but it all flew completely under Nielsen and Billboard‘s radar, along with the tens of billions (with a “b”) of mp3s in all genres downloaded with peer-to-peer filesharing apps, until the streaming era.

But events were also driving Hip-Hop’s resurgence. The shooting of Michael Brown by a White cop in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 ignited a debate about racial profiling that’d been smoldering since President Obama’s White House beer summit in ’09 with a White cop who’d arrested a Black Harvard Professor trying to break in to his own home. Then in ’13, Black Teen Trayvon Martin, shot during a struggle with a neighborhood watch coordinator in Florida who was later found to have been acting appropriately in self-defense, as was the cop in the Brown shooting.

But those and other stories combined to form one of the most pervasive media narratives of the ’10s: racial tensions and profiling, and a supposed epidemic of unarmed Black men being shot by police. Which the numbers and circumstances don’t bear out: 18 a year on average 2016 to ’19, most in struggles for the cop’s gun. But the narrative pushed by, as Elon Musk called mainstream news in 2023, the “five editors-in-chief of major publications,” still wielding their power pre-Covid-19 pandemic to manage and shape public perceptions “at scale,” with “attitudes, interpretations and conclusions already built in,” as one Media Literacy Resource Guide described narrative-driven coverage.

That definitely boosted Hip-Hop in pop culture and gave Rappers plenty of new things to say. Nearly one in four Hip-Hop #1s in ’17 and ’18 were political according to one study, the most since the ’90s, and thanks to streaming, many of those also topped the Hot100.

And race wasn’t the only issue, especially after Donald Trump took office as the 45th president. That was also in 2017, but by ’18, Trump’s first full year in office, the overwhelmingly anti-Trump media was busily stitching together similarly elaborate and potent narratives about feminism, guns, climate change, illegal immigration and of course Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia to tamper with the 2016 election.

#10 Camila Cabello featuring Young Thug – Havana

On immigration, the issue was Trump’s proposed wall along the Southern border, so what better to drum up sympathy for illegal immigrants from south of the border than a #1 hit for a record 16 weeks sung entirely in español? That was Luis Fonzi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito” in 2017 which actually didn’t hit #1 until a remix version dropped by Justin Bieber from north of the border in Canada, with most of the lyrics sung in English.

But the top beneficiary of the Latin explosion in 2018, the year we’re counting down on this week’s Chartcrush, was the solo breakthrough from Cuban-American Singer Camila Cabello, teaming up with American Rapper Young Thug on our #10 hit, “Havana.”

The first-ever Diamond-certified single by a Latin Female, the Salsa-inspired “Havana,” #10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2018: Camila Cabello’s solo breakthrough after a pair of hits in ’15 and ’16 as the standout member of the Teen Girl Group Fifth Harmony, then teaming up with Rapper/Alt Rocker Machine Gun Kelly to sing the chorus on the #4 hit “Bad Things” in 2017.

She scored another #1 in 2019, her duet with Shawn Mendes on “Señorita,” but didn’t make the top 20 again despite her 2022 album Familia getting to #10 on the album chart.

#9 Drake – In My Feelings

At #9, the first of three Rappers each with two songs in our 2018 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. 43 of the 52 weeks in 2018 had a Rap song or a song with a Rap at #1. This Rapper snagged record-setting 21 of those weeks with his two #1’s, the second of which on the calendar was #1 from late July to late September and inspired a guy on Instagram called Shiggy to post a video of himself dancing to it in the street, which New York Giants Wide Receiver Odell Beckham, Jr. copied and the viral “Kiki Challenge” was off and running.

At some point it evolved into hopping out of your moving vehicle to dance, filming yourself through the open door, and the National Transportation Safety Board had to issue an official statement about that: cut it out! It’s Drake at #9,”In My Feelings.”

Drake and Kendrick Lamar gave music its the five biggest streaming weeks ever up to that point in 2017: Lamar’s album Damn, which won the Pulitzer Prize for music, and Drake’s More Life, a mixtape, broke the record for the most streams its debut week: 384.8 million. So Drake was red hot coming into 2018, and the week his album Scorpion hit platforms, July 14, all 25 of its songs made the Hot100 and there was a noticeable dip, with every other song on the charts dropping five to ten positions to make room.

“Nice for What” was #1 that week, but then “In My Feelings,” which we just heard at #9, debuted at #1 the following week and stayed on top for the next ten, and Billboard named it “Song of the Summer.”

#8 Juice WRLD – Lucid Dreams (Forget Me)

Drake wasn’t the only Rapper who was in his feelings, though. 2018 was the year Emo Rap broke through into the top 10 from its Soundcloud origins mid-decade: a merger of Hip-Hop and the introspective, confessional lyrics and attitudes of ’00s Emo Rock.

Lil Uzi Vert, not exclusively an Emo Rapper, but he followed up his feature on The Migos’ #1 “Bad and Boujee” in ’17 with the genre’s first major hit, “XO Tour Llif3,” which opened up the charts for Emo Rap’s first two big stars, Lil Peep and XXXTentacion, but by the middle of ’18, Peep was dead from an OD in ’17 and X, shot by armed robbers, so the Emo Rapper at #8 was the last man standing in 2018’s fastest growing genre on Spotify, and the song was Emo Rap’s biggest hit, in the top 10 for 25 weeks. It’s Juice WRLD’s “Lucid Dreams.”

Juice WRLD’s “Lucid Dreams” at #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2018. Juice got to enjoy his fame a little longer than Lil Peep and XXXTentacion but at the end of 2019 at age 21, he OD’d swallowing a handful of opiate pills so cops wouldn’t find them on his airplane.

Emo Rap, the most depressing genre ever to top the Pop charts, so “Emo Rapper,” it turned out, was a highly lethal profession. Loneliness, anxiety, drugs and alcohol, nihilism, suicide, heartbreak, self-medication: just a partial list of core themes.

OD deaths among 15-24 year-olds in America were up a breathtaking 48% 2019 to ’20 according to government figures: by far the largest one-year increase ever.

Kiddos with no perspective, marinating in a media matrix pushing apocalyptic narratives about school shootings, income inequality, racism, Donald Trump and Russia conspiring to steal the election… climate change. Especially climate change! Young Congresswoman and Instagram personality Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared that “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change” in early 2019. And then in ’20, the Covid-19 pandemic.

Emo Rap was many kids’ soundtrack to all that, its rise and appeal as much a symptom of exaggerated media narratives as the alarming OD and suicide stats, but in giving voice to the feelings and validating the self-destructive responses and behaviors, the music fueled a vicious cycle.

“Lucid Dreams” re-entered the Hot100 for two weeks when the news of Juice WRLD’s death hit, but labels had already signed the second wave of Emo Rap stars, 24kGoldn and The Kid Laroi, both of whom scored even bigger hits in the genre in the early ’20s.

#7 Bebe Rexha featuring Florida Georgia Line – Meant to Be

Well at #7 is a change of pace: the biggest hit of all time on the Country charts, #1 there for an incredible 50 weeks: almost the entire year, but the lead artist wasn’t even a Country Singer!

Born in Brooklyn, raised in Staten Island, she was a second-gen Albanian-American whose first coup was writing the hook of Rapper Eminem’s 2013 hit “The Monster.” She didn’t get to sing it on the record, Rihanna did, but less than two years later the world heard her on another of her co-writes, White Rapper G-Eazy’s “Me, Myself & I,” and in ’17 she accepted an invite to write a song with the Duo who Billboard ranked the #4 top Country act of the ’10s decade, and this was the result. No wonder Rolling Stone called her a “Pop chameleon.” At #7 it’s Bebe Rexha featuring Florida Georgia Line, “Meant to Be.”

“Meant to Be,” Bebe Rexha featuring Florida Georgia Line, #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 2018’s biggest Pop hits.

“Bro-Country,” the genre that crossed over from the Country charts in the ’10s and Florida Georgia Line’s “Cruise” and its #4 Pop remix in ’12 and ’13 set the template, with approaches borrowed from Rock, Hip-Hop and even EDM. Sam Hunt’s “Body Like a Back Road,” the biggest recent Bro-County hit heading into ’18.

Bebe Rexha struggled on the charts for a few years after “Meant to Be,” but was back in the top 10 in 2023 as the Singer and Co-Writer on veteran French EDM Producer David Guetta’s hit “I’m Good (Blue).” “Pop chameleon” indeed!

#6 Cardi B, Bad Bunny & J Balvin – I Like It

So at the end of 2017 Billboard kinda made a big deal over their year-end top ten not having any songs with Female lead artists, but that was only because “Bodak Yellow,” the breakout hit by the Rapper with the #6 hit on our 2018 countdown was only in the middle of its chart run November 25, the end of Billboard‘s 2017 chart year to make that press deadline for their year-end issue. But with 15 weeks yet to go, counting the song’s full chart run in the year it saw most of its chart action, “Bodak” was really 2017’s #6 song, not #24 where Billboard had it.

But still, they had a point: 2017 was pretty Male-dominated. ’18, less so, and that had a lot to do with our Female Rapper having an even bigger second year. And she was pregnant through much of it, which was another thing to keep fans engaged on socials all Spring and Summer as the songs from her debut album Invasion of Privacy, all twelve of them besides “Bodak,” bounced around the Hot100. This was the biggest. At #6 it’s Cardi B, teamed with Puerto Rican Rapper Bad Bunny and Colombian Singer J Balvin, “I Like It.”

“I Like It,” Cardi B, another song in Spanish in the top ten on the year after “Despacito” was the #2 song of 2017, legacy media pounding their border wall and illegal immigration narratives hard, so songs in Spanish were super-relevant.

The feminist #metoo narrative, also ubiquitous as Cardi B emerged to break the near monopoly of Males at the top of the charts. Donald Trump’s vulgar comments about women on the infamous Access Hollywood tape from 2005; 87 women accusing Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein in 2017; then Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in ’18. In the Senate confirmation hearings, Christine Blasey Ford claiming he assaulted her in college.

So a new take-no-crap, in-your-face Female Rapper against that backdrop? Perfect! Cardi B, the first Female Rapper to hit #1 since White Australian Iggy Azalea in ’14, who was quickly canceled for her culture vulturing “blaccent” and history of questionable Tweets. And after Cardi B, here came Megan Thee Stallion and Doja Cat in the top 10 in ’20 and ’21.

#5 Post Malone – Better Now

OK, so now we’ve heard a song apiece from two of the three Rappers with two hits in our 2018 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, Drake and Cardi B. At numbers 5 and 4 we have a two-fer from the third: both songs back-to-back in our ranking.

At the beginning of 2016, “White Iverson” off his first album Stoney had gotten to #14 and caused a bit of a stir, but nothing else connected for over a year, until the fifth single from Stoney, “Congratulations” started its slow, seven month climb up the charts to #8. By then, his second album Beerbongs and Bentleys was nearly done, and with pent up demand on streaming platforms, its lead single debuted at #2. We’re gonna hear that one which was on the charts from late ’17 into ’18 next, but first at #5, the last hit off Beerbongs and Bentleys from nearly year later. It’s Post Malone’s “Better Now.”

“Better Now” had the highest debut, #7, of all the 15 Post Malone tracks that charted the week Beerbongs and Bentleys hit streaming services, Billboard‘s issue dated May 12. The three other tracks on that album had already charted as advance singles, and Billboard has one of those, “Psycho,” as its #6 year-end song of 2018.

We have “Better Now” instead, with “Psycho” at #12, for the same reason that Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow” is our #6 song of 2017 despite missing the year-end top ten in Billboard: they didn’t count its full chart run, and here at Chartcrush, we count every song’s full chart run. “Better Now” stayed on the Hot100 all the way ’til May of 2019: tied for the second most total weeks on the chart of all 2018 hits with 52, and all but one of those was in the Top40.

#4 Post Malone – rockstar

But Malone’s biggest hit of the year was our song at #4 on our 2018 Chartcrush countdown, the lead advance single from Beerbongs and Bentleys that debuted at #2 in October of ’17, months before the album’s release. And someone at the label, or maybe Malone himself, came up with a brilliant way to juice it on the charts: a looped video on YouTube with only the chorus, but in the description, links to hear the full song on streaming platforms, and here’s the jig: both views and streams were factored for the charts, so it’s double the clicks! Clever, huh? At #4, the whole song, not a loop: Post Malone with Rapper 21 Savage, “rockstar.”

Post Malone’s “rockstar” at #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2018, featuring Rapper 21 Savage, whose own chart breakthrough “Bank Account” peaked at #12 two months before “rockstar.”

Now, critics didn’t much like Postie. Spin called him “a doofy longhaired White guy” in a “Worst Songs of the Year” feature that included “rockstar,” and a 2022 New Yorker assessment had the headline “Post Malone’s Languid Songs of Self-Loathing.” In a year when Emo Rap killed on streaming platforms, though, maybe that’s a ringing endorsement, right? But Post Malone didn’t need critics to like him; he was back with even bigger hits in ’19 and ’20 off his next album Hollywood’s Bleeding.

#3 Ed Sheeran – Perfect

Next up at #3, the big 2018 hit by the highest grossing concert act of the year: 99 shows, a cool $429 million. Not bad. He also had the #1 song of 2017, so here he is coming pretty close to repeating. No artist in our Chartcrush rankings has done that since Bing Crosby in 1944 and ’45!

It’s the fourth single off his 2017 album Divide, just the mathematical symbol on the cover, but an appropriate title given the media posture in the late ’10s that I’ve been talking about, and all the toxic narratives. At #3, Ed Sheeran’s “Perfect.”

“Perfect,” English Singer-Songwriter Ed Sheeran, the #3 song of 2018 a year after scoring the biggest hit of 2017 with “Shape of You.” There were two Duet remix versions of “Perfect,” one with Beyonce and the other with Italian Tenor Andrea Bocelli helping propel it to #1 for five weeks, then six more at #2 behind Camila Cabello’s “Havana.”

As big as he was in the U.S., Ed Sheeran was arguably even bigger than The Beatles in his native U.K. After his album Divide dropped, he broke a record set in 1953 by occupying all five of the top chart positions on the U.K. chart. The Beatles did that in the U.S. in 1964, but not in the U.K.

#2 Drake – God’s Plan

At #2, the second song in our Chartcrush 2018 Top Ten Countdown by the Rapper whose “In My Feelings” we heard back at #9 sparked the year’s big social media meme in late Summer, the Kiki Challenge. This one was earlier, the lead single from his first proper studio album in two years, Scorpion, but first released on a two-song EP a month before he even announced that he was working on a new album, and five months before the album actually dropped.

The label budgeted a million bucks to make a video, and he gave nearly all of it to the needy and charities in Miami in cash and oversized checks and filmed himself doing so. And that was the video. It nevertheless won Video of the Year at the BET Awards.

One parody had late night host Jimmy Kimmel’s sidekick Guillermo spreading around $100 in singles in a Dollar Store. Here again, Drake with “God’s Plan.”

Drake, contemplating his fame and fate on “God’s Plan,” #2 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, 2018 edition. The first of three #1s from his Scorpion album. “Nice for What” was next when it debuted at #1 in late April and replaced “God’s Plan” at the top; then “In My Feelings” replaced that in July and combined, the three songs gave Drake 29 weeks at #1 in 2018, breaking Usher’s record of 28 in ’04. He also had the #2 song four of those weeks.

Billboard has him as the year’s top Hot100 artist, which surprised no one, but on simple chart points, not counting featured appearances, only lead artist billings, Post Malone actually comes out #1.

#1 Maroon 5 featuring Cardi B – Girls like You

Billboard also had “God’s Plan” as their #1 Hot100 song of the year. But again, Billboard‘s year-end rankings can’t factor full chart runs, only weeks within their “chart years” imposed by the press deadlines for the year-end issues with their chart recaps.

Our #1 is the song that replaced “God’s Plan” atop the weekly Hot100, and stayed there for the next seven weeks through most of the Fall. But then it stayed on the chart all the way ’til June of 2019, seven months past Billboard‘s cut-off for the 2018 chart year, so Billboard ranked it #10 for 2018 and #22 for 2019. But when you factor all the weeks together, it beats “God’s Plan” by a pretty comfortable margin despite having four fewer weeks at #1.

No 2018 song had more weeks in the top10: 33 of its total 52 weeks on the chart, making it 2018’s #1 song: Maroon 5 and Cardi B’s “Girls like You.”

Cardi B’s simmering beef with Nicki Minaj coming to blows in September may’ve helped juice “Girls like You” to #1. She’d become the first Black Female Rapper since Lauryn Hill in the ’90 to score a #1 solo hit and did it with her debut single. The closest Nicki had gotten, “Anaconda,” #2 in 2014 behind Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off.”

Now Maroon 5: 15-year chart veterans still going strong in 2018. “Girls like You,” their fourth career #1 and #1 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 2018’s biggest hits.

Front man Adam Levine, the star judge/coach on NBC’s top-rated singing competition reality show The Voice since 2011, and in the ’10s, many of Maroon 5’s biggest hits, including “Girls like You,” collaborations with “it” Rappers: Wiz Khalifa in 2012 (“Payphone”), Nicki Minaj in ’15 (the remix of “Sugar”), Kendrick Lamar in ’16 (“Don’t Wanna Know”) and Future in ’17 with “Cold.”

Bonus

And that’s our top 10. Again, we factor songs’ full runs, which gets the year-straddling hits “Lucid Dreams” and “Better Now” that missed Billboard‘s year-end top 10 because of their necessary year-splitting into our Chartcrush top 10. But those coming in bumps two out from Billboard‘s top ten, so to be thorough, let’s have a look at those.

#13 Zedd, Maren Morris and Grey – The Middle

At #8 Billboard had the hit by Russian-born German EDM Producer Zedd teamed with Country Singer Maren Morris and American EDM Duo Grey, “The Middle.”

“The Middle” was also Billboard‘s #1 year-end Hot Dance/Electronic song having set a new record with 33 weeks at #1 on that chart. It notches in at #13 on our Chartcrush Hot100 ranking.

#12 Post Malone – Psycho

And the other song from Billboard‘s year-end top 10 that got shuffled out of our Chartcrush top 10 by those year-straddlers coming in: their #5 song of the year: the third single from Post Malone’s Beerbongs and Bentleys, “Psycho.”

Post Malone’s “Psycho” is #12 on our Chartcrush 2018 ranking; I mentioned it earlier in our Postie twofer at numbers 5 and 4 in the countdown when we heard “Better Now” and “rockstar.”

Well it’s been fun but we’re gonna have to wrap up our 2018 edition of Chartcrush! I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi, and if you like what you heard and want more, please please please, head over to our website, chartcrush.com, where you’ll a full transcript and a link to the podcast version on Spotify, plus badass extras like our full top 100 chart and interactive line graph of the actual chart runs of the songs we heard this hour. We do that for every year, ’40s to the present, and it’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com.

Thanks for listening and be sure and tune in again this time next week, same station, for another year, and another edition of Chartcrush.

