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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 count down the top ten songs according to our exclusive recap of the weekly pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re turning the clock back to 1978. Peak Disco! In the movies, on TV, in the fashion magazines, in advertising, and on the Pop charts: everywhere! Even food! An article in Smithsonian in 2011 detailed how a woman made her husband’s birthday dinner using recipes published in the year he was born: 1978. The title of the article? “Tastes like Disco.”

After ramping up for three years, by ’78, every city had a thriving Disco scene with multiple clubs: first time since the early ’40s that dancing was a full-blown industry in America. Discos were even out in the middle of nowhere. They sprung up almost overnight, just as described in Wild Cherry’s big hit “Play That Funky Music:” an autobiographical song about a Rock band in, of all places, Appalachia that suddenly finds itself with nowhere to play because all the clubs that used to hire them for gigs have switched to Disco. That was in ’76. After Saturday Night Fever hit the big screen at the end of ’77, starring John Travolta as a working-class, Disco-obsessed, huckapoo-shirt wearing Italian-American in Brooklyn, New York, the Disco craze was in full bloom.

Hundreds of radio stations switched to a  Disco format in ’78. One in New York flipped from playing Adult Contemporary in July to become “WKTU Disco 92,” and by December its audience had increased eight-fold and it was the #1 station in the city, even beating out longtime top 40 leader WABC.

And of course, people switched to Disco! Anyone who lived through the late ’70s knew someone, at school, in their family, or just out and about, who suddenly showed up one day with the clothes and the hair. Clothing stores and hair salons of course switched to Disco too, and the overnight personal makeovers they wrought were impossible to miss because the glamor, sophistication, glitter and glitz of Disco was the polar opposite of the whole grungy jeans and flannel pot-smoking rural Hippie thing that had hung around since the ’60s.

Even Rock got a facelift. Van Halen debuted in ’78: out of the Hollywood Glam Rock scene, mentored by KISS’s Gene Simmons: a whole new, flashy, swaggering, blow-dried and decked-out look and matching sound that helped set the template for Rock in the ’80s. Nothing Disco about Van Halen’s music, of course, but for lots of oldskool Rock heroes it wasn’t just a new, flashier, cleaned-up look. The Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, Alice Cooper, Chicago, Jefferson Starship and even The Grateful Dead on “Shakedown Street…” all those and many more incorporated Disco grooves into their music in the late ’70s. And the drip-drip-drip of those encroachments as Disco peaked musically and culturally brewed a backlash, which boiled over in ’79: Disco Demolition Night in Chicago. That’s a story for another episode.

But it wasn’t just Rock. Funk and R&B, of course, were the wellsprings of Disco, but glossier, smoother Disco upstarts crowded out several acts who were thriving on the Pop and R&B charts pre-Disco: James Brown, Gladys Knight & The Pips, Kool & The Gang, Pointer Sisters, Moments, Whispers–even Motown superstars like Diana Ross and former Temptation Eddie Kendricks. Some of those surged back with massive Post-Disco hits in the ’80s, but others failed to adapt.

#10 Commodores – Three Times a Lady

Now Disco wasn’t the only way a Soul/R&B/Funk act could adapt to changing sounds and fashions. With the leading edge of the Baby Boom generation now in or approaching their thirties, the Adult Contemporary radio format was modernizing. In ’79, Billboard finally got around to re-naming its “Easy Listening” chart to “Adult Contemporary,” reflecting the format’s long drawn-out shift away from the Traditional Pop and Orchestral acts that’d dominated in the ’60s toward Singer-Songwriters and Soft Rock in the ’70s. And in ’78, our song at #10 as we kick off our Countdown, proved that ballads rooted in R&B could cross over and get massive airplay on AC radio right alongside the latest hits by Barry Manilow, Barbra Streisand and Roberta Flack. It was #1 on the Easy Listening chart for three weeks, all while topping the Soul/R&B chart and the Hot100 late in the Summer of ’78: Lionel Richie’s biggest hit while he was still in his group The Commodores: “Three Times a Lady.”

On the strength of his massive ballad hits with The Commodores, Lionel Richie became one of the most in-demand songwriters in the biz, not only writing but producing Kenny Rogers’ biggest hit, “Lady” in 1980 and soon after launching his solo career: one of the most successful of the ’80s. For their part, The Commodores followed up their massive 1977 R&B/Pop/Dance hit “Brick House” with “Too Hot ta Trot.” That topped the Soul/R&B chart, but couldn’t crack the top 20 on the Hot100 as Disco continued edging out the group’s preferred hard Funk sound.

#9 Paul Davis – I Go Crazy

We’re counting down the top hits of 1978 here on this week’s Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, and up next at #9 is another ballad, this one a Soft Rock song about realizing that you’re not over your ex. It only got to #7, but it was on the Hot100 for 40 weeks, August ’77 to May of ’78. That’s the longest chart run of any 1978 song by a mile, and it set a new record for chart longevity that stood for nearly five years. It’s Singer-Songwriter Paul Davis, his first top ten hit after cranking out albums and singles for nearly ten years: “I Go Crazy.”

Paul Davis’s “I Go Crazy,” #9 as we count down the top ten hits of 1978 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Davis had another good year in 1982 with a pair of top 20 hits, “Cool Night” and “’65 Love Affair:” both of those staples of latter-day so-called “Yacht Rock” playlists of Soft Rock hits from the late ’70s and ’80s. Interestingly, “I Go Crazy” was not an Easy Listening/Adult Contemporary hit, despite Davis being in the top ten on that chart for six weeks in late ’74 into ’75 with his story song, “Ride ‘Em Cowboy.”

#8 Player – Baby Come Back

And speaking of Yacht Rock, our #8 song will also ring a bell for fans of the genre: a genre, by the way, that wasn’t defined as such until the mid-’00s, when the mockumentary Yacht Rock debuted in an online amateur film festival, parodying the stories of late ’70s and ’80s Soft Rock acts, and went viral. The group is from Yacht Rock’s epicenter, Los Angeles, California, and on the strength of their three top 40 hits in the year, they were Billboard’s top New Singles Artist of 1978. It’s Player: “Baby Come Back.”

Player. “Baby Come Back,” #8, often mistaken for Daryl Hall & John Oates, the Philadelphia Soft Rock Blue-Eyed Soul duo who are specifically mocked in the aforementioned Yacht Rock mockumentary. Player broke up after a falling out between the founding members later in ’78, but Hall & Oates did successfully transition into the ’80s New Wave era and beyond. John Oates has credited the Yacht Rock series with rekindling interest in Hall & Oates in the ’00s, especially among Millennials. Player’s other top ten hit from 1978, “This Time I’m in It for Love,” often mistaken for another big late ’70s Yacht Rock act, Steely Dan.

#7 A Taste of Honey – Boogie Oogie Oogie

Well if you’ve been patiently waiting to hear some Disco here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1978, your wait is over. And it’s a good segue from the softer sounds we kicked off with at numbers 10 through 8, because while it’s definitely Disco, it’s also got a bit of that laid-back ’70s Soft Rock chill too. They were a hit right out of the gate: first album, first single (which is our #7 song)—and one of a handful of acts throughout chart history who named themselves after song titles, in this case a song from a 1960 Broadway show that was covered by everyone from The Beatles to Barbara Streisand, before Herb Alpert took it into the top ten in 1965, “A Taste of Honey.” At #7, “Boogie Oogie Oogie.”