::end transcript::

::start transcript::

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

This week on Chartcrush, it’s 1954, the year Todd Storz invented Top40 radio, and Silent Generation Teens launched a crudely-recorded R&B disc by a Black Vocal Group, The Chords’ “Sh-Boom,” into the Top 10. The next Summer, Bill Haley & The Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” was the first #1 Rock ‘n Roll record. Then Top 10s by Pat Boone, Chuck Berry and The Platters, a #1 by The Platters, and in May of ’56, Elvis’s debut with “Heartbreak Hotel.”

TV, the nation’s new communications medium in the early ’50s. Sets in U.S. households went from just 1% in 1948 to 75% in 1955, and at the same time, the FCC was feverishly granting radio broadcast licenses, so with all the new options on the dial vying for a shrinking audience, radio got to be a very tough business. Most stations, still chugging along with the same TV-style hodgepodge of network and local talk, music, news, serials and variety as had been on radio since the ’20s.

But in ’51, Todd Storz, the GM of KOWH in Omaha, Nebraska, noticed that the only time anyone was listening was when his station was spinning records, so in ’51 he did for radio what MTV did for TV in the ’80s: music all day. And by the end of the year, KOWH was #1 in Omaha and Storz was copying the formula at stations throughout the Midwest.

And then in ’54, legend has it, on a long lunch, Storz noticed a waitress plunk a quarter in the jukebox to play a record they’d been hearing all afternoon played by patrons three more times, and it was an “aha” moment for him: don’t just play music; play the same 30 or 40 records over and over again all day. Well, once KOWH started doing that, ratings soared even higher, thanks to the throngs of Teens that started tuning in to hear the latest hits.

With mom and dad in charge of the one TV in the house, music on the radio became their go-to media, and by the end of the ’50s, Top40 stations were #1 in almost every market playing Rock ‘n Roll, R&B, Country and Traditional Pop hits, a racially integrated mix.

DJs Alan Freed and Hunter Hancock may’ve pioneered playing Black R&B and Doo Wop on the radio for a few hours a day (or, more accurately, night) in Akron, Ohio and Los Angeles. But it took Top 40 to magnify that impact once, as Billboard noted in September, “youngsters, [who were] the backbone of the Pop record business, [sought out those R&B records] in stores and on juke boxes.”

“Gee” was first: an upbeat record by a Harlem Doo Wop group called The Crows that made the national top 20 in the Spring. But then in the Summer, another group, The Chords out of The Bronx, made the top 10 with “Sh-Boom,” immediately covered by a White Canadian Vocal Group with a Pop arrangement on a major label, and that was one of the year’s biggest hits, #1 for eight weeks, launching the R&B gold rush that led to Rock ‘n Roll.

White Silents were seeking out R&B records as a harmless form of personal rebellion and release amid the conformity of the ’50s, but it was also against the backdrop of the Cold War battle for hearts and minds against Communists out there promising full equality. As Civil Rights lawyer and future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall cautioned during the Korean War, “America’s dereliction on race issues would put the U.S. in a vulnerable position” globally. In ’54, Marshall successfully argued for school desegregation in the Court’s landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case.

#10 Dean Martin – That’s Amore

So once White kids’ interest in Black R&B started showing up on the charts, that was the headline, but foreign sounds were another aspect of America’s postwar cultural voyeurism. Les Baxter’s 1951 album Ritual of the Savage launched the Exotica genre of lushly orchestrated tropical ersatz, but War vets and Italian immigrants of all ages had joined Silents in helping the whole Italian Crooner thing go supernova in the early ’50s with the Operatic belting of Mario Lanza and Al Martino.

Things calmed down after that, but into a very crowded Crooner field in ’54 emerged our Italian-American Singer at #10 as we kick off our Countdown, from the unlikeliest of places: a comedy duo. Well, at least he was the straight man! Jerry Lewis was the “banana,” and the song was from their 1953 musical comedy The Caddy, in which Lewis joins in. But on the record it’s all Dean Martin. Not his first chart entry, but his breakthrough, and it would’ve been #1 in February if not for another ethnic hit by Eddie Fisher that we’ll be hearing here in a few minutes. At #10, it’s “That’s Amore.”

“That’s Amore,” #10 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1954, Dean Martin’s first top ten, still teamed with comic Jerry Lewis until their epic split in 1956. “Amore,” of course, Italian for love. Not in the top ten on any of Billboard‘s 1954 year-end rankings because it first hit the charts in November of ’53 and Billboard only counted weeks in calendar ’54. But it comes out at #10 when you count its full chart run like we do for every song here at Chartcrush.

Over the years, dozens of major hits have fallen through the cracks like that on Billboard‘s year-end rankings thanks to that chart run splitting between years, which Billboard has tried to address in various ways since the ’70s, but really can’t as long as they have to get those year-end charts out before New Years.

#9 The Four Knights – I Get So Lonely (Oh Baby Mine)

At #9, a Black Vocal Group that hit the charts three and a half months before The Crows’ “Gee,” that first R&B crossover hit I mentioned. But these guys had been together since the mid-’40s, on the charts since ’51, and regulars on TV variety shows like Red Skelton and Ed Sullivan. Plus, it’s a song by a White Songwriter, so they had more in common with The Mills Brothers or Ink Spots than The Crows or Chords. Yet this was their first top ten, and it hit just as Black R&B was about to break through. It’s The Four Knights’ “I Get So Lonely (When I Dream About You),” also known as “Oh Baby Mine.”

Also known as “Oh Baby Mine” because that was the title on the record when it first came out. It’s the hook repeatedly sung by Four Knights’ Bass Singer Oscar Broadway. But subsequent pressings retitled the song to “I Get So Lonely,” and Billboard changed it on the charts several weeks into its run. Fortunately, the confusion didn’t hurt though; it continued climbing and stayed in the top ten for 17 weeks.

The Four Knights’ next three charting singles, ’55 to ’57 were collabs with none other than Nat King Cole, their label-mate on Capitol Records.

#8 Rosemary Clooney – This Ole House

At #8 as we continue our Chartcrush Countdown of 1954’s top ten hits, the first of two we’re gonna hear this hour by ’54’s top-charting Female Singer, narrowly beating “The Singing Rage Miss Patti Page” for that title after being outranked by her three years in a row.

Bandleader Tony Pastor discovered her and her sister Betty in 1945 singing on radio in Cincinnati and she was the Singer on the Pastor band’s last four charting singles in ’48 and ’49. She cut her first solo discs in ’49, but didn’t break through ’til ’51 when Columbia Records’ new A&R Chief Mitch Miller gave her the ethnic Novelty “Come On-a My House.” Which she hated, but it was a huge hit and in ’52 she followed up with a Pop version of Hank Williams’ “Half as Much” and another Miller-decreed ethnic Novelty, “Botch-a Me.”

Both of those got to #2 and by ’53 she was making Technicolor big screen musicals for Paramount and getting hitched to Oscar-winning Puerto Rican Actor Jose Ferrer. #8 for ’54, it’s Rosemary Clooney’s “This Ole House.”

“This Ole House,” #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1954, one of the many hits that Mitch Miller snatched off the Country charts and handed to Columbia’s Arrangers and Singers to class up into Pop hits in the early ’50s. Tony Bennett doing Hank Williams’ “Cold Cold Heart,” the first of those in ’51, and ’54 was when other enterprising diskmen started mining the R&B charts the same way: the R&B gold rush I mentioned earlier.

Cowboy Singer-Songwriter Stuart Hamblen wrote “This Ole House” after a hunting trip with Western Actor John Wayne in the High Sierras and finding an old miner dead in his dilapidated cabin with his dog still standing guard.

Hamblen’s own version was in the top ten on the Country charts at the same time as Clooney’s was on the Pop charts, and both versions have those deep bass vocals sung by the same guy, Thurl Ravenscroft, later the voice of the Frosted Flakes mascot Tony the Tiger (“they’re great!”), and also the Singer of “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” which became Ravenscroft’s first entry on the Hot100 under his own name when streaming clicks first put it on the Hot100 over the holidays in 2020.

#7 Eddie Fisher – I Need You Now

So Rosemary Clooney, again, ’54’s top Female act; next up at numbers 7 and 6 we have a two-fer: two songs in a row by the year’s top Male act, and the top charting act overall by a slim margin thanks to landing eight records on the charts during the year: the most of any act in ’54. Clooney had three. The two in our countdown, of course, the biggest of the eight, and both recorded live at New York’s Webster Hall backed by his label RCA-Victor’s top Arranger-Conductor Hugo Winterhalter & Orchestra. At #7, the later of the two on the calendar: #1 for five weeks in November and December. It’s Eddie Fisher’s “I Need You Now.”

Eddie Fisher’s “I Need You Now” at #7 here on our 1954 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. The song, written for 1953’s top-charting Female Singer, Joni James, but RCA rushed out Fisher’s version and it shot into the top 10 in just its second week before James’ label MGM could even get a single out, so James’ remained an album-only cut.

By the way, if you think Fisher’s eight chart hits in ’54 is impressive? In 1953 he had ten and in ’52, 13!

#6 Eddie Fisher – Oh! My Papa (O Mein Papa)

’51 and ’52 during the Korean War was when Fisher was all over the TV variety shows singing in uniform as “PFC Eddie Fisher.” Then, as soon as he was out of the Army, he got his own show on NBC, Coke Time with Eddie Fisher, and by ’54, he was dating his future wife, Actress-Singer Debbie Reynolds. Carrie Fisher, Princess Leia in Star Wars was their daughter.

Things got super-messy after he started cheating on Reynolds with Elizabeth Taylor, and the scandal raged for a few years, but NBC canceled his TV show due to the bad publicity in ’59, RCA Victor dropped him in ’60, and by the time late-Boomers came of age in the ’80s, Eddie Fisher was mostly forgotten. But back to 1954, Fisher at his peak: the first of his two #1’s in the year from January, at #6 in our 1954 Chartcrush Countdown, “Oh! My Pa-Pa.”

The Silent Generation already manifesting its global reach on the eve of the Jet Age and propelling “Oh! Mein Pa-Pa” to #1, Anglicized to “Oh! My Pa-Pa” on the record, a song from a Swiss-German stage musical that became a German movie musical in 1954. Eddie Fisher wasn’t involved in either, but his vocal version of the song soundly beat an instrumental by another Eddie, Trumpeter Eddie Calvert, that was in the top ten at the same time. In Calvert’s native U.K. it was the other way around: the instrumental was #1 and Fisher’s peaked at #9.

“Oh! My Pa-Pa,” recorded dozens of times since ’54 including by Siouxsie & The Banshees in 1979 and Bjork in 1990. It even showed up in an episode of The Simpsons, sung by Krusty the Clown! But doubtful that many of those listeners had ever heard the Eddie Fisher version or even of Eddie Fisher!

 #5 Rosemary Clooney – Hey There

At #5, the other Singer with two hits in our 1954 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. We heard the first of them at #8, right before our Eddie Fisher two-fer, and get this: the two songs were on the same single. “This Ole House” on the flip, and both sides were in the top ten for 16 straight weeks in the late Summer and Fall: the biggest double-A sided single of the ’50s until Elvis’ “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Hound Dog” in ’56.

And this side, our #5 song: pretty ambitious for 1954: a Singer having a conversation with herself. In the hit Broadway musical the song is from, The Pajama Game, the character Sid confides his feelings singing into a Dictaphone tape machine and duets with himself in the playback, but how do you pull that off non-visually, i.e. on a record? Well here’s how. Again, Rosemary Clooney with “Hey There.”

Rosemary Clooney’s “Hey There” at #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1954’s biggest hits. Did I mention that Rosemary’s little brother Nicholas was Actor George Clooney’s dad? That makes Rosemary Clooney George Clooney’s Aunt, and she guest-starred as an Alzheimer’s patient in an Emmy nominated recurring role on his ’90s TV show E.R.

“Hey There” was her last top ten hit, but she was on TV regularly into the ’60s, and her ubiquitous paper towel commercials in the ’80s (“Extra value is what you get, when you buy Coronet”).

Unlike most Singers from her era, Clooney cut a ton of albums in her later years: one, often two a year almost every year from 1976 until her death in 2002.

#4 Jo Stafford – Make Love to Me!

At #4 we have another Female Singer: “The Singer’s Singer,” with impeccable phrasing and pitch, who by ’54 was a 15-year industry veteran with over 60 chart hits, updating for the mid-’50s on a brash, brassy, sexy record with a Doo-Woppy vocal hook that turned out to be her last top ten. Her follow-ups including a cover of Cuban-American Girl Group the DiCastro Sisters’ hit in 1954, “Teach Me Tonight,” only scraped the top 20. But “Make Love to Me!” was the #1 Jukebox hit in the land for seven straight weeks in early Spring. It’s Jo Stafford.

[note: song is not in Spotify’s library; here’s a link to it in Apple Music]

Jo Stafford’s “Make Love to Me!,” #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1954’s top ten hits, backed by her longtime Bandleader-Arranger Paul Weston, first at Capitol, then moving with her to Columbia, and along the way they got married.

In ’59 Stafford turned down an extended gig in Vegas to focus on her family and mostly retired from music, but in retirement, her and Weston honed their bad music party act into a Grammy-winning Comedy album under the pseudonyms Darlene and Jonathan Edwards, and music biz titan Mitch Miller blamed their third album in ’62 for fatally torpedoing his brand by spoofing his Sing Along with Mitch franchise.

Darlene and Jonathan went dormant in the late ’60s but resurfaced in ’79 with a one-off single butchering The Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive,” right as Disco was crashing. According to Stafford in a 2003 interview, Barry Gibb was not amused.

#3 The Crew-Cuts – Sh-Boom

At #3, the record that started the 1954 R&B gold rush I’ve been talking about that made Rock ‘n Roll inevitable. It’s the first cover by a White act made deliberately to cash in on Teens’ newfound obsession with Black R&B, stoked by Alan Freed, Hunter Hancock and other trailblazing DJs on the radio, and then magnified by Top40 once enough kids bought the records and got them on the charts. That was the perfect storm that lifted this record to #1 on all three of Billboard‘s Pop charts (Best Sellers, Airplay and Jukeboxes), and kept it there for five straight weeks in late Summer.

Now, a quick note before we hear it about how we compile our Chartcrush rankings for pre-Hot100 years with those three separate charts. It can get confusing, so to streamline things, we just do the same thing that Billboard did when it created the Hot100: weigh the rankings on the Sales, Airplay and Jukebox charts equally and combine them into a single weekly chart. And from there we just rank the songs exactly how we do for Hot100 years, post-1958. Neat, huh?

OK, so without further ado, the hit that transformed the music biz in ’54: The Crew-Cuts cover of The Chords’ “Sh-Boom.”

After the success of “Gee” by The Crows just two months earlier, the minute executives at Mercury Records got wind of another R&B record selling like crazy, they paired their house Arranger-Bandleader and Musical Director David Carroll with the fresh-faced Canadian group they’d just signed, whose debut “Crazy ‘Bout Ya Baby” had just hit the charts, to class it up for the Pop charts. And 72 hours later, the Crew-Cuts version of “Sh-Boom” was recorded, pressed and on its way to radio stations and stores.

The Chords only had the Billboard charts to themselves with their original for a single week. It kept rising though, peaking at #5 on the Jukebox chart the week The Crew-Cuts version hit #2 on the Sales and DJ charts: the first R&B single to make the top 10 on any Pop chart. But it lost momentum once the Crew-Cuts hit #1.

“Boom,” according to Chords tenor Jimmy Keyes, was the slang word on the streets of New York: a word you’d hear 15 times in five minutes: “Hey, man, boom, how ya doin’.” They added the “shh” to make it sound like an incoming bomb. “Sh-Boom.” And “ding dong, alanga langa lang?” Well that’s church bells, of course!

The Crew-Cuts, of course, totally oblivious to all that, but would The Chords original have gotten the same traction in 1954 if Mercury hadn’t sprung into action with The Crew-Cuts version? Hard to say, but after “Sh-Boom” hit, the pillaging of the R&B charts for Pop hits reached a frenzy.

Gradually, more and more kids started seeking out the originals, but notwithstanding the massive Songwriting royalties generated by big Pop hits, the case could be made—was made—that all this Pop “whitewashing” was coming at the expense of Black artists. But once labels just started signing the Black R&B artists themselves to make bigger-budget records that could cross over, it was a moot point, and flush with cash, R&B labels new and old did the same. Motown, anyone?

#2 Perry Como – Wanted

Well we’re down to #2 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1954, and it’s another chart veteran. By ’54 he wasn’t just on TV, he’d been on TV as long as there’d been TV, and he had not one but two shows: his weekly Sunday night Chesterfield Supper Club, and a 15-minute musical variety show on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays immediately following the Nightly News. And both those shows, simulcast on the radio.

He hadn’t done any movies since the ’40s but still, with that TV and radio footprint, when he put out a new record, it was a big deal, and this one was a bigger deal than most. At #2, Perry Como’s “Wanted.”

The #1 DJ and Jukebox hit of the year in Billboard; #2 Sales; his biggest hit since “If” in 1951, Perry Como’s “Wanted” at #2 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1954. Same Arranger and backing band we heard on Eddie Fisher’s hits at numbers 7 and 6, RCA’s Hugo Winterhalter & Orchestra.

Como also scored in ’54 with not the first, but one of the biggest and best remembered hits of the first year of the ’50s Mambo dance craze sweeping the country two years before Elvis, “Papa Loves Mambo,” heard in many an Arthur Murray Dance studio as people answered ads and signed up for lessons in the tens of thousands.

By the way, another milestone in ’54: the first year vinyl 45s outsold shellac 78 RPM records: better sound with vinyl as consumer hi-fi caught on, and jukebox operators upgraded to newer models. A third of the 200 million records made in ’54, destined for America’s 450,000 jukeboxes, according to Billboard.

#1 Kitty Kallen – Little Things Mean a Lot

And at #1, the song that replaced “Wanted” at #1 on our weekly charts derived from Billboard‘s published Sales, DJ and Jukebox charts, and it was #1 for ten weeks, three longer than “Wanted.”

She was the Singer on two of the most iconic hits of 1945, as the Allies cruised to victory in World War 2: “I’m Beginning to See the Light” and “It’s Been a Long, Long Time,” featured under Trumpeter Harry James and his Orchestra. After that, though, she couldn’t score another hit, even reuniting with Harry James for two singles on Columbia in ’52. But then this one appeared in March of ’54 and just left everyone breathless: one of those records that says exactly what folks need to hear, how and when they need to hear it. It’s Kitty Kallen’s “Little Things Mean a Lot.”

Kitty Kallen happened to be in her new label Decca Records’ A&R office looking for material to record the day “Little Things Mean a Lot” came in. She loved it, but Decca, not so much. “That’s a ‘women’s song;’ it could never be a hit,” they said. Which might’ve been the end of it had Kallen not believed so strongly in the song that she offered to be on the hook for the recording session until the record sold 50,000 units. Well Decca liked that idea, and “Little Things” topped the Best Sellers chart for nine straight weeks.

Kitty Kallen followed up with another top 10 in ’54, “In the Chapel in the Moonlight,” but in ’55 she lost her voice in the middle of a gig in London and wouldn’t perform again for four years. She was back on the charts in ’59 though with a new deal on Columbia. Then in ’62 on RCA.