A Taste of Honey, “Boogie Oogie Oogie” at #7. Acts named after songs: “Boyz II Men” was a song by New Edition before it became the name of the Philly R&B vocal group that ruled the charts in the ’90s. “Radio Head” was a Talking Heads song. “Deep Purple,” a #1 hit by Nino Tempo & April Stevens in 1963. “Death Cab for Cutie,” a song by the ’60s British avant garde outfit The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Just a few of the song-title named acts through the years besides “A Taste of Honey,” again, named after the Herb Alpert hit.

They followed up “Boogie Oogie Oogie” with more Disco, but things changed fast in ’79 with the “Disco Sucks” backlash, and they would almost certainly have been a one-hit wonder if they hadn’t bucked their label and producers and kept their cover of Kyu Sakamoto’s 1963 hit “Sukiyaki” a ballad. The song had been a favorite of singer Janice-Marie Johnson as a kid—and with the new English lyrics she wrote, they took it into the top five in 1981.

#6 Andy Gibb – (Love Is) Thicker than Water

OK, we’re down to #6, and I’ve gotta throw this out there: from here on in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1978, five of the songs (that’s five of the top six songs of the year) are by four brothers. I don’t mean slang “brotha’s.” No! Literally four brothers, in the same family, with the same parents! Well that’s unique in chart history! The oldest three, Barry and fraternal twins Maurice and Robin, had been the nucleus of their group The Bee Gees since the mid-’60s. But in ’77, here came the youngest, as a solo act. But really in name only; all his stuff came out of the same hit making factory (songwriting, production and everything in between) as The Bee Gees. Our #6 song was peaking on the charts on his 20th birthday in March: his second #1 after 1977’s “I Just Want to Be Your Everything,” it’s Andy Gibb “(Love Is) Thicker Than Water.”

“(Love Is) Thicker Than Water,” the first of two Andy Gibb songs in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of the biggest hits of 1978, and the first of five by the Gibb brothers collectively: solo act Andy Gibb and his older brothers’ group The Bee Gees. By the way, their sister, Lesley, the oldest of the lot: never involved in her brothers’ musical ventures except for a brief spell in 1969 when she replaced Robin onstage after he temporarily quit to pursue a solo career.

#5 Exile – Kiss You All Over

Now our song at #5 is the #1 song of 1978 (as long as you don’t count the Gibb brothers)! It’s the first hit by a regional Kentucky bar band who’d been at it since the early ’60s. And it ranks #10 on a special Billboard list of the “Sexiest Songs of All-Time” published in 2022. Its over-the-top steaminess, not lost on New York’s biggest top 40 station at the time, WABC, who refused to put it on the air until it hit #1 nationally at the end of September and they couldn’t not play it, for a run of four weeks on top. It’s Exile’s “Kiss You All Over.”

Exile “Kiss You All Over:” #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1978. Now viewers staying up late for The Midnight Special in 1978… that was the show after Johnny Carson on Friday nights in the ’70s and one of the few places you could see music on TV pre-MTV… well, those folks got to see Exile front man Jimmy Stokley delivering those deep, Barry White-inspired vocals at the beginning of “Kiss You All Over” looking like a glammed-up version of Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters in a one-piece body suit. Which explains why Glam Rock producer Mike Chapman took such an interest in them, and eventually gave them his song “Kiss You All Over.”

Chapman and songwriting partner Nikki Chinn had already launched Glam Rock act The Sweet out of L.A. (their top tens “Little Willy” and “Ballroom Blitz”), and Nick Gilder’s New Wavey “Hot Child in the City,” which replaced “Kiss You All Over” at #1. Next up for Chapman in ’79 was Blondie’s Parallel Lines album, which included their breakout hits “Heart of Glass” and “One Way or Another.” And then The Knack’s debut including “My Sharona.” Quite a roll for Mike Chapman!

On the Pop charts, Exile was a one-hit wonder, but after flashy front man Jimmy Stokely quit in 1980, they retooled and scored ten #1’s on the Country charts in the ’80s. In 1997, Dance Pop trio No Mercy (most famous for their top ten hit “Where Do You Go?”) did a flamenco-y House version of “Kiss You All Over” and scored a #1 hit on the Dance chart.

#4 Bee Gees – Stayin’ Alive

Well we’re down to the small numbers in our countdown, and for 1978, that can mean only one thing: Bee Gees! At #4, here’s “Stayin’ Alive!”

The song that came to epitomize not just The Bee Gees, but really the whole Disco craze, “Stayin’ Alive,” from the year’s #1 album, the double-LP soundtrack to the movie Saturday Night Fever and 1978’s #4 song according to Billboard, as well as our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show ranking. In the movie it’s in the opening credits scene:John Travolta as Tony Manero walking down the sidewalk in his neighborhood in Brooklyn all decked out in his dancing clothes even in the middle of the day, eating two stacked slices of pizza and carrying a can of paint back to his family’s hardware store, checking out the clothes and boogie shoes in the store windows while “Stayin’ Alive” plays in sync with his footsteps.

Saturday Night Fever catapulted not just Disco music, but the Disco scene to the pinnacle of Pop culture, one of just a handful of zeitgeists throughout history that galvanized America so completely that it’s hard to even think of the year without a half a dozen sights and sounds flooding your mind: John Travolta in his white three-piece polyester suit and The Bee Gees (the tallest, Barry, in the middle), shiny, gold-satin varsity-style jackets unbuttoned to show off their prodigious chest hair. Your mileage may vary with the specific sights and sounds, but you get the point.

#3 Bee Gees – How Deep Is Your Love

The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack yielded three #1 hits for The Bee Gees, but “Stayin’ Alive” wasn’t the first. The first was our next song at #3, and it entered the Hot100 a full three months before the movie even hit theaters. It’s the ballad, “How Deep Is Your Love.”

Bee Gees, “How Deep Is Your Love,” #3 as we count down the top ten hits of 1978 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. In 2001, Barry Gibb said that was his favorite Bee Gees song: a big deal because there have been so many Bee Gees songs. Hundreds!

The Bee Gees didn’t just materialize in the Disco era; they’d scored their first hits, a string of them, in ’67 and ‘8. At the end of the ’60s though, like a lot of groups, they got caught between Pop and the more serious Progressive and Blues-oriented Album Rock that was being championed by Hippie media outlets like Rolling Stone—unable to plant their flag in either camp. After a brief slump and breakup they got their Beatlesesque “Lonely Days” and the dreamy ballad “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” into the top five in ’70 and ’71, but slumped again—until Soul/R&B producer Arif Mardin came into their lives a few later. “Jive Talkin'” was a #1 hit in ’75, and the album it was on, Main Course, featured the first appearance on a record of what became Barry Gibb’s trademark: his falsetto!