Bonus

Well that’s the top 10 according to our exclusive Chartcrush recap of Billboard‘s weekly Sales, Airplay and Jukebox charts. Again, our ranking derived by combining those three into a Hot100-style chart, then using the same method we use for Hot100 years to calculate the points. But some records were among the top 10 on one, two, or even all three of Billboard‘s published year-end charts (again Sales, Airplay and Jukeboxes), but yet didn’t make the top 10 on our Chartcrush ranking, so, just so we don’t leave anything out, let’s have a look at those.

#11 Patti Page – Cross Over the Bridge

The song Billboard ranked #8 on its year-end DJ chart and #6 on Jukeboxes just misses our Chartcrush Top ten at #11: the biggest hit in ’54 by the Singer Rosemary Clooney finally beat out for Top Charting Female in ’54: Patti Page with “Cross Over the Bridge.”

Patti Page had seven charting records in ’54, more than any other Female Singer, and “Cross Over the Bridge” was the biggest, but another was a cover of “The Queen of R&B” Ruth Brown’s “Oh, What a Dream,” around the same time as Mercury labelmates The Crew-Cuts were out there with their version of “Sh-Boom.” It only got to #15, so not all White R&B covers were big hits!

Oh, and here’s a fun fact: the Chords original version of “Sh-Boom” was not the intended hit. The A-side of that record was a cover of the song we just heard, Patti Page’s “Cross Over the Bridge!”

#12 Doris Day – Secret Love

Next as we look at the songs that made Billboard‘s year-end Sales, Airplay and Jukebox top 10s for ’54 but missed the top ten on our combined Chartcrush ranking, our #12 song which was Billboard‘s #9 Best Seller and #8 DJ hit of ’54. From the 1953 musical Calamity Jane, Doris Day, who also stars in the film, “Secret Love.”

Doris Day with the Best Original Song at the 26th Oscars, “Secret Love,” from Calamity Jane.

#13 Frank Sinatra – Young-at-Heart

Now Frank Sinatra in ’54 was fresh from his Supporting Actor Oscar win for his role in From Here to Eternity, which also lifted him out of his chart slump with his first top 5 hit since 1946. It was Billboard‘s #6 year-end Airplay hit, and it shakes out at #13 on our Chartcrush combined ranking we counted down the top 10 from earlier: “Young-at-Heart.”

“Young-at-Heart,” Frank Sinatra’s first major hit for Capitol Records after parting ways with Mitch Miller and Columbia; the title song from the movie that paired Sinatra with Doris Day. There’s that name again! And in the film Young at Heart, Day’s character’s father gets a hi-fi for his birthday. Billboard predicted that that was going to help drive hi-fi sales nationwide.

#15 The Gaylords – The Little Shoemaker

Billboard‘s #10 year-end Jukebox hit of ’54 notched in at #15 on our Chartcrush combined ranking: another imported song, this time from France, and Rosemary Clooney appropriately sang some of it in French on her version, but that didn’t chart. Chicago Vocal Trio The Gaylords’ version with verses sung in Italian did though. Go figure! But that was The Gaylords’ gimmick on almost all their hits, so… In the top 5 on all three Billboard charts for eight weeks: “The Little Shoemaker.”

Gaylords, “The Little Shoemaker.” Petula Clark scored the U.K. hit with her all-English version of that song. Petula, still a decade away from her first U.S. hit in ’64, “Downtown.”

#17 Tony Bennett – Stranger in Paradise

Now as you’ve been hearing throughout our Chartcrush Countdown Show for 1954, songs often had multiple versions on the charts simultaneously. That was dying down a little since its peak in the late ’40s, but it still happened, so Billboard‘s Honor Roll of Hits was a weekly chart that ranked songs instead of records, combining all the versions into a single ranking position.

Well at #8 on Billboard‘s year-end Honor Roll recap for ’54 was a song that had three competing top ten versions on the records charts, none strong enough to make the year-end top ten records, but when you combine all three of them, one of the year’s top hits. And the biggest with 12 weeks in the top 10 on all three weekly records charts: Sales, Airplay and Jukeboxes was Crooner Tony Bennett’s version. “Stranger in Paradise”

Tony Bennett sang that song in concert for the next 57 years, and in 2011 even re-did it for his album Duets II with Opera Singer Andrea Bocelli, “Stranger in Paradise.” Our Chartcrush ranking has Bennett’s version at #17 for 1954, up against Singer Tony Martin’s and Vocal Group The Four Aces’ versions at numbers 57 and 26, respectively.

#18 Four Aces featuring Al Alberts – Three Coins in the Fountain

And speaking of the Four Aces, their biggest hit of ’54 was #8 on both Billboard‘s year-end Sales and Jukebox charts and #10 Airplay. So how on Earth is it only #18 on our Chartcrush ranking? Well, because it got stuck at #2 for six weeks in the Summer behind “Little Things Mean a Lot,” so songs that did get to #1 outrank it in our Chartcrush point system.

As Billboard started doing in 1967, our ranking method awards bonus points for weeks at #1, which better reflects the hockey-stick curve with sales and airplay as the song rankings approach #1. Still a massive hit, though: featuring Lead Singer Al Alberts, The Four Aces’ “Three Coins in the Fountain.”

The Four Aces’ grandiose, cinematic “Three Coins in the Fountain.” It was the title song of a movie and even won the Best Original Song Oscar the year after “Secret Love,” but the Four Aces version isn’t the one in the film; Frank Sinatra’s is, and his more low-key version even charted, but was “Aced” on the charts by the version we just heard. No Four Aces recording ever appeared in a movie in the ’50s, but Robert Zemekis used their version of “Mr. Sandman” in 1985’s Back to the Future…

#19 Archie Bleyer & Maria Alba – Hernando’s Hideaway

…instead of the better-known Chordettes version produced by, the Artist who scored 1954’s #10 Best Seller according to Billboard; that’s #19 on our Chartcrush ranking. I mentioned the movie The Pajama Game back when we heard Rosemary Clooney’s “Hey There” back at #5. This was another big hit from the film, capitalizing on that Mambo craze I talked about: Cadence Records Founder-Owner-Producer Archie Bleyer with Spanish Actress Maria Alba on castanets, “Hernando’s Hideaway.”

Johnnie Ray and Guy Lombardo, both out with versions of “Hernando’s Hideaway” in ’54, but Archie Bleyer’s with the sound effects and castanets, the clear winner on the charts.

That meme of secret, mysterious after-hours clubs where only a select few are welcome and you need a password: it surfaced again in ’56 on Jim Lowe’s “The Green Door.” What goes on in there, hmmm? Well in ’50’s America there was a long, wide-ranging list of taboo and illicit behaviors that listeners could draw from to flesh out their imaginations.

And on that titillating note, it’s time to wrap up our 1954 edition of Chartcrush! I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Hey, if you like what you heard and you want more, head over to our website, chartcrush.com for a full transcript of the show and a link to the podcast version on Spotify, plus boss extras like our full top 100 chart and interactive graph of the actual chart runs of the songs we heard this hour. We do that for every year, ’40s to present, and it’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com. Thanks for listening and be sure and tune in again this time next week, same station, for another year, and another edition of Chartcrush.

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::start transcript::

Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we dive deep into a year in Pop music and culture, and count down the top ten hits according to our recap of the weekly Hot100 charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week it’s 1983, the year of Michael Jackson, and the year of MTV.

But at the beginning of 1983? Hard to believe, but MTV wasn’t even playing Michael Jackson. More on that and Michael Jackson later in the show when we play his— not one, but multiple hits in our top ten countdown.

But first to set the stage, MTV. It debuted in August of 1981 with 2.1 million households on just a handful of cable systems with a straightforward concept: AOR radio on TV; AOR short for Album Oriented Rock, the main FM Rock radio format charted on Billboard‘s just-launched Mainstream Rock Tracks chart. Topping that chart in ’81, acts like The Who, Tom Petty, Moody Blues, Foreigner, Blue Oyster Cult and The Rolling Stones.

So OK. But one big problem with that right off the bat: MTV was TV, not radio. If a video was boring or low-budget, just the Band or Singer performing live like most vids by AOR acts in those days, it wasn’t going to play the same on TV. And of course if there was no video, MTV couldn’t play it at all. Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry,” Rush’s “New World Man,” Eric Clapton’s “I Can’t Stand It,” all #1 Mainstream Rock songs in MTV’s first couple years with no video.

MTV co-founder Les Garland told Jet magazine in 2006 that in the early days he was spending 50% of his time trying to convince artists to make videos, and labels to bankroll them.

Now the other problem was the AOR format itself. It was in trouble. The Sony Walkman was killing Top40 on AM as Pop fans craved better sound, so the FM band obliged, and many stations ditched AOR for CHR: Contemporary Hits.

As Billboard Rock editor Roman Kozak wrote in his radio recap at the end of ’83: “the son of once-despised top 40 was actually playing hipper and more exciting music than that being dredged up from the AOR dinosaurs, even with a few New Wave acts grudgingly thrown in.”

And by “New Wave,” he’s not just talking post-Punk New Wave like The Human League, Clash, Eurythmics and Talking Heads. Glam Metal fell under the “New Wave” banner too, groups like Quiet Riot, Twisted Sister, Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard, at least until Rock stations chose a path and veered into Modern or so-called “Active Rock” formats, or just stuck with AOR to become Classic Rock.

MTV though was all-of-the-above: stretching AOR to its limits in search of videos, which strongly favored sub-genres like Post-Punk and New Wave with a tradition of theatrics and wild art house visuals that went way beyond the guitar neck closeups and hands-on-keys shots in AOR vids.

One thing MTV wouldn’t do in ’81 and ’82? Branch off into pure Pop or R&B. That, they reasoned, would be a bridge too far for their target AOR demo, still on their Death of Disco victory lap.

But whatever MTV’s calculus was in its first two years, by golly it worked! It wasn’t just that people who already had cable were watching. People got cable just so they could get MTV. “I want my MTV” was what you were supposed to call your cable company and tell them so they’d add it. Only then would you sign up and subscribe. This was millions of people coast-to-coast and by ’83 almost every cable system was carrying MTV. It was cable’s killer app: MTV households up from 2.1 million at launch to 17 million by ’83.

#10 Patti Austin with James Ingram – Baby, Come to Me

But still not as big as broadcast! In 1981 for example, 30 million viewers tuned in to watch an episode of General Hospital, the daytime soap opera on ABC, a show that had almost as big an impact on the charts in the early ’80s as MTV. Exhibit A: our #10 song as we kick off our 1983 Chartcrush Countdown.

The episode was the one where Luke and Laura Spencer tie the knot two years after he professes his love, then rapes her on the floor of the Mafia-owned Disco he manages, thinking he’s going to be killed the next day attempting to assassinate a Senate candidate on orders from his mob boss. Talk about compelling video, right?

And at #10, the song that began a slow five-month climb on the Hot100 once it started showing up as Luke’s romantic theme music on the show. It’d only gotten to #73 upon its initial release in the Spring of ’82, but made it all the way to #1 for two weeks in February, thanks to, no, not MTV—they weren’t playing it—but General Hospital. It’s Patti Austin and James Ingram’s “Baby, Come to Me.”

Adult Contemporary, also evolving in ’83, from a Country-Pop dominated format in the first years of the ’80s to Slow R&B, like Patti Austin and James Ingram’s “Baby, Come to Me” at #10 as we count down the top hits 1983 on this week’s edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

Separately, both Austin and Ingram continued charting R&B and AC hits through the ’80s, but Ingram got another turn at #1 on the Hot100: his 1990 Power Ballad, “I Don’t Have the Heart,” and before that, his duet with Linda Ronstadt on “Somewhere Out There” from An American Tail got to #2 in ’87 and won Best Song at the Oscars.

And speaking of General Hospital‘s impact on the charts, “Baby, Come to Me” wasn’t the show’s only export. The Afternoon Delights’ plot summary novelty, “General Hospi-Tale” had already made the Top40 in 1981, and also, former early ’70s Teen Idol Rick Springfield was Dr. Noah Drake on the show. “Jesse’s Girl” from his first album since the mid-’70s was #1 the same the week MTV launched in August of ’81.

#9 Kenny Rogers duet with Dolly Parton – Islands in the Stream

Now contrary to common perception, The Bee Gees did not disappear after Disco imploded, even if their brand was all but unmarketable after their last #1, “Love You Inside and Out,” in the Summer of ’79. Their 1981 album Living Eyes only got to #41 on the album chart, and its lead single barely scraped the Top40 on the Hot100.

But despite that, the appetite for their distinctive songs and production sheen was undiminished, provided it was someone else’s name on the record. Barbra Streisand’s “Woman in Love,” “Guilty” and “What Kind of Fool” in ’80 and ’81: Bee Gees songs in every conceivable way except Streisand’s vocals. All top ten hits. Ditto Dionne Warwick’s “Heartbreaker” in ’82: her first top ten in over three years.

Well, for ’83, the Bee Gees teamed with our Singer at #9: Country crossover’s biggest star, looking for his next #1 after his collab with Lionel Richie on “Lady” in ’80. And he got it. And the brothers Gibb, who co-wrote and produced his entire 1983 album Eyes That See in the Dark? Well, after Streisand and Warwick, the Bee Gees were three-for-three in the post-Disco ’80s!

It started out as a solo record, but didn’t gel until they brought in Dolly Parton from down the hall in the same studio and made it a duet. At #9 it’s Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, “Islands in the Stream.”

A duet by two of Country’s biggest stars, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, on a Bee Gees song, “Islands in the Stream,” #9 as we count down the top hits of 1983 here on this week’s edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

Younger GenXers will recall Mýa interpolating the song on Pras Michel’s “Ghetto Superstar (That Is What You Are)” from 1998.

Now don’t look for “Islands in the Stream” in the top ten on Billboard‘s 1983 year-end charts because it was too late in the year, its chart run split between their ’83 and ’84 chart years. They have it at #56 for ’84. But counting its full chart run in the calendar year it was biggest as we do for every song at Chartcrush reveals it as one of 1983’s top hits: one of the many hits throughout chart history that’ve fallen through the cracks on Billboard‘s year-end charts because their runs, arbitrarily split between adjacent “chart years.”

#8 Michael Jackson – Beat It

So AC hits notwithstanding, as I talked about in the intro, ’83’s big music headlines? MTV and Michael Jackson. Jackson’s Thriller came out in November of ’82, initially with two videos planned. But MTV was still positioning itself as Rock, with almost no Black artists in rotation, and no Disco artists, so it was gonna be tough to get them aired. Michael Jackson, of course, both Black and a Disco artist.

But with MTV already stretching the AOR format playing obscure British and Australian stuff that no American AOR radio station would’ve sought out on their own, and Black R&B star Rick James (“Slick Rick”) out there accusing MTV of racism for not playing “Superfreak,” it was pretty weak for MTV CEO Robert Pittman to exclude those Jackson vids. So in a bold move, CBS president Walter Yetnikov threatened to yank all vids by CBS and subsidiaries if they wouldn’t play Michael Jackson, and MTV relented.

Thriller, already on its way to becoming the best selling album of all time after Michael debuted the moonwalk on NBC’s Motown 25th Anniversary special for 40 million U.S. viewers, many of whom didn’t have cable yet. And of course, once MTV did start playing Michael Jackson, not only didn’t the expected anti-Disco backlash happen, but MTV became the first profitable cable channel, and a legit cultural force.

Now the song we’re gonna hear right now at #8 on our countdown wasn’t the first Michael Jackson vid on MTV, but it was his first to crack the top 20 on the Mainstream Rock chart: the same chart MTV used initially. It’s the third single issued from Thriller featuring a scorching solo by Rock guitar god Eddie Van Halen, “Beat It.”

“Beat It.” Michael Jackson, #8 as we count down the top ten songs of 1983 here on this week’s Chartcrush. That scorching Eddie Van Halen guitar solo: even conservative AOR stations had to play that, and it broke the logjam of Black artists on MTV. Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” and Eddy Grant’s “Electric Avenue” both debuted on the Mainstream Rock chart the same week as “Beat It.” And both eventually made the top 20 too.

As for Eddie: partly thanks to “Beat It,” the next year, his band Van Halen crossed over to the Hot100. “Jump” was not only their first top ten Pop hit, it went all the way to #1 for five weeks!

#7 Bonnie Tyler – Total Eclipse of the Heart

So at #9 we heard a Bee Gees song that got to #1 sung by other artists, “Islands in the Stream.” At #7 we have a Meat Loaf song that got to #1 sung by another artist.

Jim Steinman was the composer of Meat Loaf’s multi-platinum Bat out of Hell album in 1978, but its ’80s follow-ups Bad for Good and Dead Ringer, also by Steinman, tanked even worse than The Bee Gees even though there wasn’t anything remotely “Disco” about Steinman or Meat Loaf. Dead Ringer‘s only charting single peaked at #81.

So Steinman did exactly what The Bee Gees did: retreated behind the studio glass and scored with another artist out front, in this case, the husky-voiced Welsh Singer whose “It’s a Heartache” was five or ten Hot100 positions ahead of Meat Loaf’s biggest hit, “Two out of Three Ain’t Bad,” through most of its chart run in the Summer of ’78. But she didn’t chart again ’til this. At #7 it’s Bonnie Tyler doing Jim Steinman’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

Bonnie Tyler teaming up with Bat out of Hell mastermind Jim Steinman for “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” the #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1983. Steinman and Tyler teamed up again for her next hit, “Holding Out for a Hero” from the Footloose soundtrack in ’84. That one got to #2 in her native U.K., but only #34 on the Hot100, and Bonnie Tyler faded after that, but Steinman and Meat Loaf finally got their act together and scored again in ’93 with the Bat Out of Hell sequel, Back into Hell and its hit “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That).”

#6 Men at Work – Down Under

Now if you look at 1983’s big albums, three loom the largest. Thriller first hit #1 at the end of February and then the album with the #1 song in our countdown dominated the charts in most of the second half of the year. But our #6 song is from the album that was #1 for 15 weeks over the holidays at the end of 1982 until Thriller reached #1 in February. And this was its second #1 single after the group’s MTV-fueled breakthrough with “Who Can It Be Now?” Originally the B-side of their first Australian single in 1980, they re-recorded it in ’81 for their debut album Business as Usual. It’s Men at Work’s “Down Under.”

Well thanks to that song’s celebration of all things peculiarly Australian, like Kombi’s, Vegemite and chundering (that’s Aussie slang for vomiting), not to mention the term “Down Under” itself, Men at Work had folks talking up an “Aussie invasion” in ’83 to rival the mid-’60s British invasion, with other Aussies like INXS, Midnight Oil and Split Enz lending credence.

But actually, Australians had been charting top ten hits in the U.S. for years: Helen Reddy, The Little River Band, Olivia Newton-John, and more recently Air Supply. They were the top-charting AC act of the early ’80s, and the second top-charting Hot100 act.

But what was new in ’83 thanks to MTV was the absolute dominance of non-North American acts on the Hot100. Five or more of the top ten in 27 of the year’s 52 weeks, by artists from abroad. No other year in chart history even comes close.