#2 Andy Gibb – Shadow Dancing

Well we’re going to continue with our mini Brothers Gibb marathon, also known as the top four songs of 1978, at #2 with Andy Gibb’s biggest hit of the year. We heard “(Love Is) Thicker Than Water” back at #6. Andy got a songwriting assist from brother Barry on that one, but all three Bee Gees contributed on this one. And it shows! Almost indistinguishable from any of The Bee Gees hits from Saturday Night Fever. And why wouldn’t it be with the same songwriters and producers: The Bee Gees’ in-house production team of Barry Gibb, Albhy Galuten and Karl Richardson: Gibb-Galuten-Richardson. At #2, it’s Andy Gibb, “Shadow Dancing.”

With “Shadow Dancing,” Andy Gibb became the first solo act in chart history to score #1’s with his first three singles. It was #1 for seven weeks: 1978’s big Summer hit, after all three of the Bee Gees’ hits from Saturday Night Fever had finished their chart runs in the first half of the year. Same songwriters, same producers, even the same label as The Bee Gees and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack album: RSO Records for “Robert Stigwood Organization,” with its red cow logo inspired by a Japanese legend. Besides the Bee Gees and Andy Gibb, our #8 song, Player’s “Baby Come Back,” was also on RSO, for a total of six out of the ten top records of 1978.

Music and showbiz entrepreneur Stigwood had been The Bee Gees’ manager all the way back to their first charting singles in 1967, and it was his idea to turn a Tom Wolfe-style essay in New York magazine into Saturday Night Fever, which he produced, and cast John Travolta, whom he’d just signed to a three picture contract, to play the lead.

Fun fact: the author of the essay Stigwood bought the movie rights to, a Brit named Nik Cohn, admitted in the ’90s that he’d made it all up; his actual experiences attempting to research New York’s working-class outer borough Disco scene had mostly consisted of arriving at the 2001 Odyssey club in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge neighborhood while a drunken brawl was in progress outside, and being thrown up on before he was even out of his taxicab.

#1 Bee Gees – Night Fever

And we’re down to #1 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1978. It’s Saturday Night Fever’s title track. Well, sort of. When the song was written, the working title for the movie was simply “Night Fever.” Ultimately, that was rejected for being too vague. Could be a zombie flick, or a disaster movie about a mysterious disease, right? So they went with Saturday Night Fever. But the song was already done. Again, The Bee Gees, the biggest of their three hits—all from Saturday Night Fever—among 1978’s top records, “Night Fever.”

For two weeks end of February into March, all three of the Bee Gees’ hits from Saturday Night Fever were in the top ten, “How Deep Is Your Love,” “Stayin’ Alive” and the #1 song of 1978 according to our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show ranking, the song we just heard, “Night Fever.” And Andy Gibb’s “(Love Is) Thicker than Water” (our #6 song) was #2 both of those weeks. It doesn’t get much bigger than that on the charts, and the Brothers Gibb rode the wave with three more #1s late ’78 into ’79, “Too Much Heaven,” “Tragedy” and “Love You Inside and Out” from their follow-up album Spirits Having Flown.

But then the bottom dropped out of the Disco craze, and the early ’80s were tough times for Disco icons. Barry Gibb and The Bee Gees biggest successes post ’79 came writing and producing other artists. Barry teamed up with Barbra Streisand, writing, producing and singing backup on her 1980 smash “A Woman in Love,” our #8 song of 1980. By then, Andy Gibb was already deep in the throes of his addiction to cocaine and alcohol, and his erratic behavior got him fired from his roles in Broadway plays and hosting the TV show Solid Gold, cost him his relationship with actress Victoria Principal, and was the cause of his tragic death from heart failure in 1988, just days after he turned 30.

Billboard ranked Andy’s “Shadow Dancing” as the #1 song of 1978. Well, it was on the chart five weeks longer, but “Night Fever’s” eight weeks at #1 (up against “Shadow Dancing’s” seven), plus its additional week in the top ten gives it the edge in our Chartcrush ranking algorithm.

Bonus

Now, usually in our bonus segment of Chartcrush, after we finish the countdown, we look at the differences between our top ten and the top ten on Billboard‘s published year-end Hot100 chart. Some years there are lots of differences. But for ’78: only Paul Davis’s “I Go Crazy” (our #9 song) isn’t in Billboard‘s top ten. They had it at #12. And the only song from Billboard‘s top ten not in ours is their #3 song, which was Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life,” which winds up our #1 song of 1977 counting it’s full chart run, including its amazing ten straight weeks at #1 just before Saturday Night Fever hit theaters at the end of ’77.

So in the time we have left, we’re gonna do something a little different. We’re gonna put the exclamation point on the The Bee Gees and RSO Records’ dominance in 1978 by looking at five more hits on RSO that in addition to the six we heard in our countdown, were all in the top 20 on the year.

#17 Samantha Sang – Emotion

And three of those, written and produced by The Bee Gees, starting with our #17 song that most people in ’78 thought was a Bee Gees song. And except for the minor detail of the Lead Singer whose name is on the record, it really was a Bee Gees record! Co-written by Barry and Robin Gibb and produced by Gibb, Galuten & Richardson, but sung by an Australian Singer who’d first worked with the Bee Gees in the U.K. in 1969, it’s Samantha Sang’s “Emotion.”

Something I didn’t mention when we heard the Bee Gees’ two biggest hits of ’78: on March 18 when “Night Fever” hit #1 and “Stayin’ Alive” moved up to #2, The Bee Gees became the first act since The Beatles in 1964 to lock down the top two spots on the Hot100 the same week. Samantha Sang’s “Emotion” was #3 that week.

#19 Yvonne Elliman – If I Can’t Have You

At #19 was the lone #1 hit from Saturday Night Fever not performed by the Bee Gees on the soundtrack album, but the song was written by, yep, Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb, and their version was the B-side of the “Stayin’ Alive” single. The final #1 from Saturday Night Fever, Yvonne Elliman’s “If I Can’t Have You.”

It was Bee Gees Manager, RSO Records founder and Saturday Night Fever mastermind Robert Stigwood who decided to use Yvonne Elliman’s version of “If I Can’t Have You” in the movie, and have The Bee Gees record the song she was originally slated to do, “How Deep Is Your Love.”

#20 Frankie Valli – Grease

Now Stigwood had another big culture-shaking movie later in ’78, and its soundtrack was another #1 double album on RSO. Our #20 song of 1978 was the title song that Barry Gibb wrote for the project, performed by Four Season Frankie Valli, “Grease.”

Elvis Presley died in August of ’77 and ’50s nostalgia sitcoms Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley were the top two shows on TV, both on the ABC network. Grease couldn’t miss.

#15 Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta – You’re the One That I Want

It was the second movie in actor John Travolta’s three-picture deal with Stigwood’s RSO Films, co-starring Olivia Newton-John, whose singing career had slumped when Disco hit. But her radical image makeover from sweet ’70s Country-Pop cupcake to ’80s “Physical” sexpot Diva happens right there onscreen as her and Travolta sing the movie’s other #1 hit, not a Gibb song, but on the RSO label: “You’re the One That I Want.”