Australia and the U.K. had a head start making and airing clever videos. Australia’s Countdown and Sounds; Britain’s Top of the Pops, big pre-MTV music video shows. So when MTV needed videos to fill all that airtime their first couple of years before Americans ramped up, that’s where they came from.

#5 Lionel Richie – All Night Long (All Night)

At #5 as we continue our Chartcrush countdown of 1983’s top ten hits, a Danceable upbeat song from the early ’80s’ top-charting Balladeer, and exclusively a Balladeer for years: “Three Times a Lady” and “Still” in the ’70s with his group The Commodores; “Lady,” written for Kenny Rogers in 1980; “Endless Love,” his duet with Diana Ross in ’81, and “Truly,” his chart debut as a solo act in ’82: all #1s, but all Ballads.

His only charted non-Ballad up to ’83? “You Are” from his ’82 solo debut, which got to #4. But he still had something to prove, and prove it he did when the song he wrote for folks to dance to on vacation topped the chart for four weeks November into December—like “Islands in the Stream,” too late in the year for its full chart run to be factored into ’83, but Billboard has it their #12 Hot100 hit for ’84, counting just its weeks from November 5 on. That full run, though, makes it the #5 song of ’83 by our Chartcrush reckoning. It’s Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long (All Night).”

By the end of ’85, Lionel Richie’s 1983 album Can’t Slow Down was RIAA-certified Diamond for sales of ten million. “All Night Long” was its lead single, #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1983.

Lionel with a Jamaican lilt to his voice on that, did you notice? And an African chant inspired by the fourth single from Michael Jackson’s Thriller, “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.” Accent and chant, both fake, but no one in ’83 cared.

Richie’s next two hits off Can’t Slow Down were “Hello” and “Stuck on You,” two more Ballads, but he was back in ’86 with another upbeat hit, “Dancing on the Ceiling.”

#4 Michael Jackson – Billie Jean

And speaking of Thriller, at #4, the second single from the album. The first: Michael Jackson’s schmaltzy duet with former Beatle Paul McCartney, “The Girl Is Mine,” which might’ve impacted early sales as fans wondered if the rest of the album is less Thriller, and more filler.

But of course it wasn’t, and that became abundantly clear when this one hit the airwaves in January, and then the famous light-up sidewalk moonwalking video premiered the first week in March, after CBS Records honcho Walter Yetnikov forced MTV’s hand. One of the most iconic videos of all time, here’s Michael Jackson again: “Billie Jean.”

“Billie Jean,” the best-selling single of Michael Jackson’s entire solo career, #1 on the Hot100 for seven weeks, #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1983’s biggest hits, and the song that opened MTV up to sounds besides Rock, including the many other Black artists who followed. Prince’s “Little Red Corvette,” added the same week as “Billie Jean.”

The Walkman may’ve doomed AM Top 40, not to mention vinyl LP’s (cassettes outsold vinyl for the first time in ’83), but the notion of a gravitational center in Pop lived on for another decade thanks to Walter Yetnikov’s ultimatum and MTV putting “Billie Jean” on the air.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t the top R&B single of the year; that honor went to Marvin Gaye with “Sexual Healing.” “Billie Jean” was #2.

Quincy Jones, the Producer of Thriller and it’s six top ten singles, including “Billie Jean.” And he also produced Patti Austin & James Ingram’s “Baby, Come to Me” our #10 song.

#3 Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson – Say Say Say

But back to Michael Jackson. At #3 is the second MJ/Paul McCartney duet in less than a year. “The Girl Is Mine” off Thriller peaked at #2 in January; this one off McCartney’s ’83 album Pipes of Peace got to #1 in December, making it the third song in our 1983 countdown that peaked in calendar ’83, but after Billboard‘s October 29 cut-off for the chart year. Billboard has it as the #3 song of 1984.

On “Girl Is Mine” at the beginning of the Thriller juggernaut, Michael got the cachet of having a Beatle on his record, but on this, the Beatle got an even bigger boost from having Michael Jackson on his. It hit the charts one week after Thriller‘s sixth single, “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” and went on to become McCartney’s biggest single ever, #1 for six weeks mid-December to mid-January. At #3, “Say Say Say.”

Now “Say Say Say” may’ve hit the charts at the end of ’83, but it was recorded in London in the Spring of ’81, a year before Michael Jackson even started working on Thriller. Beatles producer George Martin helmed the session.

McCartney and Jackson, two of Pop’s biggest stars of all-time, both accused at various points in their careers of over-indulging sappy, mawkish tendencies: McCartney on “Another Day” and “Silly Love Songs,” and Jackson on “Ben” and “She’s Out of My Life.”

Put ’em together and what do you get? Well, on “Girl Is Mine” you get a supremely sappy and mawkish record, exactly what you’d expect. Less so on “Say Say Say,” but in both cases you get massive hits. “Say Say Say” was McCartney’s last #1 but he continued charting on the Hot100 as a lead artist all the way to 2007.

#2 Irene Cara – Flashdance…What a Feeling

Well we’re down to #2 on our Chartcrush Countdown for 1983: the lone Soundtrack single in the top ten. It won Best Original Song at the Oscars for the Singer, who wrote the lyrics in the back of a taxicab on her way to record it. Three years earlier in 1980, she’d been the Singer on another top ten hit that won Best Original Song, “Fame.” But she hadn’t been among the Songwriters, so she didn’t get a gold statue.

This one’s also the title song of the movie, and also like Fame, the movie was a surprise box-office smash that grossed many many times the modest amount it cost to make. From ’83’s cinematic pop culture phenom, at #2 it’s Irene Cara’s “Flashdance…What a Feeling.”

Irene Cara, “Flashdance…What a Feeling,” the title song from the movie and the #2 song of 1983 here on our ’83 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. The video was all movie footage, as was the video for Flashdance‘s other #1 hit, Michael Sembello’s “Maniac,” and heavy rotation on MTV helped propel the movie’s massive success at the box office: a pattern that repeated many times through the ’80s as soundtrack hits proliferated. It wasn’t just the music biz looking to MTV to create hits, so was Hollywood!

#1 The Police – Every Breath You Take

And that gets us to #1, about which the most astonishing thing I can tell you is: in the year of Thriller, it’s not Michael Jackson. It’s actually the band’s only career #1, but eight weeks on top in the Summer, and since that chart run is all in Billboard‘s ’83 chart year, every week of it counted, and it’s #1 on their official published year-end Hot100 too. And the album it’s on was #1 for 17 weeks. That album? Synchronicity: the band’s fifth and final LP. Here are The Police with the #1 song of 1983, “Every Breath You Take.”

The Police, “Every Breath You Take,” the #1 song of 1983, beating out five singles from Michael Jackson’s Thriller that were on the Hot100 during the year. The Police nearly broke up in the middle of recording their Synchronicity album, with Singer-Bassist-Frontman Sting and Drummer Stewart Copeland actually coming to blows. But fortunately they were able to complete the album and a world tour that went through the Spring of ’84 and was one of the two top grossing tours of the year (David Bowie the other).

Critics at the time were calling The Police the biggest Rock band in the world. They reunited in ’85 to headline a stadium benefit for the human rights group Amnesty International and tried to record a new album, but it didn’t work out and Sting, Copeland and guitarist Andy Summers went their separate ways ’til their lucrative 30th Anniversary reunion tour in 2007. But they never made another album!

Bonus

And there you have ’em: the top ten songs of 1983 according to our Chartcrush ranking that factors every song’s full run. But the year-straddling hits “Islands in the Stream,” “All Night Long” and “Say Say Say” coming in to our top ten displaces three songs from Billboard‘s year-end top ten, so to be thorough, let’s have a look at those.

#11 Eurythmics – Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)

At #10, Billboard had a real MTV New Wave hit, and by that I mean: a song that wouldn’t have done nearly as well in the U.S. if not for the wide exposure its edgy, high-concept video got on MTV. The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” was ’82’s top example, our #7 song of 1982; this one though? Pushed to #11 on our 1983 ranking: Eurythmics, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).”

Eurythmics: Singer Annie Lennox and Songwriter-Producer Dave Stewart: “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” Their first and biggest of more than a dozen hits before they split in 1990: Lennox to a successful solo career, and Stewart, a top producer in the ’90s and beyond.

#9 Michael Sembello – Maniac

And at #9, Billboard had the second #1 from Flashdance, which topped the Hot100 for two weeks two months after Irene Cara’s six week reign at #1 in early Summer with the title song. We have it at #12 on the year: Michael Sembello’s “Maniac.”

Fun fact: “Maniac” was originally about a deranged killer, not a dancer, inspired by a slasher movie, but the Flashdance Producers wanted it so Writers Dennis Matkosky and Sembello rewrote the lyrics to be about a dancing maniac. Sembello was unable to follow up the success of “Maniac,” so he went back to songwriting and producing behind the scenes.

And finally, Billboard‘s #7 song of 1983 was Daryl Hall & John Oates’ “Maneater,” an ’82 to ’83 year-straddler that we have as 1982’s #8 song, so we won’t be spinning that one here on our 1983 edition of Chartcrush.

But you can hear it on our 1982 episode: the podcast version of which is streaming now on Spotify, along with all our other Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Shows, ’40s up to now. For links to those, head on over to our website, chartcrush.com, where you’ll also find full written episode transcripts with copious source links, and other radical extras like our full top 100 charts and interactive line graphs of the actual chart runs of the songs in each episode.

For now, though, we gotta wrap up our 1983 edition of Chartcrush. I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi, and as always I want to thank you for listening. That website again: chartcrush.com, and tune in again next week, same station, same time, for another year in another edition of Chartcrush.

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::start transcript::

Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we dive deep into a year in Pop music and culture, and count down the top ten songs according to our exclusive recap of the weekly charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush we’re turning back the clock to 1962, which began with an extraordinary event: “The Twist” hitting #1 for a second time in January after already having hit #1 in 1960 and falling completely off the Hot100 for almost a whole year. The only time that’s ever happened: same record hitting #1 in two different chart runs.

But it wasn’t just a curiosity for chart geeks; it was a legit turning point for Rock ‘n Roll because it was the first Rock record to cross over to an adult audience. That’s how it hit #1 that second time: different audience digging it and buying it: grownups, once high society gossip columns started reporting sightings of mucky-mucks and celebs from Judy Garland to JFK’s sister Jean to the Duke of Bedford doing the Twist at the Peppermint Lounge, a mob-owned dive bar on the West side of Midtown Manhattan that literally overnight became the hottest ticket in town.

Rock needed that win. In the six years since “Rock Around the Clock” and Elvis shaking his pelvis doing “Hound Dog,” many OG Rockers, sidelined for various reasons. Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, radioactive from scandals involving young girls. Elvis, drafted. Little Richard, now a Preacher. Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper dead in the horrible “Day the Music Died” plane crash in Iowa in ’59.

’59, also the year the Payola scandal broke: DJ’s taking bribes from record labels. With Congress turning up the heat and DJs and radio stations facing fines and jail time, no one was taking any chances with crude-sounding records that could be red flags for enforcers, so Top40 got very middle-of-the-road.

Billboard even debuted a chart in 1961 called “Middle Road.” It later became Easy Listening and then in 1979, Adult Contemporary. Stations needed that chart! Percy Faith’s Musak-y “Theme from a Summer Place” was #1 for nine straight weeks, peak Payola hysteria: 1960’s top hit.

But even before the Payola scandal, Rock records were sounding more polished and professional as hit after hit raked in Teens’ disposable income and labels spent more on production. In ’58, ABC-Paramount A&R head, also a Bandleader, Don Costa signed down ‘n dirty OG New Orleans R&B Singer Lloyd Price and gave him the full Sinatra orchestra treatment in a top studio, and “Stagger Lee” and “Personality” made Price 1959’s top singles artist. And Teen Idol Rocker Bobby Darin scored the biggest hit of 1959 with “Mack the Knife,” not even a Rock song! He went straight at Sinatra on his own turf with that one!

Of course, the notion of cleaning up Rock ‘n Roll went all the way back to the beginning, Dot Records and Pat Boone in 1955, and even before that, Mitch Miller as head of A&R at Columbia getting Tony Bennett and Rosemary Clooney to record Hank Williams Country songs, but post-Payola, the difference was that only those kinds of records were safe for the airwaves.

So Rock was assimilating, but the Rock ‘n Roll generation, Silents, were aging: aged 17 to 37 in ’62, so most of the adults who “discovered” “The Twist” in ’62: technically in the same generation as the Teens who first got it to #1 after watching Chubby Checker on American Bandstand in 1960. That’s what we call a generational peak, the few years that come around every 15 to 20, when almost everyone in the coveted 18 to 34 target audience for ads and media is in the same generation. The oldest Boomers, just 17 in ’62: still too young to imprint themselves on the culture, which would change in ’64 with Beatlemania.

But the late ’50s and early ’60s were all about the Silents. And one of their defining features was their internationalism at the dawn of the Jet Age. Until 1958 only a couple records by non-U.S. artists had ever topped the charts, but that year Italian Domenico Modugno’s “Volare,” sung in Italian, was the Summer’s biggest hit and many other international hits followed. By ’62 Billboard was devoting a ton of space to musical happenings abroad.

#10 The Tornadoes – Telstar

Like the two British records in our ’62 countdown. Yup, that’s right: two years before The Beatles!

Joe Meek was a trailblazing Sound Engineer and Producer in London, a Silent, fascinated by space and electronic music, so after AT&T put the first comms satellite in orbit in the Summer of ’62, he wrote a song about it. His in-house studio band The Tornados cut it, and within weeks it was climbing the U.K. and U.S. charts. #1 on the Hot100 the last two weeks of ’62 and the first week of ’63 and #10 as we kick off our Chartcrush countdown of 1962’s biggest hits. It’s an instrumental: “Telstar.”

One of the biggest hits of 1961, Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” whet the public’s appetite for weird new keyboard sounds, and “Telstar,” delivered for ’62: #10 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, 1962 edition.

Joe Meek, the Brit behind the Tornadoes was an acknowledged genius, but a tortured genius, likely schizophrenic. His studio was above a shop in London run by the landlady, who’d bang on the ceiling with a broomstick to complain about the noise, which would drive anyone trying to run a studio nuts, but for Meek, it was too much, and in 1967 after years of feuding, he murdered her, then himself with a borrowed shotgun.

By the way, British Rockers Muse: Frontman Matt Bellamy is Tornados guitarist George Bellamy’s son. Muse’s “Knights of Cydonia” in 2006, a tribute to “Telstar.”

#9 The Shirelles – Soldier Boy

Next up at #9, what would a 1962 countdown be without a Girl Group? Girl Groups, a cornerstone of the more sophisticated, polished Brill Building sound that filled the airwaves post-Payola.

Notwithstanding countless pulp fiction paperbacks and B-movies, the “Bad girl” Pop star wasn’t a thing ’til Nancy Sinatra later in the ’60s, then Donna Summer in the mid-’70s and of course Madonna in the ’80s. And early Rock ‘n Roll was Male dominated, as was the Greaser hoodlumism critics said it incited. So records by Female Singers: automatically in the safe zone for nervous radio Program Directors, and June 27, 1960, peak Payola hysteria, there were more than three in the top ten for the first time in nearly four years.

Well, April 21, 1962 was another milestone: the first week in chart history with three songs by Black Females in the top ten. Our #9 song was #6 that week, on its way to #1 for three weeks in May. Their second #1 after “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” in ’61, written by Brill Building Songwriting power couple Carole King and Gerry Goffin, it’s The Shirelles’ “Soldier Boy.”

“Soldier Boy,” reportedly written on the spot by Luther Dixon and Scepter’s Owner-Producer Florence Greenberg and recorded in one take with five minutes left in the session, #9 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1962. A song that became closely associated with Vietnam once hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops were in combat there, but in ’62 when it was a hit, Vietnam was just one of many countries around the world where Americans were deployed.

JFK’s administration had two big Cold War setbacks its first year: the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, then the Berlin Wall, and Kennedy was determined to not add Vietnam to that list. Now The Shirelles weren’t a Motown group, but Berry Gordy, Jr.’s first Motortown “Sound of Young America” package tour hit the road in ’62: Marvelettes and Mary Wells, Motown’s two big Female acts, pre-Supremes.

#8 Mr. Acker Bilk – Stranger on the Shore

Next here on our 1962 edition of Chartcrush, the second of the two British records in our top ten countdown, also an instrumental, but unlike “Telstar’s” aggressive futurism, this is a sweet little piece from a BBC show about a French au pair in England that some assume was a hit because people needed something to calm them down during the Cuban Missile Crisis, yet another Cold War powderkeg as Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev put America’s new, young, idealistic President through the ringer. But Kennedy didn’t spot Khruschev’s nukes in Cuba ’til October and this was #1 in May and June, so nope.

But, again, that Payola chill on the airwaves gave records like this a boost, not to mention all-in-one home stereo cabinets now showing up in department stores and the Sears catalog and bringing hi-fi within reach for millions. I mentioned Percy Faith’s 1960 smash “Theme from ‘A Summer Place'” in the intro; in ’62 it was bowler-hatted, goateed, striped-waistcoated English clarinetist Mr. Acker Bilk, “Stranger on the Shore.”

Mr. Acker Bilk vanished from the charts almost as quickly as he arrived, and he was back on the cabaret circuit by the time The Beatles hit in ’64, but his one big hit, “Stranger on the Shore,” secured his legacy. In the top ten for 11 weeks, and #1 for just one, yet Billboard named it the year’s top hit based on the simple inverse-rank point system they were using at the time. That’s one point for a week at #100, 100 points for a week at #1, and so on.

As Billboard started doing in 1967 and refined in the years since, our Chartcrush ranking awards bonus points for weeks at #1 and in the top ten to better reflect the hockey-stick reality of sales and airplay volume as you approach #1.

And by the way, we apply that consistently to every year: same ranking method, so our Chartcrush rankings are truly apples-to-apples.

#7 Chubby Checker – Limbo Rock

So with grownups now doing the Twist, the kiddos needed new dances, and 1962 was a parade of them, one after the other: Loco-Motion, Candied Yam, Slop, Martian Hop, Mess Around, Mashed Potato, Surfer’s Stomp, Bristol Stomp, Swim, Frug, Jerk, Monkey, Hitchhike, Watusi.

And at the end of year, Mr. Twist himself, Chubby Checker, unveiled one. Not his first since “The Twist,” mind you; he was a busy man in ’61 and ’62: “Pony Time” in early ’61, “Let’s Twist Again” and “The Fly” in the Summer and Fall of ’61, and “Slow Twistin‘” with Mashed Potato Diva Dee Dee Sharp in the Spring of ’62, all top tens. But people did this one at parties for decades to come. At #7, “How low can you go?” Chubby Checker’s “Limbo Rock.”

An Island feel on that song, Chubby Checker’s “Limbo Rock” at #8. An instrumental version was out first in the Summer by The Champs (the “Tequila” guys).

Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat Song” unleashed Calypso on the charts in ’57 and it surged again in ’62. Soul shouter Gary U.S. Bonds’ big Summer hit was a mashup of Calypso and Twisting: “Twist Twist Senora.” I mentioned in the intro the Silent generation’s internationalism.