Saturday Night Fever might’ve beat Grease on the Hot100 and album charts, but not at the box office. Grease was 1978’s top grossing movie, by a lot.

#13 Eric Clapton – Lay Down Sally

And finally, our #13 song, nothing to do with The Bee Gees, Grease or Saturday Night Fever, but on Robert Stigwood’s RSO label, for a grand total of 11 of the top 20 hits of 1978, all on RSO. It grabbed the #3 spot behind “Night Fever” and “Stayin’ Alive” from Samantha Sang’s “Emotion” at the beginning of April, and those remained the top three songs, in that order, for the next three weeks. It’s Eric Clapton’s “Lay Down Sally.”

Eric Clapton went even further back with Robert Stigwood than The Bee Gees, all the way to the start of his ’60s supergroup Cream, with Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce. The RSO label’s first U.S. release was by Clapton’s early ’70s band Derek & The Dominoes.

Well that’s all we have for you in our 1978 edition of The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Thanks for listening! On our website, chartcrush.com, you can find a written transcript and a link to stream this and other Chartcrush countdown shows on Spotify, plus chart run line graphs and other jivin’ extras. Every week, we count down a different year from the beginning of the charts in the ’40s all the way up to the present, so tune again, same station, same time, for 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 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 the music industry’s leading trade publication, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re setting our sights on 2014, the tipping point when social media went from being an important emerging and evolving part of pop culture, to being its gravitational center, like how TV eclipsed radio in the early ’50s.

In 2011, Coca-Cola launched the first multi-million dollar social media brand campaign on Facebook (“Share a Coke,” where users got to design their own Coke cans) and in 2014 postings for social media marketing on the job site Indeed doubled. The surge of U.S. adults on social platforms passed 60% in 2014 according to the Pew Research Center. For teens it was nearly 90%. By 2016, Hillary Clinton’s presidential election loss to Donald Trump was being blamed, albeit more loudly than credibly as it turned out, on Russian-paid-for ads on Facebook.

Music, of course, a focal point of social media going all the way back to the MySpace days in the ’00s, and Billboard started its Social 50 Artists chart, ranking likes and mentions on social platforms, in 2010. But in 2014, even septuagenarian Pop Diva Barbra Streisand managed to get her 34th album Partners to debut at #1 by going big on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Her full-hour appearance on NBC’s Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon’s first year hosting: well, that helped too. But if there were any lingering doubts that social was the new go-to for publicity and awareness building, Streisand, not to mention the viral “ice bucket challenge” in 2014, sealed the deal.

Revenue though? Not so much. For that, a different game changer was needed to pull the music biz out of its 15-year tailspin from music piracy on peer-to-peer mp3 platforms. Music streaming data had been a factor on Hot100 since 2007 when custom-playlist radio-type streams were first factored into the chart’s calculus, but it wasn’t until 2012 that Billboard debuted its Streaming Songs chart, and started factoring on-demand streams in the Hot100. YouTube views were added in 2013, but streaming’s revenue upside wasn’t at all apparent yet.

Taylor Swift took her entire catalog off the streaming platform Spotify in 2014. She didn’t think the 0.6 cents a stream artists were getting was fair, and she wasn’t alone. But Spotify’s Daniel Ek spent the year arguing that it was a lot better than the 0.0 cents the billion or so people downloading music illegally were generating. It was a couple years before usage of streaming services ramped up to the point where 0.6 cents a stream added up to real money. But by ’17 Taylor’s catalog was back on Spotify. In ’18 streaming passed 50% of total music industry revenue, and by ’19, on-demand streaming alone was making more bank than the entire industry was in 2014.

#10 Pitbull featuring Ke$ha – Timber

Now in music, the glitzy, blingy, party-time, synth-driven, Auto-Tuned, four-on-the floor “New Pop” that Billboard heralded in 2010: still the default at the top of the Pop charts. And it’s epitomized by our song at #10 as we kick off our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2014: the Latin rapper who scored the #5 song of 2011 in the style with “Give Me Everything,” featuring the overnight Pop sensation whose glittery, brash, decadent image made her the poster girl for the “New Pop” when she nailed the #1 song of 2010 with “Tik Tok.” It’s Pitbull featuring Ke$ha, “Timber.”

That was the formula for a hit Rap song in the early 2010s: irresistible Pop vocal hook with the Rapper delivering the message with urgent phrasing. “Timber,” Pitbull featuring Ke$ha, Billboard’s #2 Rap song of 2014 and #10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of the year’s biggest Pop hits. They co-headlined a North American tour together in 2013, Pitbull and Ke$ha did, and “Timber” was a product of that year-long collaboration. But Pitbull admitted he’d originally had a different singer in mind, Rihanna, whose collab with Eminem “The Monster” kept “Timber” out of the top spot at #2 for four weeks at the beginning of the year.

#9 MAGIC! – Rude

At #9, a Canadian reggae fusion trio that got a ton of incoming from critics when their first hit was suddenly all over Pop radio in late July and August. The New York Post called the song “a flaccid, boring slice of lightweight reggae that sounds like it was written to be heard in a dentist’s waiting room.” And a Billboard piece trumpeting all the new female talent in 2014 and proclaiming “Pop’s ‘End of Men’ Moment” dismissed it as a “retrograde hit by Canadian ragga-nothings.” Ouch! And that’s just a small sampling.

But in the streaming era, as Billboard noted in 2013, fans were now in charge, and this became the first reggae-tinged #1 hit on the Hot100 since Sean Paul’s “Get Busy” all the way back in ’03. Here is MAGIC with an exclamation point. I guess you’re supposed to say it loud and fast… MAGIC! “Rude.”

MAGIC!’s Rude, #9 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 2014. When it hit #1 at the end of July, Time actually reached out to the great-great-granddaughter of the original queen of etiquette Emily Post to ask if a dad saying no to a guy that wants to marry his daughter is, in fact, rude. The conclusion? No, having a negative opinion about something (even something someone cares deeply about) isn’t just on its own impolite. MAGIC! continued charting songs in their native Canada for another couple years but in the U.S. they were a true one-hit wonder.

#8 Iggy Azalea featuring Charli XCX – Fancy

Speaking of impoliteness, some have called the early 2010’s Hip-Hop’s “Ratchet Era,” ratchet being a slang term out of the South that comes from “wretched.” At first it was a put-down but it evolved. Ebony defined it in 2014 as “uncouthness so absurd that it borders on camp” and credited Baton Rouge rapper Lil Boosie with injecting it into the vernacular with his “ode to unadulterated (sic) ignance,” “Do the Ratchet.”

Anyway, there were lots of stylistic currents in Hip-Hop in the early 2010s, the most dominant being what the Millennial-targeted website Mic.com called “Pop-Rap mashups” that were topping the charts. We just heard a great example at #10, Pitbull and Ke$ha’s “Timber.” So maybe the early ’10s were the “Pop Mashup Era” of Hip-Hop. But out in L.A., producer DJ Mustard was calling what he was doing with artists like YG, Tyga and Ty Dolla Sign the “Ratchet Sound,” a minimalist but catchy up-tempo style targeted at clubs.