“Limbo Rock” at first was the B-side: the flip of “Popeye the Hitchhiker.” That was two dances in one song, The Popeye and the Hitch Hike. But it was the Limbo that caught fire, and the record peaked at #2, kept out of the top spot by “Telstar.”

But like “Telstar” and other hits in our Chartcrush 1962 top ten we’re counting down this hour, don’t look for it on Billboard‘s year-end ranking because their cutoff week for the ’62 chart year was October 27. Everything after that? Ignored in their ranking. At Chartcrush with the benefit of hindsight and not having to get an issue out by New Years, we get to count every song’s entire chart run and rank it just one year, and that year is the calendar year it scored the most points. Songs never fall through the cracks here on Chartcrush!

#6 The 4 Seasons – Sherry

And neither do whole groups, like the year’s top chart debut, who broke through in the Fall and scored two back-to-back #1’s before the end of the year. But neither of those hits is in the top ten on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100: the second because it was after the October 27 chart year cutoff, but the first, which is our #6 song, because despite its five weeks at #1, lesser hits with more weeks on the chart outranked it.

Remember, Billboard wasn’t awarding those #1 bonus points yet in 1962, so under their simple inverse point method, for example, ten weeks at #50 got the same number of points as five at #1. Incredible that it took Billboard until 1967 to address that!

Anyway, they were one of two Vocal Harmony Groups from opposite coasts that burst onto the scene simultaneously in the Fall. California’s Beach Boys, and the “Jersey Boys” (the title of their Tony-winning jukebox musical that ran on Broadway for 12 years in the ’00s and ’10s). That’s right, The 4 Seasons! Their breakthrough, “Sherry.”

Frankie Valli there with his trademark powerhouse falsetto on The 4 Seasons’ “Sherry,” the #6 song of 1962 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. #1 in just its fourth week on the Hot100; only a handful of non-American Idol winners in chart history can say that about their debut singles!

Initially called “Jackie” for First Lady Jackie Kennedy, the song inspired by Bruce Channel’s #1 “Hey! Baby” from earlier in ’62 evolved first into “Terri,” then “Sherry” after the daughter of big-time New York DJ Jack Spector, Songwriter Bob Gaudio’s best bud.

Despite being dwarfed on the charts in 1962, The Beach Boys eventually caught up and surpassed The 4 Seasons in later years to become ’62’s biggest debut looking at career chart points, but The 4 Seasons scored two #1s right out of the gate in ’62, and a third in early ’63, “Walk like a Man.” We’ll be hearing that second 1962 hit here in a few minutes.

#5 Joey Dee & The Starliters – Peppermint Twist, Part 1

But first, another group of Jersey boys that just happened to be playing at the Peppermint Lounge the weekend in October of ’61 that New York society columnists spotted British actress Merle Oberon and Russian expat Prince Serge Oblinski there Twistin’ the night away.

The sighting hit the papers the next day, and that night at the Peppermint Lounge, the NYPD needed barricades and mounted police for crowd control. Which remained the situation on West 45th Street between Sixth and Broadway throughout all of ’62 as 30 other “Twist” records came and went from the charts. Even Frank Sinatra jumped on the bandwagon with “Ev’rybody’s Twistin’.”

But besides Chubby Checker’s original, the only other that topped the chart was the one that replaced it at #1 for three weeks in January and February, by our lucky combo from Jersey, who were immediately promoted to house band at the Peppermint. Obviously!

They wrote and cut the song as a tribute to the Peppermint and the Twist craze, along with a whole album titled, what else? Doin’ the Twist at the Peppermint Lounge, which got all the way to #2 on the album chart at a time when albums by Rockers almost never cracked the top ten. At #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1962 it’s Joey Dee & The Starliters’ “Peppermint Twist.”

Joey Dee & The Starliters’ “Peppermint Twist,” the #5 song of 1962 by our reckoning here at the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Billboard had it all the way down at #25, not counting the first six weeks of its chart run in 1961 and not awarding those bonus points for its three weeks at #1.

The group’s namesake Joey Dee co-wrote “The Peppermint Twist,” but the Lead Singer is not Dee; it’s bandmate Dave Brigati, whose kid brother Eddie went on to co-found The Young Rascals with Felix Cavaliere in 1965. Small world!

As for Dee & The Starlighters, they made the top ten one more time with a frantic, live cover of “Shout” that even got The Isley Brothers’ 1958 original back on the charts in mid-’62 and inspired their new top 20 hit “Twist and Shout.” That, of course, became a centerpiece of The Beatles’ early repertoire.

#4 Bobby Vinton – Roses Are Red (My Love)

Well we’re gonna slow things down considerably for our #4 hit, which is a last-ditch “hail Mary” by a guy from the same Pittsburgh suburb that produced Perry Como, whose dream of hosting a Teen version of the Lawrence Welk Show on TV seemed doomed after his 1961 Young Man with a Big Band album and its singles failed to connect.

But at the meeting where his label was about to drop him he noticed two more singles on his contract, so in desperation he grabbed one of the demos there on the table, cut a version in a Teen Idol style jettisoning the whole Bandleader thing, and promoted the hell out of it. He even bought a thousand copies himself for distribution to DJs with, get this, a red rose! Apparently, that wasn’t considered Payola!

And it worked. The record was #1 for four weeks in the Summer and the #4 song of 1962 both on Billboard and our Chartcrush rankings, one of just two songs in our top ten that line up with Billboard‘s ranking. It’s Bobby Vinton’s “Roses Are Red (My Love).”

Teen Idols weren’t invented in the Early ’60s. Emotive Crooner Johnnie Ray pioneered the look and style in the early ’50s. But after the Payola scandal froze out edgier sounds on the radio, labels were on the lookout for Male avatars of style who had just enough James Dean swagger to get the Teen girls a-crushin’ and a-swoonin’, but who in real life were the opposite of Rockers out riding fast cars and motorcycles, doing scandalous dance moves on TV and generating shocking headlines. Teen Idols like Ricky Nelson, Paul Anka, Frankie Avalon, Fabian and the Bobbies: Rydell, Vee, Darin, and, reluctantly, Vinton, whose first hit “Roses Are Red (My Love)” we just heard at #4.

Bobby Vinton was all the way to the zero-swagger end of the Teen Idol spectrum, but he made up for it with business smarts, professionalism and sheer force of will. After charting nearly 40 more hits over the next decade-plus, he finally realized that dream of hosting his own TV show. The Bobby Vinton Show aired on TV from ’75 to ’78.

#3 The 4 Seasons – Big Girls Don’t Cry

Del Shannon’s “Runaway” not only whet the public’s appetite for weird electronic keyboards like on “Telstar;” it also paved the way for powerhouse falsetto leads, along with Maurice Williams & The Zodiacs’ #1 hit from 1960, “Stay.” And Dion & The Belmonts with their snappy Pop arrangements and harmonies: next level Doo-Wop!

Well, the group at #3 who we’ve already heard in our countdown didn’t have any strange keyboards, but they did have snappy arrangements and intricate harmonies, and they sure took that falsetto to the bank! We heard their breakthrough “Sherry” back at #6; here again, The 4 Seasons: their second #1, also for five weeks and the #3 song of 1962 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, “Big Girls Don’t Cry.”

“Big Girls Don’t Cry,” Frankie Valli’s piercing falsetto along with that cleverly contrasting doofus voice by Bass Singer Nick Massi, another Four Seasons trademark also on their first #1 “Sherry” we heard back at #6.

“Big Girls,” the bigger hit, #3 on our Chartcrush ’62 Countdown, but it didn’t make Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 at all because all but its first two weeks on the chart were after their October 27 chart year cutoff. If Billboard had been factoring weeks after the cutoff into the following year like it started doing in 1972, “Big Girls” would’ve been one of 1963’s top hits.

As depicted in their jukebox musical Jersey Boys, The 4 Seasons’ road to stardom was a long one. Three of the guys had been in a ’50s group called The 4 Lovers, who were on RCA and even played Ed Sullivan, but nothing charted so RCA cut them loose and the hitmaking lineup didn’t come together until 1960, when none other than future Actor Joe Pesci, their friend, introduced them to Bob Gaudio, whose ’50s group The Royal Teens had scored a hit. “Short Shorts,” #4 in 1958, then resurrected in the ’80s for a ubiquitous Clio-winning ad for Nair, the hair removal lotion.

Gaudio wrote most of The 4 Seasons hits including “Sherry” and “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” along with Producer Bob Crewe.

#2 Ray Charles – I Can’t Stop Loving You

So in the Summer of ’62 there were two million-selling singles after three years of tanking sales due to Payola fallout, but also the LP surge from stereo and hi-fi. Summer, typically the doldrums for single sales, so the industry took notice.

One of the million-sellers was Bobby Vinton’s “Roses Are Red,” which was only available on a single ’til after it hit #1, but the other, our #2 song, was on an album, and that album was #1 all Summer, 14 weeks, in addition to the single selling a million.

He’s the acknowledged inventor of Soul music, but also a big Country-Western fan, and in 1962 he went all-in on Country. That album was Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, and the single was his reinterpretation of a 1958 hit by Country legend Don Gibson. It’s Ray Charles with “I Can’t Stop Loving You.”

Ray Charles’ “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” #1 for five weeks and the #2 song of the year as we count down the top ten from 1962 here on this week’s Chartcrush. It was also Billboard‘s #2 Hot100 hit of the year, and despite being a Country song, #1 on the R&B chart for ten weeks.

Connie Francis also dove head-first into Country earlier in ’62 and scored what turned out to be her last #1: “Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You.”

#1 Chubby Checker – The Twist

Well we’re down to our #1 song, and I’m not really sure what else to say since I’ve been talking about it since the top of the show: the centerpiece of 1962 Pop and the only record in history to get to #1 in two separate runs on the Hot100. That after it caught on with adults in late 1961 once gossip writers started catching celebrities slumming at New York’s Peppermint Lounge doing the dance.

It was a Teen sensation in 1960 after he did it on American Bandstand; then again for two weeks in January 1962 after dropping off the chart for almost all of ’61: Chubby Checker’s “The Twist.”

So Billboard has “The Twist” at #9 on its year-end ranking for 1962 because they didn’t count the first seven weeks of its historic second chart run in late 1961. Again, at Chartcrush, we count every song’s full chart run and rank it in the year it earned the most points, so “The Twist” takes its no-brainer place as 1962’s top hit.

If you’re wondering, we consider chart runs “separate” if they have at least six months off the chart in between. And besides Christmas hits, and in the streaming era, songs that chart again after an artist’s death like Whitney Houston, Prince and Juice WRLD, only three records besides “The Twist” have made the top ten in separate runs:

Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me,” #4 in 1961 when it first came out, and then #9 in 1987 when it was the title song of the movie Stand by Me.

Bobby (Boris) Pickett’s 1962 Halloween #1 “Monster Mash” peaked again at #10 when it was reissued in the Summer of 1973.

And Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” #9 in 1976 and then #2 in 1992 when it was in the Wayne’s World soundtrack shortly after Freddie Mercury’s death.

And that’s it!

Bonus

Well there you have ’em, the real top ten songs of 1962. But in deference to Billboard despite their flawed ranking methodology in ’62, before we sign off we want to take a look at the songs that they had in their top ten for ’62,  but weren’t in our countdown. There were five of ’em.

#43 The Sensations – Let Me In

At #8 they had a one-hit Doo Wop group out of Philly, The Sensations.

Sensations Singer Yvonne Mills Baker also wrote that song, “Let Me In,” Billboard‘s #8 song of 1962; #43 on our Chartcrush ranking: one of the first all-Male groups to add a Female Lead Singer.

#22 Little Eva – The Loco-Motion

We heard three dance craze records in our countdown, Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” and “Limbo Rock” and Joey Dee & The Starliters’ “Peppermint Twist.” Of those, Billboard‘s year-end top ten only had “The Twist” at #9. But they had two different ones, including their #7 song, #22 on our Chartcrush ranking, Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion.”

Husband-and-wife Brill Building Songsmiths Gerry Goffin and Carole King wrote “The Loco-Motion” as the follow-up to another Singer’s dance craze record, but she passed so they gave it to their 16-year-old babysitter, and Little Eva Boyd went from making $35 a week to earning a cool $30 grand as a Pop star. She scored three more charting singles in ’62 and ’63, all written by Goffin and King.

#11 Shelley Fabares – Johnny Angel

At #6 as we continue our look at the songs that made Billboard‘s year-end top ten but not our Chartcrush top ten we counted down this hour, Billboard had the record by the Teen daughter in TV’s Donna Reed Show, actress Shelly Fabares. It shot to #1 after she sang it in an episode, about a girl’s hopeless crush on a boy who doesn’t know she exists, “Johnny Angel.”

Shelly Fabares’ “Johnny Angel” just misses our Chartcrush Top Ten at #11. Fabares remained a big star on TV and movies into the ’90s but her Singing career began and ended with “Johnny Angel” and its sequel “Johnny Loves Me” a couple months later.

#17 David Rose & His Orchestra – The Stripper

Billboard‘s 1962 year-end top ten also had two instrumentals: their #1 song, Acker Bilk’s “Stranger on the Shore” (#8 on our ranking), but instead of “Telstar” which was too late in the year to factor, at #5, they had… “The Stripper.”

Legend has it that a young, Male office assistant was sent down to the tape vault to grab an unreleased recording by David Rose & His Orchestra to slap on the B-side of their new Easy Listening version of the standard “Ebb Tide,” and he returned with “The Stripper,” recorded in 1958. And it was delighted young, Male Top40 DJs who completely ignored “Ebb Tide” and instead played the B-side to death in the Summer of ’62, making “The Stripper” Billboard‘s #5 hit of the year. Our Chartcrush ranking puts it at #17.

#14 Dee Dee Sharp – Mashed Potato Time

And finally, Billboard‘s #3 song of 1962 didn’t make our top ten. It had lots of weeks in the Top 40 so it got a longevity boost in Billboard. But it never got to #1, so it lands at #14 when songs that did get their bonus points. It’s the hit that Goffin and King wrote “The Loco-Motion” as a follow up for: Dee Dee Sharp’s “Mashed Potato Time.”

The Mashed Potato, the biggest Teen dance obsession of ’62 while mom and dad were out discovering the two-year-old Twist. But, wait, The Mashed Potato dance move was older than the Twist. James Brown came up with it in ’59!

Oh, and fun fact: “The Monster Mash” is the same dance as the Mashed Potato. Just add Frankenstein-style zombie gestures with your arms and hands!

So 1962, an interesting year in chart history! I hope you enjoyed our look back here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi, and if you did and want more, go check out our website, chartcrush.com where you can listen again to the podcast version on Spotify,  follow along with a written transcript and check out spiffy extras like our full Top100 chart and interactive line graph of the top ten songs. We do that for every year we count down, and we count down a different one every week on this show, ’40s to the present, so check it out, again chartcrush.com, and be sure and tune in next week, same station and time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

::end transcript::

::start transcript::

Welcome! This is the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show and I’m your host Christopher Verdesi. Every week we set our sights on a different year in Pop music and culture and count down the top ten hits according to our exclusive recap of the weekly charts published at the time by the music industry’s top trade mag, Billboard. This week, we’re turning the clock back to 1995, a politically-charged year after Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America to shrink the government swept Republicans to control of the House of Representatives, and the GOP also won back control of the Senate.

Republicans had won Presidential races against the backdrop of the culture wars raging since the early ’70s, but flipping the House? That was new. 1955, the last time there’d been a Republican Speaker. The Culture Wars, accelerating in the ’90 and spilling over into national politics, and music was at the center.

For its 1992 chart year, Billboard had completely transformed its data collection for ranking songs and albums, switching from its 40-year-old system of retail and radio surveys to actual barcode scans for sales through Soundscan and airplay spins reported by Broadcast Data Systems. And the change was dramatic as the charts started reflecting what Gen-X was actually consuming. Suddenly, artists and whole genres considered fringy and underground were on top: Gangsta Rap, Punk, Alt Rock, all aggressively pushing the limits of public taste.

Zooming out with the benefit of hindsight, it was the inflection point between modernism and postmodernism’s elevation of low culture and inversion of Western civ’s “meta-narratives,” in religion, morality, aesthetics, everything.

Gen-X essayist Chuck Klosterman in his book The Nineties highlights 1994’s Reality Bites as the cinematic epitome of his generation’s pathological fear and loathing of “selling out,” with “selling out” defined as embracing, rather than rejecting, virtually any aspect of those meta-narratives.

And in ’95, with the Cold War over five years and the youngest Boomers now in their 30s, when Billboard unveiled its year-end Hot100 chart and a Gangsta Rap track was the #1 song of the year, it was like an exclamation point on all that. Was Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” really 1995’s most popular song though? Well, definitely an important milestone in the mainstreaming of Hip-Hop: one of the major themes of ’90s and ’00s, but no, it wasn’t. It was more like wishful thinking on the part of postmodern taste inverters and envelope pushers, not to mention Hip-Hop fans. It was only #50 on Billboard’s year-end Airplay ranking.

How it got to be #1 on the year-end Hot100, we’ll explore in more detail as the show goes on, but for now, suffice to say that the Hot100 was broken in 1995, and stayed broken all the way ’til Billboard fixed it for its 1999 chart year. So for those late ’90s years, ’95 to ’98, Billboard‘s Airplay chart, not the Hot100, is the best gauge of what was broadly popular, so that’s what we’ll be counting down here on our 1995 edition of Chartcrush: the top ten derived from Billboard‘s weekly Airplay chart that ranked the songs based on actual spins on a broad cross-section of radio stations.

#10 Sophie B. Hawkins – As I Lay Me Down

Kicking things off at #10, speaking of Reality Bites, after Lisa Loeb scored the first-ever #1 hit by an unsigned artist in ’94 (her song “Stay (I Missed You)” from the film), one of ’95’s big Indie Female sensations was our Singer at #10: her second hit after “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” in 1992 and one of the top Adult Contemporary hits of ’95 (#1 on that chart for six weeks), it’s Sophie B. Hawkins’ “As I Lay Me Down.”

What are those backing vocals saying in the chorus? If you thought “I like tacos,” you’re not alone. ’95, one of the last years that misheard lyrics could become memes, before fans could look ’em up on the Web. “Ooh La Kah Koh” is what they’re singing: just nonsense syllables.

Sophie B. Hawkins’ “As I Lay Me Down,” #10 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1995’s biggest hits according to our exclusive recap of Billboard‘s weekly “Radio Songs” airplay charts. It also peaked at #6 on the Hot100. It was in the Christina Ricci coming-of-age flick Now and Then and an episode of Fox’s Party of Five, the family Drama that made stars out of Matthew Fox, Neve Campbell and Jennifer Love-Hewitt. Hawkins even guest stars in the episode.

#9 Hootie & The Blowfish – Only Wanna Be with You

At #9, a band that surprised everyone by scoring the bestselling album of 1995—by a mile. 12 million in its first year. As AllMusic writer Stephen Thomas Erlewine puts it, they “defined the mid-’90s mainstream in the wake of Alt Rock” by flipping the script on the conventional notion of artsy left-of-the-dial college Rock. They sounded Alternative, but were really anything but, making Alt Rock safe for local pubs, mom’s minivan and mainstream radio.