Tyga’s “Rack City,” #7 in 2012, the biggest hit out of that scene on the Pop charts, until our song at #8 by 2014’s top Rapper on the charts, who was a woman! Pop’s “End of Men” moment indeed! DJ Mustard had nothing whatsoever to do with it, other than chilling with her in L.A. when her career was ramping up, and he accused her and her producers of “jocking” his sound, but definitely not the first time in Pop history that someone’s sound got “jocked.” Elvis Presley anyone? At #8, it’s 2014’s big Summer earworm, by not only the year’s top Rapper, but Billboard’s Top New Artist overall, Australian-born Iggy Azalea featuring British Singer-Songwriter Charli XCX, “Fancy.”

Iggy Azalea featuring Charli XCX “Fancy,” the #8 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2014. It was Billboard’s #4 song of the year, and as I mentioned, the #1 Rap song. But Iggy, no stranger to controversy, first accused of ripping off DJ Mustard’s “Ratchet” West Coast Hip-Hop style, and then, when she made it big, of cultural appropriation for being Australian-born, yet rapping with a Southern “blaccent.” And insensitivity for some of her past Tweets and comments, plus her aggressive image and attitude. Definitely a lot of current to swim against as a celebrity in the ’10s.

Her feature on Ariana Grande’s “Problem” was at #2 behind “Fancy” for five weeks, the first time the same artist had both the #1 and #2 songs since The Beatles. And then “Problem” replaced “Fancy” at #1, giving Iggy Azalea 13 consecutive weeks at #1, beginning of June to end of August. But just a year after “Fancy” topped the chart, Cosmopolitan was already wondering in print how Iggy Azalea had become the world’s most hated pop star, and after 2015, she didn’t crack the Top 40 again on any Songs chart, not even in her native Australia.

#7 Avicii featuring Aloe Blacc – Wake Me Up

Now on Billboard’s year-end charts, there’s a long history of massive hits that didn’t rank anywhere near where they should’ve because of when they were hits during the year. If a song’s chart run is over the holidays from one year into the next? Well Billboard has to get its year-end issue out before New Years, so anything after whatever they set as the cut-off issue for their “chart year” is either ignored, as in the ’50s and ’60s, or kicked into the following year, which splits the points between two different years.

Here at Chartcrush, one of the reasons we do this show is to correct that record by factoring every song’s full chart run into whichever calendar year it earned the most points.

Having said all that, though, our #7 song was a tricky one! It entered the chart in July of 2013 and made the top ten in September 2013, where it stayed for 21 weeks including six at its peak of #4. Now even though its peak was in 2013 and it was declining on the charts in 2014, it took its sweet time and didn’t exit until July of 2014, 53 total weeks. And by a slight margin it scored more ranking points in 2014.

It’s the biggest hit by one of the top headliners in the early ’10s Electronic Dance Music craze: Swedish DJ and Producer Avicii, Billboard’s #1 Dance/Electronic artist for 2014; Rapper-Singer Aloe Blacc, who wrote the lyrics, on lead vocals, “Wake Me Up.”

So every other major genre in the ’00s merged with Electronic Dance Club sounds to score big under the “New Pop” banner, why not Indie Folk? Well, that’s what Avicii must’ve been thinking with “Wake Me Up,” the #7 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2014.

The crowd at Miami’s Ultra Music EDM festival didn’t quite know what to make of it when the banjo came out and Avicii unveiled it live during what Spin called the “Hee Haw 2013 portion of the set.” But Indie Folk groups Mumford & Sons and The Lumineers had been racking up hits for a couple years, so what Avicii started as an experiment hit the bullseye on the Pop charts and wound up the biggest hit of his career.

His follow-up, “Hey Brother” was also a hit, and “Wake Me Up” singer Aloe Blacc made the Top Ten later in ’14 with his Elton John “Your Song” riffing “The Man.” In 2018, Avicii’s sudden death by suicide shocked the world.

#6 Sam Smith – Stay with Me

At #6 is Billboard’s #2 New Artist of the year, behind Iggy Azalea, and his Gospel-inspired ballad in which he pleads with a one-night stand not to leave him. And as you listen, you’ll notice that most of the Gospel feeling in the song comes from the choir in the chorus. But it’s not a real choir! It’s the singer layering his vocal like 20 times to create that choir effect with overdubs. He used real backup singers, though, when he sang the song on Saturday Night Live, which he credits for breaking him in the U.S. a full 11 weeks before his album was even out! It’s English singer Sam Smith, “Stay with Me.”

Sam Smith, “Stay with Me,” #6 as we count down the biggest hits of 2014 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Smith won four awards at the 57th Grammys including Record of the Year for “Stay with Me,” and in his acceptance speech he thanked the man who inspired it by breaking his heart, “because you got me four Grammys.”

Earlier I mentioned the 2014 Billboard article “Pop’s End of Men Moment,” a riff on feminist provocateur Hanna Rosin’s buzzworthy 2012 book The End of Men. The Billboard piece singles out Sam Smith along with Ed Sheeran as the type of “expressive, nurturing, cooperative” man that the charts still had room for in 2014. But after “Stay with Me” dropped to #6 on September 20 there wasn’t any room at all for the XY chromosome set in the top five on the Hot100 for seven straight weeks. It was all ladies. The previous record for all females in the Top Five? Four weeks in early 1999.

#4 OneRepublic – Counting Stars

Another 2014 op-ed in Billboard, same issue as the “End of Men” article, was titled “Rockers in Dockers.” It observed that what was once called “Classic Rock,” and before that just “Rock,” was now “Dad Rock.” Bruce Springsteen, Led Zeppelin, U2, Foo Fighters, Spoon, Wilco, The Strokes and others: called out by name as acts with “White Male auteurs, guitar solos, heroism and narrative songs.” “Music for squares:” patriarchal and exclusionary.

Whew! That’s an awful lot of shade, and coming alongside proclamations about the end of men, in the sixth year of the Obama presidency with Obama’s grass-roots arm, Organizing for America, urging young people to sign up for Obamacare in its viral “pajama boy” ad on social media, if you were a White male still bringing your guitar onstage in 2014, easy to see how you might not want to be played on Rock radio.

So maybe not a surprise when you scan through the Rock genre charts for the early ’10s looking for big Hot100 hits and even acts that coulda woulda shoulda been on there, and would’ve been, for example, in the ’80s, but aren’t. Our #4 song, a great example.

Lorde, Imagine Dragons, Bastille and Coldplay: Billboard’s top four Rock artists of 2014, but these guys? Not even on the list. It’s the third single from their third album, Native, released after a three-year hiatus, and it was on the Hot100 for, get this, 68 weeks, 25 in the Top Ten, it’s OneRepublic “Counting Stars.”