It was #19 on the year going by the Hot100, but #9 looking at Airplay, it’s Hootie & The Blowfish, “Only Wanna Be with You.”

Hootie & The Blowfish, “Only Wanna Be with You,” #9 as we count down the top ten Airplay hits of 1995 on this week’s edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. They scored three other massive hits off their Cracked Rear View album, the breakout single, “Hold My Hand,” plus “Let Her Cry,” and “Time.” But later albums didn’t fare as well and the band went on hiatus in 2008. Singer Darius Rucker became a big Country star with eight Country #1’s from 2008 to ’18.

#8 Blues Traveler – Run-Around

While the O.J. Simpson trial was mesmerizing TV audiences in 1995, there were a couple notable deaths in the music world. Latin Pop singer Selena (dubbed the “Mexican Madonna”) / was shot and killed in a dispute over money, by a former fan club President. She was just 23 and on the verge of achieving major crossover success for Latin music, four years before Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, Shakira and Jennifer Lopez.

And then in August, Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia died of a heart attack. In their long strange trip since the mid-60s, The Grateful Dead? Never bigger than when Garcia passed away. They spawned a whole movement of Jam Bands in the ’90s: Phish, Black Crowes, Spin Doctors, Dave Matthews and the group with the #8 Airplay hit of ’95, who were David Letterman’s favorite band: more appearances on that show than any other act.

It comes out #11 on the year ranking the songs according to the Hot100, but #8 Airplay, it’s Blues Traveler’s “Run Around.”

“Run Around.” In 1991, a few years before that song made Blues Traveler stars, group leader John Popper was at The Arrowhead Ranch 15 miles from the site of the original 1969 Woodstock playing with a bunch of other Jam Bands, and got the inspiration to organize the H.O.R.D.E. Festival: Jam Bands’ answer to the Alt Rock festival Lollapalooza. H.O.R.D.E. ran for seven successful years during a decade of Summer music festivals: Warped, Lilith Fair, Woodstock revivals.

#7 The Rembrandts – I’ll Be There for You

Next up at #7 is the song that made everyone realize that the Hot100 chart was broken: again, why we’re counting down the top ten Airplay hits here on our 1995 edition of the Chartcrush Countdown Show instead of the Hot100, our usual go-to. It was Billboard’s #1 Airplay song for eight straight weeks in the Summer of ’95, but disqualified from the Hot100 because it wasn’t out as a single.

All the way up to the end of 1998, Billboard stubbornly clung to its rule that songs had to be out as singles in order to chart on the Hot100, which was problematic because increasingly, hits weren’t being released as singles. Labels wanted to sell $15 albums, not $4 singles, but besides, once the 7-inch vinyl 45 faded, fans didn’t have much use for cassettes or CD’s with just a couple songs.

Now the exceptions, R&B, Dance and Hip-Hop: genres with a tradition of multiple versions and remixes of hit songs going back to the late ’70s and 12-inch vinyl. So-called “CD Maxi singles” in those genres: hot items because you couldn’t get the remixes and extended versions anywhere else. So the Hot100 skewed heavily in favor of R&B, Dance and Hip-Hop, at the expense of “song-is-the-song” genres.

But Rock and Country, still as big as ever on the Album charts and on the radio. And in the case of the #7 song on our 1995 Airplay countdown, TV, thanks to NBC’s Thursday night primetime hit Friends. It was the theme song. It’s The Rembrandts, “I’ll Be There for You.”

Friends premiered September 22, 1994, just three weeks after show producers decided it even needed a theme song, tried to get R.E.M.’s “Shiny Happy People” but couldn’t, so recruited a Songwriter and Pop Rock Duo The Rembrandts to create one, and the result was “I’ll Be There for You.”

Friends was an immediate hit on TV but the whole first season you couldn’t buy the song in any format, until May of ’95 as Summer reruns were about to start and The Rembrandts tacked it on as the last track on their new album, L.P. But no single because the band didn’t write it and didn’t think it represented them, so the only way to get it was to buy the album. And before the end of the year, a million people did.

Finally in the Fall of ’95 with the release of the Friends soundtrack album for the premiere of Season Two of the show, “I’ll Be There for You” came out as a single and debuted at #17 on the Hot100, but that was after it’d become the first song ever to top the Airplay chart without being on the Hot100 at all over the Summer: the first of many like that over the next few years, it turned out, as Billboard continued its policy of disqualifying Airplay-only hits from the Hot100 all the way up to its 1999 chart year.

#6 Mariah Carey – Fantasy

At #6, the other extreme: a song that greatly benefitted from Billboard‘s singles-only policy. It was only the second single in history to debut at #1 on the Hot100, and by the end of ’95, that single was Double Platinum.

Billboard listed the album version on its charts, and that’s what Adult Contemporary and most Top40 stations played, but much of the song’s success was thanks to a remix (only on the single) by Bad Boy Records mogul Puff Daddy featuring Wu Tang Clan Rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard that crossed it and the artist over to the Hip-Hop audience just as that was about to become an essential career move for Pop Singers who wanted to stay relevant.

And no one was a bigger Pop Singer in the ’90s than she was. That’s not hyperbole, she literally was Billboard‘s top charting act of the ’90s decade. It’s Mariah Carey’s ninth #1 hit, the lead single from her 1995 Dream Lover album and our #6 Airplay hit of the year, “Fantasy.”

Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy,” #6 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1995’s top hits ranked from Billboard‘s weekly “Radio Songs” Airplay chart. It was also Billboard‘s #7 year-end Hot100 song.

That remix version I mentioned: it was a bold move and a big deal in ’95 for a star of Mariah’s caliber to embrace Rap like that, and she did it against the bluntly-expressed wishes of her mentor, label boss and hubby Tommy Mottola, a first-wave Boomer 20 years her senior who, like most Boomers, was immune, even hostile, to the pull of the Postmodern Gen-X sounds and sensibilities that transformed pop culture in the early ’90s.

Mottola couldn’t stop that remix, but he did quash her Alt-Rock band Chick, whose 1995 album Someone’s Ugly Daughter would’ve no doubt caused more than just a ripple if it’d come out with her original vocals instead of her friend Clarissa Dane’s overdubs as the band’s subbed-in frontwoman. Mariah’s involvement, a closely-guarded secret until her memoir spilled the deets in 2020.

By the way, that catchy bass line in “Fantasy?” It’s a sample from “Genius of Love,” by Tom Tom Club, the Talking Heads spinoff, that immediately caught on with Rappers upon its first appearance in 1981. No fewer than 85 Hip-Hop records using that sample before Mariah got a hold of it in ’95.

#5 Dionne Farris – I Know

Moving on, our #5 Airplay hit of ’95, also out as a single, and it just missed the year-end top ten on the Hot100 at #11, by a Singer who, despite getting her start in the epicenter of Hip-Hop (New York), got involved with the Atlanta Alternative Hip-Hop group Arrested Development and sang on their big hit in ’92, “Tennessee.” From there future American Idol judge Randy Jackson signed her to a solo album deal on Columbia, and this was her debut single from the album. It’s Dionne Farris’s “I Know.”

One-hit wonder Dionne Farris’ “I Know:” the #5 radio Airplay song of 1995 as we count down our top ten derived from that chart here on our 1995 edition of Chartcrush. She cut a follow-up album, but the label (same as Mariah Carey’s, Columbia) declined to release it, citing creative differences, and after that she quit music altogether to raise her daughter. But in 2007, she released the album herself on iTunes.

#4 Real McCoy – Another Night

At #4, another of the five songs in our Radio Songs-derived top ten countdown that were also in the top ten on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 singles chart. This one, a crossover from the Dance chart. Again, Dance, one of the genres that continued selling tons of singles in the ’90s thanks to extended Club, House and Special mixes not available anywhere else.

And the four-minute Radio version caught on, thanks to Arista Records boss Clive Davis, who’d struck gold in 1994 breaking Reggae-tinged Swedes Ace of Base in the U.S. and was looking to repeat that trick with this German Euro-Disco outfit that’d suddenly caught on in Canada. Well, Ace of Base they weren’t, but they were 1995’s Club Culture triumph: Billboard’s #1 New Pop Group of 1995, with three other Hot100 hits during the year besides our #4 song. It’s The Real McCoy with “Another Night.”

“Another Night” could easily have been the song that Chris Kattan and Will Ferrell’s Roxbury Guys on SNL bobbed their heads to in their rayon suits cruising clubs for women, but instead they chose a lesser Euro-Disco hit from ’93, Haddaway’s “What Is Love.” “Another Night” never topped the Radio Songs chart. It peaked at #2. But it was on the chart longer than any other ’95 hit: 44 weeks. And 45 on the Hot100, where it holds the record for most weeks at a chart position besides #1: 11 at #3.

#3 Madonna – Take a Bow

So, Mariah Carey, the top Pop Diva of the early ’90s, breaking out of her Adult Contemporary box in ’95 to embrace the Gen-X Postmodern taste inversion. Well, our act at #3 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1995: Billboard‘s top charting act of the ’80s, a constant provocateur and envelope pusher, to the point where multiple scholars and books have highlighted her as the central figure of Postmodernism, and she did the exact opposite from Mariah in ’95, even apologizing for putting everyone through the ringer.

“I’m going to be a good girl this year, I swear,” she said on video with a little girl in her lap. “Secret,” the lead single from her 1994 album Bedtime Stories topped out at #3 on the Hot100, but the second was #1 for seven weeks and topped the Airplay chart for nine. It’s Madonna, “Take a Bow.”

It ain’t easy being the vanguard of a cultural sea change for ten years! Feminist lightning rod Camille Paglia for one, got it, calling Madonna in a 1990 New York Times op ed “the true feminist” for exposing “the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode.”

So pushing limits worked in the ’80s and early ’90s. Why change? Well after MTV banned her video for “Justify My Love,” and after she almost got arrested for obscenity in Canada on her Blonde Ambition tour, her Girlie Show tour that made Blonde Ambition look tame by comparison, and finally, her bizarre, profanity-laced smell-my-panties appearance on Late Night with David Letterman in ’94, the eyebrow-raising had turned to serious public doubts about her sanity. So doing a 180 and cleaning it up seemed like the most shocking thing she could do for ’95, and with Bedtime Stories it paid off.

When “Take a Bow” hit #1, Madonna dethroned Carole King as the Female songwriter who had written the most #1 songs in chart history.

#2 Boyz II Men – On Bended Knee

And our act at #2 became the first act since The Beatles in 1964 to replace itself at #1 on the weekly Hot100 with a different song. Decades old chart records falling like dominoes in the ’90s.

Incidentally, The Beatles scored their first top ten Hot100 hit since the ’70s / in 1995, “Free as a Bird,” from their Anthology project. At #2 though, this group’s sixth Hot100 top ten hit since their chart debut in ’91, and their third #1, after “End of the Road” in ’92 and, more recently, “I’ll Make Love to You.” That’s our Chartcrush #1 song of 1994 and the one our #2 song of ’95 replaced to match that Beatles milestone. It’s Boyz II Men’s “On Bended Knee.”

So Mariah Carey, the top charting act of the ’90s on the Hot100; Boyz II Men, the top charting group of the decade, “On Bended Knee,” the #2 Airplay hit of 1995, and even bigger things were right around the corner. Their collaboration with Mariah, “One Sweet Day” hit the charts in December 1995 and stayed at #1 on the Hot100 for 16 weeks, another record broken. That one it stood until 2017.

#1 Seal – Kiss from a Rose

And that gets us to our #1 song according to the Billboard year-end Airplay chart: a sleeper hit. When the artist first wrote and recorded it all the way back in 1987, he was embarrassed by it; says he just threw the tape in the corner. Then five years later during the sessions for his second album, he dusted it off and gave it to his producer Trevor Horn to work on, and it peaked at #20 on the Hot100. Not bad for a throwaway song, right?

But then, it was selected for the hottest movie of 1995, Batman Forever and re-entered the chart, went all the way to #1, became the #1 Airplay single of 1995 with 10 weeks at #1, and won all the awards at the Grammys. It’s Seal, “Kiss from a Rose.”

“Kiss from a Rose,” Seal, the #1 song on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1995’s top Airplay songs, propelled by its appearance in the blockbuster Batman Returns. Over on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100, it was #4. Seal’s cover version of The Steve Miller Band’s “Fly like an Eagle” went to #10 in 1997, but he never came close to repeating his unexpected success with “Kiss from a Rose.”

Bonus

So that’s our top ten. As I’ve been saying, lots of differences between what was happening on radio in ’95 and the Hot100 with Billboard‘s rule about songs having to be out as commercial singles to be eligible to chart. Four of the year’s top ten Airplay hits we just heard in the countdown didn’t make Billboard‘s year-end top ten on the Hot100 despite being out as singles.

Our #10 song, Sophie B. Hawkins’ “As I Lay Me Down” was Billboard‘s #39 Hot100 hit of 1995 and #76 for ’96 since its chart run extended all the way to the end of March. Hootie & Blowfish’s “Only Wanna Be with You,” which we have at #9: Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 had that one at #33. Our #8 Airplay hit, Blues Traveler’s “Run-Around” was #14 and Dionne Farris’ “I Know,” our #5 song was #11 on the year-end Hot100. And of course, The Rembrandts’ “I’ll Be There for You,” which we have at #7, didn’t make the year-end Hot100 at all because it wasn’t out as a single during its eight week run atop the Radio Songs chart.

But Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 had five other songs in the top ten that we didn’t hear this hour in our Airplay-derived ranking, so in the time we have left, let’s take a look at those.

#30 Montell Jordan – This Is How We Do It

At #10, Billboard had a six-foot eight R&B Singer whose first single used a ubiquitous Hip-Hop sample like Mariah Carey did with Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” on “Fantasy.” Here it was Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story,” one of the most sampled tracks of all-time. It’s Montell Jordan, “This Is How We Do It.”

The first non-Rap record on Def Jam after its acquisition by PolyGram, Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It,” Billboard‘s #10 Hot100 song of 1995. It notches in at #30 on our Airplay ranking we counted down the top ten from earlier.

#36 Monica – Don’t Take It Personal (Just One of Dem Days)

At #9 on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 was the debut by a 14-year-old R&B Singer that was in the top ten for 14 weeks but only got to #2. If it’d gotten to #1, she would’ve dethroned Little Peggy March as the youngest Female with a #1 hit ever. Little Peggy March was 15 in 1963 when “I Will Follow Him” topped the chart. It’s Monica’s “Don’t Take It Personal (Just One of Dem Days).”

Before Britney vs. Christina in ’99, there was Brandy vs. Monica, two Black Female Teens. Brandy hit first with “I Wanna Be Down” and “Baby” in the first half of the year, both top tens, but Monica’s “Don’t Take It Personal (Just One of Dem Days)” got all the way to #2. Neither Singer topped the chart ’til ’98, when they teamed up on “The Boy Is Mine.” “Don’t Take It Personal” was #36 on our Airplay ranking.

#19 TLC – Creep

Billboard‘s #3 and #2 Hot100 songs of 1995 were both by the ’90’s top charting Girl Group on the Hot100, but neither song was among the top ten Airplay hits we counted down this hour. Both were in the top 20 though. The one Billboard had at #3 was #19 on our Airplay ranking. Radio, generally more conservative about what goes on the air than fans about what they buy, and it’s a song about revenge cheating that topped the chart just weeks after the trio’s Rapper, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, burned down her boyfriend’s Atlanta mansion. It’s TLC’s “Creep.”

Considering how big they were in ’92 when their first album dropped, surprisingly, “Creep” was TLC’s first #1 hit on the Hot100. It only got to #3 on the Airplay chart though.

#17 TLC – Waterfalls

The third single off their 1994 CrazySexyCool album got to #2 though, and was #17 on our ’95 Airplay ranking, #2 on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100. The song that kept Monica’s “Don’t Take It Personal” from hitting #1 and breaking Little Peggy March’s record for youngest Female chart topper, it’s “Waterfalls.”

Tionne, Lisa & Chilli, TLC with “Waterfalls,” a song about AIDS and drug violence, and best video at the MTV Video Music Awards, a first for a Black artist.

#43 Coolio – Gangsta’s Paradise

As I said at the top of the show explaining why we were going with the Airplay chart for our ’95 Chartcrush Top Ten countdown, the Hot100 had ceased to be an accurate ranking of the nation’s top hits with Billboard sticking to its rule that songs had to be out as commercial singles. Until they finally changed that at the end of ’98, several top hits: absent from the Hot100. The Friends theme “I’ll Be There for You,” the most glaring omission in ’95.

Well the flip-side of that: looking at the Hot100, several songs that were out as singles appear much more popular than they really were, and no hit makes that point better than the song Billboard ranked #1 for 1995. It was #50 on their year-end Airplay ranking so how can it be the year’s top hit?

Besides the Soundtrack album it was on, the tough school Drama Dangerous Minds starring Michelle Pfeiffer, the only way fans could buy the song for its first three months in release was the single. That also boosted it on the Hot100, and a Gangsta Rap track being named the year’s #1 hit was a milestone in the mainstreaming of Hip-Hop. Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise.”

Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” featuring Singer L.V., Billboard‘s #1 Hot100 song of 1995 but only 50th on its Airplay ranking. No profanity on any version of that song thanks to Stevie Wonder, who made it a condition of sampling his 1976 song “Pastime Paradise” for the beat. Ironically, though, it’s one of the least Pop-oriented tracks by a Rapper, Coolio, who many have criticized for leaning too hard into Pop.

And with that, we’re gonna have to close out our 1995 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, but if you like what you heard and you want more, visit our website, chartcrush.com for a written transcript of the show, and a link to stream the expanded podcast version on Spotify, plus bangin’ extras like our full top 100 chart and interactive line graph of the actual chart runs of the songs we heard this hour. We do that for every year, 1940s up to now, and it’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com.

I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Thanks for listening, and don’t forget to tune in again next week, same station and time, for another year, and another edition of Chartcrush.

::end transcript::

::start transcript::

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

This week on Chartcrush it’s 1979, the year Disco suddenly, and spectacularly, flamed out at its height, after surging nearly four years, swept away in a sudden, spontaneous release of pent up frustration over the whole gamut of ’70s problems: energy crisis, urban rot, stagflation, malaise, the misery index, President Carter’s smiley aw-shucks beta personality, pussy-footing around with Soviets and terrorists, hand-wringing over Watergate and Vietnam, the Welfare State, collapsing morals and social fallout, and on and on. On the eve of the ’80s, all of it had to go. Not a conscious rebellion; more like a primal scream: just let this decade be over!

The last #1 Disco hit, Chic’s “Good Times,” referenced the 1930s Depression era that spawned Big Band Swing, another bad time that went on too long, and the last time dancing had been so big, not coincidentally. Virtually every city in ’79 had a Disco. And the latest thing: Disco roller rinks, especially out in the ‘burbs, with mirror balls and lights and DJ booths and the latest Disco records pumped through state-of-the-art sound systems.