OneRepublic, “Counting Stars,” #4 as we count down the top ten songs of 2014 here on The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. As big as they were in the early ’10s, group leader Ryan Tedder was just as big a deal behind-the-scenes as a Songwriter and Producer. He started writing “Counting Stars” for Beyonce while chillin’ with her and hubby Jay-Z at their place in the Hamptons on New York’s Long Island. “Counting Stars” turned out to be more of a fit for OneRepublic, but Tedder’s song “XO” was the lead single off Beyonce’s self-titled album released for Holiday shoppers at the end of 2013 and Billboard’s #2 album of 2014, behind only the Frozen soundtrack.

#5 John Legend – All of Me

At #5, just the third song with only piano and vocals to hit #1 in the history of the Hot100. The first was Adele’s “Someone like You,” our #6 song of 2011, and then Bruno Mars’ “When I Was Your Man,” #14 on the year 2013. From 1958 to 2011? No piano and vocal only songs got to #1, which is kind of surprising with piano-based artists like Elton John, Carole King, Billy Joel and Alicia Keys in the mix.

But the idea of stripping down an arrangement to just the Singer and his or her instrument: not a new idea, but in the 2010’s after years of everyone from Rockers to Rappers searching for new ways to put across intimacy and raw emotion in the grooves of recorded music, sometimes less is just more. Billboard’s #1 Radio and Adult Contemporary song of 2014, #5 on our Chartcrush ranking, here’s John Legend’s “All of Me.”

John Legend, “All of Me,” #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2014. A lot of that song’s success on the Pop charts was thanks to an up-tempo remix by Dutch DJ and producer Tiësto that was preferred by Pop radio.

In 2018, John Legend won an Emmy for his role as Jesus in NBC’s Easter Jesus Christ Superstar concert, which made him the first Black male in the elite “EGOT” club: winners of Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards: E-G-O-T.

#3 Katy Perry featuring Juicy J – Dark Horse

We heard Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” at #8, directly influenced by “Ratchet” sound producer DJ Mustard out of L.A. Our #3 hit, by a major established Pop star, but influenced by a different underground strain of Hip-Hop, namely Trap, out of Atlanta, where Azalea also spent a lot of time. But this song topped the charts weeks before “Fancy” debuted.

Trap, pioneered by Atlanta Rapper (and Iggy Azalea mentor) T.I. in the mid 00’s, but it stayed mostly underground until our #3 song, which was declining after eight months on the Hot100, but rebounded back into the Top 20 the week after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in August of 2014. The subsequent unrest birthed the Black Lives Matter movement and a surge of racial consciousness last couple years of the Obama administration.

And Trap, which broke through with this song, led Hip-Hop’s comeback on the Pop charts in the late ’10s, with its ominous, dark vibe, gritty lyrics and spacious reverberated ambiance. Perfect for the (quote from the singer) “witchy, spell-y kind of black magic-y idea” (unquote) of the song about a woman warning a man not to fall in love with her.” At #3, it’s Katy Perry featuring Juicy J, “Dark Horse.”

Billboard’s Top Female Artist, top Singles Artist and #2 top overall artist of 2014, Katy Perry featuring Juicy J., “Dark Horse:” #3 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of the biggest hits of 2014. And also Billboard’s #1 Streaming song of the year.

Perry, no stranger to Hip-Hop collaborations. “California Gurls” with Snoop Dogg and “E.T.” with Kanye West: both among the top ten hits of 2010 and ’11, respectively. So when even a mainstream glossy like GQ is calling Trap “the sound of Hip-Hop in 2012,” if you’re Katy Perry, it’s a no-brainer.

Another breakthrough Trap megahit in 2014: DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What,” a very respectable #19 on our 2014 ranking. After further Trap milestones like Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” in ’15, Desiigner’s “Panda” in ’16, Migos and Lil Uzi Vert’s “Bad and Bougee” in ’17, Hip-Hop was never bigger on the Pop charts and Trap was the sound, launching white Rapper Post Malone and the mature phase of Pop diva Ariana Grande’s career in ’18 and ’19.

#2 Meghan Trainor – All About That Bass

Our #2 song is a latecomer to the early 2010s Pop explosion, who hit pay dirt with her very first single: a song that’s been described as “a Bubblegum Pop, Doo-Wop and Retro-R&B song that draws influences from various musical genres including Hip-Hop, Country, Soul and Rock ‘n Roll.” Wow, that’s an awful lot going on in one song, isn’t it? Makes you seriously ponder Mic writer Matt Pollock’s proclamation that “2014 Was the Year Pop Music Killed Traditional Genres.” But there’s no denying that the song kicked America’s 2014 obsession with big booties into overdrive. At #2, it’s Meghan Trainor, “All About That Bass.”

Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass,” not the first big-booty song that hit the charts in 2014. Jason Derulo’s “Talk Dirty” and “Wiggle” were out before, and Miley Cyrus may’ve gotten the ball rolling even before that with her twerking at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards. But “All About That Bass” wall-to-wall on Pop radio in the Summer sealed the deal on what was widely recognized as a cultural obsession with butts, as Vogue put it in August.

Later in the Summer, Nicki Minaj reprised Sir Mix-a-Lot’s 1992 hit “Baby Got Back” at the 2014 VMAs (her song “Anaconda”). Then J-Lo remixed her song “Booty” with Iggy Azalea. That hit clubs in September and went straight to #1 on the Dance chart. And then Kim Kardashian’s mic drop on the whole “Year of the Booty” thing with her bare-butt cover shot and “Break the Internet” photo spread in Paper magazine.

#1 Pharrell Williams – Happy

And that gets us to the #1 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2014. It was #1 for ten of the 13 weeks between “Dark Horse” and “Fancy,” March to May, and the first song ever to hit #1 on six singular-format Billboard Airplay charts: Adult Contemporary, Pop Songs, Adult Pop Songs, Rhythmic Songs, Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay and Adult R&B Songs. Translation? Massive crossover hit, with almost universal appeal across multiple genres. From Disney’s smash animated feature Despicable Me 2, here is the #1 song of 2014, and a real good candidate for “feel good song of the decade”, Pharrell Williams’ “Happy.”

Ten consecutive weeks at #1, Pharrell Williams’s “Happy,” the #1 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2014. Pharrell in 2014: no stranger to the Pop charts, but for the most part up to then, all the way back to the early ’90s, he preferred to work behind the scenes. Just a low key guy with huge talent, gets along with everyone, but totally okay taking second or featured billing.

He did have a #5 hit in ’03 under his own name with “Frontin'” featuring Jay-Z, but other than that, for the rest of the ’00s up to 2014, Pharrell’s biggest hits were as a featured artist on tracks like Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It like It’s Hot” in ’04 and ’05, Ludacris’s “Money Maker” in ’06, and then two of the biggest hits of 2013, Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” and Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” both of which he co-wrote.

Pharrell was even going to give “Happy” to another artist: CeeLo Green, who recorded it and Pharrell thought CeeLo’s version was better. Only reason that version wasn’t released in the Fall of 2012 was CeeLo’s label didn’t want to cannibalize sales of his Christmas album!

Since “Happy” was in Despicable Me 2, it was nominated for a Best Original Song Oscar, but lost to Idina Menzel’s “Let It Go” from Frozen. A reporter caught up to Pharrell after the Oscars and asked him how badly he’d wanted that award, and Pharrell said: “When they read the results, my face was frozen. But then I thought about it, and I just decided just to let it go.”