By ’79 Disco had become a hegemonic genre-devouring vortex. First Funk, Soul and R&B, then Jazz and now even Rock and Country acts taking the Disco plunge! And radio? Well, AM Top 40, which still had half the audience for music: their job was to play the Top 40, regardless of genre, so that was now half Disco. But on FM, Disco-exclusive stations cropping up in major cities, and beating everyone else, even the big AM stations.

WKTU “Disco 92” in New York and infamously, WDAI in Chicago, previously an Album Rock station. Infamously because one DJ who lost his job when WDAI switched to Disco didn’t take it lying down. Moving to another Chicago Rock station, Steve Dahl took up the “Disco Sucks” mantle on his morning show, where he’d put on a Disco record and a few seconds in, scratch the needle across it with an explosion sound.

He got so popular doing that that the struggling Chicago White Sox thought they could fill some seats with a “Disco Sucks” promotion. Bring a Disco record, throw it in a bin and get in to a White Sox-Tigers doubleheader for just 98 cents (98, Dahl’s new home on the FM dial). And between games, “Disco Demolition” where Dahl detonates the bin of Disco records behind second base.

Well, fill seats it did: the biggest crowd ever at Comiskey Park, but there for “Disco Sucks,” not baseball, and after the explosion, total mayhem as thousands rushed the field and the Sox had to forfeit game 2. July 12, 1979. Disco Demolition Night, when the simmering Disco backlash burst out into the open and became a national news story.

And the shift on the charts: sudden and dramatic. For the first eight months of ’79, almost every #1 was either Disco or a slow song by a Disco act. But less than a month after “Disco Demolition,” Chic’s “Good Times” was nudged to #2 and The Knack’s “My Sharona” topped the chart for six weeks. And for the rest of the year, the top ten was a Discoless grab bag and the music biz, already reeling from a 20% drop in LP sales since ’78, was left scrambling.

MCA fired its entire A&R staff in ’79 and those laid-off staffers no doubt rode down to the lobby with their pink slips grumbling about cassette decks, home taping and the just-launched Sony Walkman. So it wasn’t just that folks were tired of Disco. But things didn’t pick up again for the industry ’til 1983 and ’84 with MTV. But that’s for another episode.

#10 KC & The Sunshine Band – Please Don’t Go

We kick off our 1979 Chartcrush countdown, with two hits at numbers 10 and 9 that both came very late in the year, months after Disco Demolition, and the one at #10 is something different from an iconic Disco group that landed four #1’s pre-Saturday Night Fever and Bee Gees, but zero after, not even a top 20, until this. Sometimes a couple years out of the limelight can be a good thing! At #10 it’s KC & The Sunshine Band’s only Ballad, “Please Don’t Go.”

KC & The Sunshine Band’s “Please Don’t Go” at #10, stuck at #2 the last two weeks of the year behind the song we’re gonna hear next at #9 in our 1979 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, and then it moved up, and was the first #1 of the ’80s.

Now at Billboard, their year-end charts don’t go by calendar years. They have to give themselves time to get their year-end issue out before New Years, so there’s a cutoff, and in ’79 that cutoff was early: October 20, “Please Don’t Go’s” ninth week on the chart. It’s remaining 17 weeks, including its 11 in the top ten? In Billboard’s 1980 chart year. They have it at #19 for 1980. Well at Chartcrush, we do go by the calendar year, and rank every song’s full chart run in the year it earned the majority of its ranking points. No splitting. So it’s our #10 song of 1979.

#9 Robert Holmes – Escape (The Pina Colada Song)

Same situation with our #9 song. It was neck-and-neck in the top ten with “Please Don’t Go” December into January, and was the last #1 of the ’70s decade: a story song with an unexpected twist at the end, by a Singer-Songwriter who got his start in the anonymous world of late ’60s Bubblegum, then spent most of the ’70s writing ad jingles, songs for other artists (notably Barbra Streisand) and four albums, none of which charted. His fifth, though, was the charm, and its lead single took off. At #9, Rupert Holmes’ “Escape (The Pina Colada Song).”

Narrative Story Songs, huge in the first half of the ’70s, then a lull as Disco ramped up, then a resurgence. Kenny Rogers had launched his solo career with his Country crossover Story Songs “Lucille” in ’77, “The Gambler” in ’78, and his latest “Coward of the County,” which was in the top ten at the same time as Rupert Holmes’ “Escape (The Pina Colada Song),” the one we just heard at #9.

Rogers moved on from musical storytelling in the ’80s, but not Rupert Holmes. His Broadway musical based on Charles Dickens’ unfinished last novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, won five Tony Awards in 1986. Once the follow-up singles after “Escape” ran their course in 1980, though, and two from his next album failed to crack the top 40, that was it for Rupert Holmes on the Pop charts.

#8 Peaches & Herb – Reunited

Next, the third song in a row in our Chartcrush Countdown for 1979, that isn’t Disco, but unlike the first two at numbers 10 and 9, it hit in the first part of the year, so, one of the #1 Ballads by Disco acts that I mentioned at the top of the show. The Bee Gees’ “Too Much Heaven” was another: #1 for two weeks in January.

This one came later, #1 for four weeks in May, after their dancefloor-filler “Shake Your Groove Thing” had lit up the charts in March, four straight weeks at #5. Hey, the kiddos at the roller disco needed slow songs too! #1 for four weeks in May. At #8, it’s the Duo Peaches & Herb with “Reunited.”

Peaches & Herb weren’t really “Reunited” because it wasn’t the same “Peaches” who was with Herb Fame for their string of hits in the late ’60s including the song “United.” Francine Barker was “Peaches” in their “Sweethearts of Soul” days, and she’d retired. Herb had too, in 1970, to be a DC cop.

But music beckoned again and Producer Van McCoy, who’d put the first Peaches & Herb Duo together, hooked him up with former model Linda Greene, and she’s the “Peaches” on all their late ’70s stuff. McCoy had just scored himself with one of the first Disco #1s, his instrumental “The Hustle” in the Summer of ’75, but the Peaches & Herb relaunch album he produced in ’76 didn’t chart, so they switched labels and teamed up with Dino Fekaris and Freddie Perren, the team who’d just done Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”

Fekaris & Perren wrote and produced all of Peaches & Cream’s 2 Hot! album, and cranked out three more Peaches & Herb albums in ’80 and ’81, but except the ’80s wedding perennial “I Pledge My Love,” which topped out at #19, nothing connected like their hits in ’79.

#7 Village People – Y.M.C.A.

At #7, finally some Disco! By a group conceived as a celebration of the Gay lifestyle and club scene in New York that gave Disco its flashy, flamboyant aesthetic. Gays had come a long way since the 1969 Stonewall Riots that ignited the Gay Rights movement, but that scene was still deep underground, and few outside of it had any clue, least of all the kiddos at suburban roller rinks skating around to our #7 song, spelling out letters with their arms.

It never got to #1, but was #2 for three weeks in February and in the top ten for 12: enough to make it one of the top ten hits of the year. It’s The Village People’s second hit after “Macho Man” in the late Summer of ’78, “Y.M.C.A.”

A song about Gay men cruising for hookups—Cruisin’, the title of their album—at a place long-known for Gay hookups—the Y.M.C.A.—by a group named after New York’s Gay neighborhood—the Village—costumed as Gay Male fantasy personas—Cop, Cowboy, Hardhat, Indian, G.I., Biker—and formed specifically to target the Gay club scene… and still, most people in 1979 had no clue what any of that meant. Or even that there was a Gay club scene.

For many, their first inkling was scratching below the surface on “Y.M.C.A.” (or talking to someone who had). By the way, fun fact: Village People frontman Victor Willis, who wrote “Y.M.C.A.” is straight, married at the peak of the Village People’s fame to the future Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show, Phylicia Rashad.

#6 Gloria Gaynor – I Will Survive

Well, we’re counting down the biggest hits of 1979 here on this week’s edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, and in 1974, our Singer at #6 had helped usher in Disco with one of the earliest Disco top tens, her cover of the Jackson 5’s “Never Can Say Goodbye.”

On the album, it was the middle song in a three-song, 18-plus minute Disco suite: a first-of-its-kind by remix pioneer Tom Moulton, who understood that even DJs sometimes need to eat a sandwich or take a bathroom break! Moulton, also the compiler of Billboard’s first Dance Club Songs chart in October of ’74, on which he ranked “Never Can Say Goodbye” at #1. No more hits after that, though, until she helped close out the Disco era in ’79 with this, her biggest hit. At #6 it’s Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”

It was the B-side, Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” tacked on at the end a session after a long day recording the discoized Righteous Brothers cover issued as the A-side in August of ’78. But the single went nowhere until “I Will Survive” caught on with DJs, making the chart in December, then a slow four-month climb to #1 on the Hot100 for two weeks in March.

Written and produced by the same guys who did Peaches & Herb’s “Reunited” a short time later, former Motown producers Dino Fekaris and Freddie Perren. And with the same backing band, but with a simpler arrangement, no back-up Singers, and none of the production flourishes usually on Disco hits by Female singers like sped up vocals, for one. So Gaynor’s voice on “I Will Survive” is unfiltered, unvarnished, and honest: a record that was way ahead of its time and remained a dancefloor anthem for many years.

#5 Rod Stewart – Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?

Well you’re listening to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, our 1979 edition, and we’re down to #5.

Now, David Bowie, Elton John, Paul McCartney and The Eagles had all scored Disco-dabbling hits in ’75 and ’76 when the sound was still incubating, having not yet completely outgrown its Funk and Philly Soul roots. But by ’78 thanks to Saturday Night Fever and the Bee Gees, it was nearly impossible to spin the radio dial, turn on a TV, or for that matter even walk down the street or go shopping without being bombarded by spandex, mirror balls and fuschia.

Imagine that from inside the music biz bubble! Disco wasn’t just a bandwagon anymore; it was a convoy of semis rolling down the interstate: Pop itself! So after the Rolling Stones took the plunge on “Miss You” and scored their first #1 in five years, our act at #5 saw the future and asked his Drummer Carmine Appice, formerly of the proto-Metal ’60s band Vanilla Fudge, to help him make it happen by writing a song like “Miss You.” And this was the result. At #5 it’s Rod Stewart’s “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?”

The more ubiquitous Disco got, the more Rock fans felt alienated and forgotten. It’s a straight line from Rod Stewart showing up on TV in spandex and teased hair singing “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” in February to Steve Dahl and Disco Demolition mid-Summer.

Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” hit in the Spring: a downtown Punk band going Disco! Then Pop-Progsters ELO with “Shine a Little Light” and KISS with “I Was Made for Lovin’ You” in the immediate lead-up to Disco Demolition. Wings “Goodnight Tonight” and The Kinks “Superman,” two others along that timeline, but Rod Stewart and “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” bore the brunt.

Around the same time as Disco Demolition, Steve Dahl himself was out with a parody single on an indie label: “Do You Think I’m Disco?” It charted for six weeks.

#4 Donna Summer – Bad Girls

And meanwhile, Disco’s own stars were soaring to new heights on the charts, like the one with the two-fer at numbers 4 and 3 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1979’s top ten hits. Both songs were in the top 5 at the same time for six straight weeks, June to the end of July, and that made her the first Black Artist since Louis Jordan in 1944 to have two hits in the top five the same week on the Pop chart, and the first-ever Black Woman.

In the Hot100 era she would’ve been the first Woman, period, but Linda Ronstadt beat her to it in December ’77. Gloria Gaynor may’ve been the first and one of the last Disco Divas, but Donna Summer with her eight top tens including three #1s from ’76 to ’79, was the quintessential Disco Diva. At #4, the second single and title track from her 1979 double album, “Bad Girls.”

“Bad Girls” at #4, inspired by an office assistant at Donna Summer’s label, Casablanca Records, mistaken for a street prostitute by a police officer while running an errand for her on Sunset Blvd. in L.A.

Label boss Neil Bogart shelved the song as too Rock upon hearing Donna’s demo in January, even suggesting giving it to the label’s latest signing, Cher. But as the album came together, with all the Rock acts scoring Disco hits, “Disco Sucks” gaining steam out in the wild and Summer’s own instincts to incorporate more Rock into her style, what was disqualifying in January had become a strength, so they went to work on it.

The “toot toots” and “beep beeps” were a last-minute ad lib by Summer looking to spice up what struck her as empty spaces in the song. On the album version, they continue a few more bars a capella after the music fades, which top40 DJs could’ve had some fun with on the air, but, alas, it wasn’t on the single version. But it became a meme anyway: arguably what made “Bad Girls” such a monster hit, #1 for five weeks, July into August…

#3 Donna Summer – Hot Stuff

…and the second song on the album, that opens with… our #3 song. And like Tom Moulton’s Disco suite leading off Gloria Gaynor’s album in ’75, the two songs flow into each other without missing a beat.

“Bad Girls” wasn’t a Rock song by the time Producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte got done with it. But the leadoff track co-written by Bellotte (and also the album’s lead single)? At least as much a Rock song as “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy” is Disco, four years before Michael Jackson’s Rock crossover “Beat It.” It even won Summer the first-ever Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. And she was nominated twice more for that in ’82 and ’83, but lost both times to Pat Benatar.

#1 for three weeks up against six for “Bad Girls,” but it hung around in the top ten four weeks longer, so when you add it all up it’s the bigger hit: again Donna Summer, with “Hot Stuff.”

Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” at #3. She went way back with Songwriter-Producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, to her first record deal in Germany in ’74, having moved there in the late ’60s with a part in the Munich production of Hair.

Moroder and Bellotte’s fellow Munich Producers Sylvester Levay and Michael Kunze hit first in the U.S. with “Fly, Robin, Fly,” their minimalist take on Philly Soul credited to their Silver Convention project, but the week after that hit #1 in December of ’75, Summer’s first hit “Love to Love You Baby” debuted. That got to #2, and together those hits launched Euro-Disco and completely changed the trajectory of Dance music in the U.S.

Donna Summer weathered the Disco backlash better than most: continuing to score top fives in late ’79 and into the ’80s, even after parting ways with Casablanca Records and Giorgio Moroder to expand her creative horizons. She was never far from the Dance charts; her final album Crayons in 2008 yielded four #1 Dance/Club Play hits.

#2 The Knack – My Sharona

Next as we close in on #1 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1979, the song Billboard named #1 on the year. And that was quite an exclamation point on the Disco backlash at the time because it’s the record that decisively broke Disco’s nearly continuous stranglehold on the top spot since just after Saturday Night Fever hit theaters at the end of ’77.

It hit #1 August 25 just after Disco Demolition Night, stayed on top for six straight weeks, and in his article leading off the year-end charts, Billboard writer Paul Grien called it “the clarion call of the new music.” OK, but hold on. Was it really the #1 song of the year? Well not according to our Chartcrush ranking; we have it at #2! Explanation after the song. Here’s The Knack’s “My Sharona.”

Of course, a complete break from Disco; that’s the main headline. But even within Rock circles, “My Sharona” stood apart from the Prog and Soft Rock sounds on FM radio in the ’70s.

L.A. Times Music Editor Robert Hilburn hailed it as having restored the Teenage viewpoint to Rock: same thing they’d been saying in the U.K. about Punk. But Punk never caught on like that in America. Remember, Blondie had to make a Disco record, “Heart of Glass,” to make the charts, and by the way, Blondie and The Knack had the same Producer, Aussie Mike Chapman. So “Sharona” was New Wave’s “Rock Around the Clock” Stateside, even if it took a few more years (and MTV) for it to blossom on the charts.

Here’s a bit of trivia: Sharona was a real person: Knack front man Doug Feiger’s girlfriend. She’s on the picture sleeve of the 45. When they met she was 17. He was 25.

Song parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic’s first single was a “My Sharona” send-up, “My Bologna.”

As for The Knack? Well, they toured nonstop and their second album sounded just like their first, but they faded fast after “My Sharona” and the follow-up “Good Girls Don’t,” which peaked at #11. ’79 was still too soon for a band to not sheepishly demur when compared to The Beatles, which they were, often. No, instead they invited that comparison, and appalled Rock critics punished them by blasting their over-the-top sexist lyrics.

Doug Feiger slipped into a spiral of addiction for a few years before sobering up in the mid-80s, but sadly died of cancer at just 57 in 2010.

#1 Chic – Le Freak

OK, so here’s why “My Sharona” was Billboard’s #1 song of 1979, but it’s #2 on our Chartcrush ranking we’ve been counting down. It’s because Billboard‘s methodology in ’79 strongly favored consecutive weeks at #1. “My Sharona” and our #1 song both had six weeks on top, but “Sharona’s” were consecutive while our #1 song’s weren’t: knocked down to #2 twice, first by Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond’s “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” in December ’78, then by The Bee Gees’ “Too Much Heaven” for its two weeks in January ’79.

Both times, though, it reclaimed the #1 spot to rack up its six weeks. And it was in the top ten three weeks longer than “Sharona,” so using our Chartcrush formula (which, by the way, is identical for every year we rank), our #1 song is Billboard’s #3 song of ’79: Chic’s “Le Freak.”

Chic was Guitarist Nile Rodgers and Bassist Bernard Edwards’ project, with hired female Singers, and “Le Freak,” the first of their two #1s before the Disco implosion and #1 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1979’s top ten hits.

Their first hit, “Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah)” had been the #1 Dance Club song for seven weeks at the end of ’77, and then crossed over to peak at #6 on the Hot100 in early ’78, so Rodgers and Edwards were kind of a big deal New Years Eve ’78, when they showed up, dressed to the nines, at New York’s hottest Disco, Studio 54, invited by Jamaican-American Supermodel Singer Grace Jones, who was performing.

But Jones forgot to get them on the guest list and the door man wouldn’t let them in. So after a heated exchange, they hit a liquor store, went back to Rodgers’ apartment and wrote the song that would evolve into “Le Freak,” only that night, “Freak Out!” wasn’t the phrase on their minds; it was another more pointed phrase that also abbreviates to “F.O.” Chic topped the chart again later in ’79 with the aforementioned “Good Times,” Disco’s final #1 on August 18. “My Sharona” bumped it to #2 the next week.

So that’s the top ten here on our 1979 edition of Chartcrush, but between Billboard’s ranking published at the end of ’79 and ours, the shakeup at #1 isn’t the only difference. To review, our #10 song, KC & The Sunshine Band’s “Please Don’t Go,” had only just entered the weekly top ten at the end of Billboard‘s ’79 chart year, so they ranked it #19 in 1980. Same with our #9 song, Rupert Holmes’ “Escape.” That’s their #11 song, again 1980. So with those two coming in to our Chartcrush top ten, Billboard’s #9 and #10 songs got bumped out. So, just to be thorough, let’s take a look at those.

At #10 they had the song that replaced “My Sharona” at #1 in October: Robert John’s “Sad Eyes.”

“Sad Eyes” notches in at #12 on our Chartcrush ranking, Robert John had been at it since the late ’50s, didn’t score a big hit ’til ’72 (a cover of the Tokens’ “Lion Sleeps Tonight” that got to #3), and then it was another seven years before he got to #1, with a song he wrote, “Sad Eyes.”