Bonus

And that’s our countdown! If you’re comparing our Chartcrush ranking to Billboard’s year-end top ten for 2014, you’ll notice a few differences. Our #10 song, Pitbull and Ke$ha’s “Timber” just missed Billboard’s top ten at #11 on the year, and Avicii’s “Wake Me Up” was only #22 on Billboard because, as I mentioned earlier, Billboard split its long chart run between ’13 and ’14. So what songs from Billboard’s top ten got bumped to make room for those two?

#20 Ariana Grande and Iggy Izalea – Problem

Well at #9, Billboard had the song I mentioned earlier that made Iggy Azalea the first artist since The Beatles to have both the #1 and #2 songs on the Hot100 in the same week, and it stayed that way for five consecutive weeks, June into July. But Iggy was the featured artist.

Ariana Grande and Iggy Izalea’s “Problem,” #9 for the year on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100; #20 on our Chartcrush ranking. So does Iggy featuring on that song match The Beatles with that chart accomplishment, numbers 1 and 2 the same week? Most sources, including Billboard, say yes.

#12 Jason Derulo featuring 2Chains – Talk Dirty

Billboard’s #6 song of 2014 was Jason Derulo featuring 2Chains’ “Talk Dirty.”

Billboard‘s #6 song of 2014; #12 on our Chartcrush ranking: “Talk Dirty,” Jason Derulo featuring 2Chains. Along with “Problem,” that’s two songs in Billboard’s year-end top ten that have that cheapy horn sound in the chorus, and they happen to be the two songs not in our Chartcrush top ten. It was already a pretty well-worn gimmick in 2014, that horn sound, started by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis on 2013’s “Thrift Shop,” which did make our Chartcrush ranking: #4 for 2013.

Well folks, that’s our show for this week. I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Thanks for listening to our 2014 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Check out our website, chartcrush.com, for written transcripts and streaming links for this and other Chartcrush countdown shows, plus chart run line graphs and other lit extras. We count down a different year every week from the beginning of the charts in the ’40s all the way up to the present, so tune in again next week, same station, same time, for 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 count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re turning the clock back to 1984, the year that “the 80s” really started to look and feel like “the 80s.”

The year 1980 had been a clean break from Disco on the charts. ’70s Prog Rock faded circa 1978 and veteran Rock acts were trying to figure out their next moves, and it wasn’t Disco Rock. Just ask KISS, Rod Stewart and others that learned that the hard way! In ’81 MTV launched and in ’82, video arcades swept in, the first big MTV New Wave hits like The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” topped the charts and Michael Jackson’s Thriller came out at the end of the year, making ’83 the year of Michael Jackson (he was everywhere!), but also the year that MTV and video music eclipsed radio and even touring as music’s driving force and all the major labels created music video divisions.

But it wasn’t just music. At the end of ’84, Billboard observed how utterly and completely the “visual sizzle” of music video had transformed American pop culture—from movies and TV (even children’s programming) to advertising and merchandising. “Madison Avenue shelved last year’s celebrities and yesterday’s fashions to create commercials applying the flash and flair of rock video to automobiles, cosmetics, cereal and toys.” The cop show Miami Vice premiered in the Fall of ’84, brainstormed by NBC’s Brandon Tartikoff in a memo that said, simply, “MTV cops.”

By 1984, the ’80s weren’t just coming into focus, they’d arrived. And that was pretty exciting for a society exhausted from years of ’70s so-called “malaise:” energy crisis, Watergate, urban decay, high inflation and interest rates. It wasn’t too much of a stretch in the ’70s into the early ’80s to see 1984 shaping up as some version of the gray, totalitarian nightmare depicted in George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel 1984. But as it approached, it was turning out to be not that way at all.

Apple, the computer company, put an exclamation point on that in its now-legendary Super Bowl ad that launched the Macintosh by Alien and Blade Runner director Ridley Scott, that showed said gray Orwellian dystopia being shattered, literally, with a sledgehammer hurled by a colorfully dressed woman athlete at Big Brother’s dreary visage on the big screen. Then later in the year, President Reagan’s re-election campaign sealed the deal with its famous “Morning in America” ad that helped sweep the President to his 49-state landslide victory over former Carter Veep, Walter Mondale.

#10 Ray Parker Jr. – Ghostbusters

At #10, diving into our countdown, since ’84 was the year of the music video, no surprise that movie soundtracks loomed large on the charts. There were ten (count ’em ten) platinum-certified soundtrack albums in 1984. 1978 had five including Saturday Night Fever and Grease. Then there were four in 1980 including Urban Cowboy and Xanadu. But the ten in ’84 was more than both those two previous best years for soundtrack albums combined. And on the Hot100 singles chart, seven soundtrack songs got to #1 in ’84, five of which we’re gonna hear this hour on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. And the first of them is at #10. It’s Ray Parker, Jr’s “Ghostbusters!”

The theme song of the top grossing movie of 1984, the comedy starring Saturday Night Live’s Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd and SCTV’s Harold Ramis as parapsychologists who run a ghost-hunting business out of an old fire house. Ray Parker, Jr’s “Ghostbusters!” #10 on our 1984 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

Parker, a session guitarist since the late ’60s, with a string of hits starting in 1978 with his group Raydio (spelled with a “y”), and then as a solo act in the ’80s, hired by the producers to write the Ghostbusters theme in just three days after dozens of submissions had already been rejected. They were having trouble finding the right song because they’d been using Huey Lewis & The News’s current hit “I Want a New Drug,” as a placeholder in the film’s rough cut, but couldn’t get Lewis to do a new soundalike song because he was already locked in on another sci-fi comedy project, Back to the Future. That was 1985’s top grossing movie, and Huey Lewis’s song, “The Power of Love” is our #11 song of 1985.

So while agonizing over the tight deadline, Ray Parker, Jr. sees a pest-control commercial in the middle of the night on TV. Aha! So he quickly writes the “who you gonna call” lyrics to something similar to “I Want a New Drug,” and makes the deadline. Unfortunately though, the music is a little too similar to “I Want a New Drug,” so Huey’s people sue, and eventually settle, but according to Rolling Stone, Parker’s royalty situation remained “a mess.”

For the 1989 sequel, Ghostbusters II, Run-DMC turned in a Hip-Hop version of the song. Rock bands Walk the Moon and Fall Out Boy both did new versions for the 2016 female Ghostbusters reboot, Fall Out Boy’s version featuring rapper Missy Elliott. And then Ray Parker Jr’s original re-appeared in the end credits of the 2021 sequel Ghostbusters: Afterlife.

#9 Stevie Wonder – I Just Called to Say I Love You

At #9, the return of an act who’d scored Hot100 hits in every year from 1963 to 1982: 20 consecutive years, starting with his live harmonica jam “Fingertips” in ’63, which made him the youngest act ever to score a #1 hit at just 13 and was the #7 song of the year on both Billboard’s year-end chart for ’63 and our Chartcrush ranking. From there to ’82: five more #1s, but he broke his 20 year streak in ’83 when he shelved the album he was working on, working title: People Work, Human Play, even after debuting two songs from it on Saturday Night Live.