And at #9, Billboard had another hit from the first half of the year (the Disco half), Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell.”

“Ring My Bell” was a longshot hit, written by one of the co-founders of start-up Juana Records as a Teen Pop song about talking on the phone, and intended for 12-year-old R&B singer Stacy Lattislaw, who jumped ship to sign with a major label before she cut it. So the song fell into Anita Ward’s lap; she was working on an album right at the same time on that label. Her only top 40 hit, #1 for two weeks. It just misses the top ten on our Chartcrush ranking, at #11.

And with that, we’re gonna have to close out our 1979 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show because we are all out of time. But if you like what you heard and you want more, visit our website, chartcrush.com for a written transcript of the show and link to stream our podcast version on Spotify, plus primo extras like our full top 100 chart and interactive line graph of the actual chart runs of the songs we heard this hour. We do that for every year, 1940s up to now, and it’s all on the website. Again, chartcrush.com.

I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Thanks for listening, and don’t forget to tune in again next week, same station and time, for another year, and another edition of Chartcrush.

::end transcript::

::start transcript::

Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show! I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week we dive deep into a year in Pop music and culture and count down the top ten songs according to our exclusive recap of the weekly charts published in Billboard, the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority. This week on Chartcrush we’re counting down the biggest hits of 1946, the first year Billboard did year-end charts, adding up the action on their previous 52 weekly Retail Sales, Disk Jockey, Jukebox, Live Radio and Sheet Music charts, song-by-song, record-by-record, artist-by-artist, label-by-label, composer-by-composer, publisher-by-publisher: quite an undertaking on a tight deadline without computers!

But in 1946, Americans knew all about epic undertakings, having just split the atom and won a two-front World War; then reassimilating 12 million returning GIs and transitioning from wartime quotas, wage and price controls and government central planning to the boom of suburbs, cars, consumer goods and babies that drove Postwar economic expansion.

But at the same time, a new threat was gathering, and the guy that first called it out, was the same guy who’d called out Hitler in the ’30s, Britain’s recently unemployed wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Invited to speak at a college in President Truman’s home state of Missouri in March of ’46 after Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had said that a war between East and West was inevitable, Churchill declared that an “Iron Curtain” had descended across Central Europe, and all the countries behind it were now in what he called “the Soviet sphere.”

Truman, by the way, President less than a year. So, new President, a new world map, new technologies, and now a new threat. That’s a lot of anxiety-inducing newness to dump in the middle of a victory party, and the weird mix of confidence and terror spawned sci-fi and film noir in the late ’40s but also a massive nostalgia wave: people craving what was comfortable and familiar from the past, but also trying to define what America was and wasn’t in an era of ideologies.

The Hays Code had been around since the 30s: before ratings, the movie business’s guidelines so studios didn’t have to worry about the patchwork of different state and local decency laws across the country. It also affected music since most hit songs were written for movies. But all through ’46, Billboard was reporting on civic leaders and “vigilante” “blue-nose” groups (their words) going after “indecent” entertainment in their communities, pushing for tighter restrictions and more aggressive enforcement.

Frank Capra’s holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life came out at the end of ’46 contrasting protagonist George Bailey’s bucolic hometown, Bedford Falls, with trashy Pottersville in the alternate reality if Bailey had never been born. In 2019, a writer in Esquire preferred Pottersville’s neon, strip clubs, pool halls and Hot Jazz to Bedford Falls, “where,” he said, “the coolest thing you can do is throw rocks at a condemned house.”

But in ’46 it wasn’t a debate. Most of the top Jazz Big Bands called it quits in ’46, up against a changing market and a hefty federal sin tax on dancing establishments passed by Congress in ’44, and that left the field to the Crooners and Pop-oriented Bands that ruled the charts for the rest of the decade.

#10 Bing Crosby with Carmen Cavallaro at the Piano – I Can’t Begin to Tell You

And at #10 as we kick things off here on our 1946 edition of Chartcrush, the original star Crooner, teaming up with “The Poet of the Piano” Carmen Cavallaro, fresh from his massive 1945 hit with his band version of “Chopin’s Polonaise.” At #10 it’s Bing Crosby and Cavallaro with “I Can’t Begin to Tell You.”

Bing Crosby and Carmen Cavallaro’s “I Can’t Begin to Tell You” at #10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1946’s biggest hits. The song was from a movie, The Dolly Sisters, a biopic about identical twins who make it big on Broadway. Singer-Actress and Pinup Betty Grable sings it in the film and her version was also out on a record, but Crosby and Cavallaro’s was the bigger chart hit.

Since the first six weeks of its run were in 1945, it’s not anywhere near the top ten on any of Billboard‘s three year-end charts for ’46: Best Sellers, DJ spins and Jukebox plays. But at Chartcrush we count every song’s full chart run in the year it scored most of its points, so we have it at #10 on the year: the biggest of Crosby’s 11 charting records in ’46.

#9 Kay Kyser and His Orchestra (vocal Michael Douglas) – Ole Buttermilk Sky

And at #9, another year-straddling hit, but from the end of 1946 into 1947. Again, counting full chart runs surfaces it as one of 46’s top hits. It’s a song by Great American Songbook legend Hoagy Carmichael, written for the 1946 Technicolor Western Canyon Passage: a scene where the Male lead is getting ready to propose to his girl, hoping for a romantic, moonlit night, and Carmichael sings it himself in the film, but the biggest hit was by the Kay Kyser Orchestra, sung by future daytime TV talk show host Mike Douglas, “Ol’ Buttermilk Sky.”

Hoagy Carmichael’s own record of his song “Ol’ Buttermilk Sky” on the ARA record label also charted, well below Kyser’s on Columbia we just heard at #9 for the last 12 weeks of the year, but a new Carmichael version on Decca dropped later in the year leading up to the Oscars and surpassed Kyser’s. Not long enough to be the bigger hit overall, and he lost the Oscar to Johnny Mercer’s “Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.”

But fast forward five years to 1951 and it’s Carmichael and Mercer together at the podium accepting Best Original Song for “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening,” which they co-wrote! We’ll be hearing another tune by Hoagy Carmichael later as we continue counting down the top ten hits of 1946, here on this week’s edition of Chartcrush.

#8 Dinah Shore – The Gypsy

At #8 is the first of two versions of the same song in our top ten. Five versions were on the charts in the Summer of ’46: a common occurrence at a time when few performers were writing their own songs and Tin Pan Alley publishers were still the gravitational center of the music biz. After Mike Douglas we just heard, another ’40s Singer who went on to Daytime TV Talk Show glory in the ’70s. But she didn’t just sing on a couple hits; 21 top tens from ’41 to ’49. She was the top charting Female of the entire ’40s decade. It’s Dinah Shore’s version of “The Gypsy.”

Dinah Shore’s version of “The Gypsy,” #8 here on the 1946 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. English Bandleader Billy Reid wrote the song for Welsh Singer Dorothy Squires, and that record was a hit in the U.K., but Squires and Dinah have something else in common: serious relationships with much younger men: Squires married future James Bond Roger Moore at 38. He was 26. And Dinah in her late fifties was hot ‘n heavy with Actor Burt Reynolds for six years in the early ’70s. He was in his late thirties.

#7 Betty Hutton – Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief

At #7, as promised, another Hoagy Carmichael song from a movie, but unlike his “Old Buttermilk Sky” we heard at #9, the hit version is by the Singer-Actress who does it in the film, known for her over-the-top, manic performances in movies since 1942, and by ’46, one of Paramount’s top box office draws. And even though she was a Singer before she was an Actress, none of her records cracked the top 5 on any chart until this one in ’46. At #7, from the movie The Stork Club in which she plays a Nightclub Singer, it’s Betty Hutton’s “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief.”

Betty Hutton, “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief,” #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 1946. Irving Berlin’s Annie, Get Your Gun debuted on Broadway in ’46, about Buffalo Bill’s Female sharpshooter Annie Oakley. Ethel Merman played the lead on Broadway, but Betty Hutton was Annie in the 1950 blockbuster movie, her most enduring role.

By the way, two songs from Annie, Get Your Gun were in the top ten on Billboard’s year-end Honor Roll of Hits for ’46. That was their chart that combined all versions of songs out on records and factored in Sheet Music sales. “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly” was #5 and “They Say It’s Wonderful” was #10, but none of the versions of those songs cut by A-list Pop Singers and on the charts at the same time made our countdown of the top ten records of the year.

#6 Frank Sinatra – Five Minutes More

At #6, a Singer who accumulated a lot of nicknames over the years in different phases of his career, but the first? “Skinny,” his most striking physical characteristic. He kind of invited the taunt as a hotshot upstart unapologetically Crooning to maximum seduction effect for his teenaged Female fans (“Bobbysoxers”), and then brazenly challenging the status quo of headline Bandleaders and Featured Vocalists, going solo at the height of Big Bands in 1941. That was a genuinely gutsy move. Only Bing Crosby had survived the public backlash against the first wave of Pop Crooners in the early ’30s.

But also because Bandleader Tommy Dorsey owned 43% of his lifetime earnings by contract. Genovese family underboss Willie Moretti may or may not have convinced Dorsey to sell that contract for one dollar. As big as the Singer was as a solo act after that, though, he didn’t hit #1 on any chart, ’til 1946 when he did it twice, first with a Ballad that only topped the DJ chart, not Best Sellers or Jukeboxes, but then in late September, this was #1 on all three the same week, and Billboard started using a new nickname, “The Voice.” At #6, Frank Sinatra’s “Five Minutes More.”

You wanna hear some Swing, check out the Glenn Miller Band’s version of that song, “Five Minutes More,” which was on the charts at the same time as Sinatra’s we just heard at #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1946. Miller, of course, the biggest of the Big Bandleaders before the war, but he enlisted to lead the Army Air Forces Band in ’42, and in ’44 the plane taking him to newly-liberated France went down over the English Channel.

Sax Player/Vocalist Tex Beneke took over, and the first records by Beneke and the Glenn Miller Orchestra hit in ’46, but #4 was as high as any of them got on the charts. By year’s end as I mentioned earlier, most of the Big Bands, even Tommy Dorsey’s, had called it quits.

#5 Perry Como – Prisoner of Love

So the Pop charts now belonged to Singers, but Crosby and Sinatra weren’t the only Crooners scoring hits, and in fact, the most successful on the charts in ’46 is the one at #5. Billboard named the record #1 on its year-end Retail Best-Sellers chart, and since most sources (even Billboard) default to Sales talking about pre-Hot100 song rankings, it’s considered the year’s biggest hit. Only problem with that, record players and records were expensive in the ’40s; the vast majority of people were listening on radios and jukeboxes. Still, on our combined ranking that factors Airplay, Jukeboxes and Retail Sales it was in the top 3 for 14 straight weeks. Here’s Perry Como’s “Prisoner of Love.”

Perry Como’s “Prisoner of Love,” the #5 song of 1946 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Como was making a good living on tour with the Ted Weems Orchestra in the ’30s but quit in 1940 after his son was born to go home to Pennsylvania, open a barber shop and settle down. It wasn’t long, though, before an agent wooed him back with a deal where he could stay put and didn’t have to travel: his own network radio show and a gig at the Copacabana nightclub in New York, which was held over through the entire Summer of ’43.

RCA-Victor needed a Crooner to compete with Sinatra on Columbia and Crosby on Decca, so they snapped him up, and his World War 2 victory year smash “Till the End of Time” in ’45 made him a superstar. Perry Como managed to chart at least one top ten hit every year until 1958.

#4 Frankie Carle and His Orchestra (vocal Marjorie Hughes) – Rumors Are Flying

At numbers 4 and 3 we have a two-fer for you: two records in a row by the same act, and it’s a Band, not a Singer. Well, a Band with a Singer, but the Singer isn’t the headliner. That crediting arrangement lingered a few more years before going all but extinct in the ’50s. Anyway, the Singer was the Bandleader’s daughter. His wife slipped an unmarked recording into an audition stack, and he chose his own 19-year-old daughter not knowing who she was!

Finding out didn’t change his mind, and audiences loved her, but he didn’t like the optics so it was a secret until Walter Winchell got the scoop and spilled it in his gossip column. But that was after their first big hit of ’46 and no one seemed to mind. At #4, their second big hit of ’46 (we’ll hear that first one next in our two-fer). #1’s, for eight straight weeks in the Fall it’s Frankie Carle & Orchestra, vocal by Marjorie Hughes, “Rumors Are Flying.”

“Rumors Are Flying,” #4 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 1946’s top records, ’46’s top band, Frankie Carle’s Orchestra featuring Carle’s daughter Marjorie Hughes on the vocal.

#3 Frankie Carle and His Orchestra (vocal Marjorie Hughes) – Oh! What It Seemed to Be

Carle first got noticed as the Piano Player in Horace Heidt’s Musical Knights, who were big on network radio and scored a string of top tens in ’41 and ’42, but he eventually outgrew that and started his own band, which debuted live in early ’44. They first made the charts in ’45 but putting Marjorie in the spotlight was what cracked the code, and at #3, as promised, their first hit of ’46, #1 or 2 for ten weeks in the Spring, “Oh! What It Seemed to Be.”

Billboard named Dinah Shore the year’s top Female Singer even though Marjorie Hughes blew her away on chart points, but as the featured Singer on her dad’s band records. Being a headliner had its advantages! By the way, if you’re listening on Spotify, the podcast version of the show, you heard live versions of both those Frankie Carle songs from 1946 radio broadcasts. They don’t have the hit record versions.

Frank Sinatra also scored big with “Oh! What It Seemed to Be.” His version was tops on the DJ chart (radio’s love affair with ‘ol Blue Eyes: already in full blossom in ’46), but Carle had the edge in Record Stores and on Jukeboxes, so was #1 with Sinatra’s at #2 overall for five weeks in the Spring. After a few more hits with Marjorie singing ’47 to ’49, Carle took his band over to RCA-Victor and Marjorie stayed with Columbia as a solo act. They still performed live together for a while, but neither charted again and Marjorie left showbiz completely in 1950.

#2 Eddy Howard and His Orchestra (vocal Eddy Howard) – To Each His Own

OK, we’re down to #2 here on our Chartcrush Countdown of 1946’s top ten hits: the breakthrough by a Bandleader from L.A. who came up in the ’30s as a featured Singer with fellow Californian Dick Jurgens’ Swing Band, then started his own band in ’39: one of the first Singing Bandleaders.

That was good way to weather the shift from Big Bands to star Vocalists in the mid-40s. He was a chart newcomer and had a lot of competition with the song: five different versions in the top ten on our combined weekly ranking for three straight weeks in September. That’s a record! But he came out on top and scored the year’s #1 Airplay hit and the #2 hit overall, it’s Eddy Howard with “To Each His Own.”

Eddy Howard’s “To Each His Own” at #2 here on our 1946 edition of Chartcrush: another song written for a movie, with the same title. Multiple Oscar-nominated score writer Victor Young wrote the music for the film, but passed on taking a crack at the title song because no one at the time knew that phrase, “to each his own.” It’s from a 17th century John Donne poem. Producer Charles Brackett wouldn’t change the title though, so second-string Songwriters Jay Livingston & Ray Evans got their big break: the #2 record of the year, but also the year’s #2 song.

#1 Ink Spots – The Gypsy

Now if you’re listening to the countdown and thinking “man, the charts were skewing awfully White in the ’40s,” well, we’ve got a surprise for you at #1. And ’46 wasn’t the first year that a Black artist scored the #1 hit of the year. The Mills Brothers’ “Paper Doll,” #1 on the year 1943. And in the top ten for years in the ’40s, Louis Jordan and the Mills Brothers again in ’44 and Ella Fitzgerald, a very respectable #14 that year. And of course Nat “King” Cole in ’47 and again in ’48.

But the top charting Black act of the decade was the Group at #1 for ’46. After huge years in 1940 and ’43 they were back bigger than ever. We heard Dinah Shore doing the song back at #8, but at #1 it’s The Ink Spots version of “The Gypsy.”

Ink Spots with the #1 song of 1946 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, #1 for ten straight weeks, and their version of “To Each His Own” was also a top ten hit in ’46. They had one of the most identifiable sounds in Pop history thanks to their so-called “top & bottom” formula: lead vocal by Balladeer Bill Kenny, and a talking bass part, first by Hoppy Jones until his death in 1944, then by Bill’s brother Herb Kenny, who we just heard on “The Gypsy.” From 1940 to ’51, 19 charting records including 11 top tens.

Bonus

Well there you go: the top ten songs of 1946 according to our Chartcrush recap of Billboard‘s weekly Sales, Airplay and Jukebox charts. Again, our ranking derived by combining those three charts into a Hot100-style chart, then using the same method we use for Hot100 years to calculate the points. But looking at the charts individually, there were records that made the top ten on one, but not the others, and since we have a little bit of time, let’s take a look at those.

#17 Johnny Mercer and The Pied Pipers – Personality

First, one that Billboard had in the top ten of both their year-end Best-Sellers and DJ charts. Our ranking algorithm wasn’t as generous, but it’s our #17 song overall: the big 1946 hit by 1945’s top charting artist, Johnny Mercer, here with the Pied Pipers Vocal Group, “Personality.”

Pretty racy for a mid-’40s Pop hit! Where was the Hays office on that one? Johnny Mercer and The Pied Pipers’ “Personality.”

#16 Frank Sinatra – Oh! What It Seemed to Be

Next is the #4 song on our DJ ranking, but nowhere near the top ten on for Sales or Jukeboxes. Did I mention that radio loved Frank Sinatra? Here’s his version of “Oh! What It Seemed to Be.”

We heard Frankie Carle and Marjorie Hughes’ version of “Oh! What It Seemed to Be” at #3 in the Countdown; Sinatra’s shakes out at #16.

#12 Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters – South America, Take It Away

Our #12 overall hit comes out #9 on our Best-Sellers re-crunch: two of the ’40s top acts teaming up for another #1 after their “Don’t Fence Me In” in ’45: Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters, “South America, Take It Away.”

“South America, Take It Away,” Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters, a song about the Latin dance craze as Pan-Americanism and Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy took root in the culture.

Vaughn Monroe and His Orchestra (vocal Vaughn Monroe and The Norton Sisters) – Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

And finally, just missing our top ten for 1946 at #11, a Holiday song that we have as the year’s #10 Best-Seller and #7 DJ hit. Five weeks on top January into February made it the biggest Holiday hit since Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” in ’42: Vaughn Monroe’s “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”

Dean Martin’s 1959 version of “Let It Snow!” started charting every year at holiday time in 2018 as on-demand streaming took over, but Vaughn Monroe’s, the original hit, was in 1946.

And wouldn’t you know it, just when you’re feeling festive, it’s time to wrap things up for our 1946 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Hey, if you like what you heard and you want more, head over to our website, chartcrush.com for a full transcript of the show and a link to the podcast version on Spotify, plus ducky extras like our full top 100 chart and interactive graph of the actual chart runs of the songs we heard this hour. We do that for every year, ’40s to present, and it’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com.

Thanks for listening, and I hope you’ll tune in again this time next week, same station, for another year, and another edition of Chartcrush.

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