Music was changing fast in ’83 with Michael Jackson and MTV, so maybe he needed to retrench and figure things out before making his next move. Which came in ’84: a soundtrack album for a romantic comedy starring Gene Wilder—and as breezy and down-the-middle a song as he’d ever done. It wound up the best-selling single of his whole career. Now, it’s just #25 on Billboard’s year-end chart for 1984 because its final 12 weeks were in their 1985 chart year that began with their November 24th issue, but counting its entire chart run, as we do for every song here on Chartcrush, it comes out #9. From The Woman in Red soundtrack, it’s Stevie Wonder’s, “I Just Called to Say I Love You.”

Stevie Wonder, “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” #1 for three weeks in October and #9 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of the biggest hits of 1984. It also topped Billboard’s R&B and Adult Contemporary charts and won Best Original Song at the 57th Oscars, which, by the way, was the only Oscars ever in which all of the nominated songs were #1 hits. Stevie’s harmonica also appears on Elton John’s biggest hit in ’84, “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues,” and Chaka Khan’s groundbreaking “I Feel for You.” And then in ’85 he resumed work on his aborted 1983 album, released it as In Square Circle, and topped the charts again with “Part-Time Lover,” his final #1.

#8 Culture Club – Karma Chameleon

OK, I have an ethnic joke for you, ready? What do you call a band with a Black bassist, a Jewish drummer, and a blond White guitarist fronted by an androgynous Gay Irishman? Actually it’s not a joke; that’s the origin story of our next act out of London’s Post-Punk New Romantic scene headquartered at the Blitz Club in Covent Garden. They named themselves for their diversity. Once the video for their reggae-tinged debut, “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” hit MTV in ’82, they were on their way. Other hits followed and in ’84 they scored their biggest, and their only #1, “Karma Chameleon.” It’s Culture Club.

“Karma Chameleon,” #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1984. Culture Club’s first six charting singles all went top ten, and that was the fifth. Front man songwriter Boy George summed up the song’s message as karma justice if you don’t stay true to who you are. But turns out it’s a confessional song too—owning up to his failings in his strained relationship with Culture Club drummer, John Moss.

In its Rock recap article Billboard observed in ’84 that so-called “new music” was no longer dangerous; it was just new. And to drive home the point, cited Duran Duran, Thompson Twins, and yes, Culture Club. In ’86, Boy George guest starred as himself in an episode of NBC’s action series The A-Team that climaxes with Culture Club playing “Karma Chameleon” in a redneck bar!

#7 Yes – Owner of a Lonely Heart

So ’84 was a big year for soundtracks. It was also a big year for totally unexpected comebacks. Our #7 song is by one of the groups that pioneered and epitomized British Prog Rock in the late ’60s and ’70s who’d tried to continue making Prog Rock records but broke up in 1980, with the two remaining members eventually forming the Arena Rock supergroup Asia. The re-formed group in ’83 didn’t include either of those members and wasn’t even originally intended as a reunion. But it worked out that way as things started to gel in the studio and additional members including the group’s original lead singer got involved. I could spell all this out for you, but delineating the complicated family trees of ’70s British Prog Rock bands? That’s way beyond the scope of this program! At #7, here’s Yes, “Owner of a Lonely Heart.”

Yes, representing legacy rock on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1984 with “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” Right up to just months before its release, intended as the lead single from the debut album of a completely new group called Cinema featuring three former members of Yes. As soon as original Yes singer Jon Anderson got involved late in the game, though, everyone knew it had to be a Yes record. And it wasn’t just their first #1 single, it was their first single since an edited version of “Roundabout” off their album Fragile in 1971 to even make more than a blip on the Pop charts.

Probably the best example there is of a ’70s Prog Rock band re-tooling for the ’80s, with most of the credit for that going to producer and Synthpop trailblazer Trevor Horn, who’d actually been in Yes for their 1980 album Drama after Anderson’s departure, and whose song as half of New Wave duo The Buggles was the very first video played on MTV: “Video Killed the Radio Star.”

#6 Lionel Richie – Hello

Now if you rank Billboard’s Hot100 charts by artist, summing up all their chart action in the year, you get what Billboard presents in its year-end issue as the year’s Top Singles Artist. 1984’s Top Singles Artist is our act at #6, with five songs in the top ten during the year. And the biggest of them had two weeks at #1 in May. He began writing it for his first solo album in ’82 but thought it was too corny. Which is really saying something! Not just because the ’80s were a golden age of corny love ballads, but because he’s one of the main reasons this side of Paul McCartney that it was—going all the way back to the ’70s when his ballads like “Easy” and “Three Times a Lady” put his Funk group The Commodores right alongside Barry Manilow and Anne Murray on Adult Contemporary radio. He thought the song was too corny, but his wife loved it, his producer encouraged him to finish it, and it was his top single, the year he was the top singles artist. It’s Lionel Richie’s “Hello.”

Lionel Richie at #6 as we count down the top hits of 1984 on this week’s Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. The R&B recap in Billboard’s year-end “Talent in Action” section made the obvious but still stunning observation that “in between the frightening sales of Michael Jackson’s Thriller and the multimedia deluge of Prince’s Purple Rain, Black music’s biggest star was good old Lionel Richie.” When Richie’s second solo album Can’t Slow Down dropped in late ’83, its first two singles were the upbeat hits “All Night Long” and “Running with the Night.” So when “Hello” hit the airwaves, it was Richie’s first ballad in six months, and connected immediately. You’d think that Can’t Slow Down would’ve been the #1 album of the year too, but nope! It was #2 behind Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which was #1 for the second year in a row: the only album ever to repeat at #1 on the year.

#5 Kenny Loggins – Footloose

Well as I mentioned, ’84, the biggest year for soundtrack albums, and our #5 song was the biggest hit off the biggest of 1984’s soundtracks. Seven of the album’s songs were released as singles and four were top 20 hits, with two going all the way to #1, including the title track, by a veteran Singer-Songwriter who did a lot of soundtrack work in the ’80s, starting with the theme from Caddyshack, “I’m Alright,” a #7 hit in 1980, but this was his biggest hit. From the film starring Kevin Bacon about a big city kid who moves to a small town where dancing’s not allowed. At #5, Kenny Loggins, “Footloose”

Fun fact about Footloose: dancing bans in America weren’t just a product of Bible-thumping preachers like actor John Lithgow’s Rev. Shaw Moore in the film. At the tail end of World War Two, Congress singled out establishments that allowed dancing with a crushing 40% federal cabaret tax and that’s when the “no dancing” signs went up across the land! It was ostensibly a War funding measure but wasn’t repealed until the mid-’60s.

Kenny Loggins had two songs on the Footloose soundtrack: the title song we just heard at #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1984, plus “I’m Free (Heaven Helps the Man),” which peaked at #22. Also on the album, the top 20 hits “Dancing in the Sheets” by Shalamar, and a duet by Heart’s Ann Wilson and Loverboy front man Mike Reno, the power-ballad “Almost Paradise,” as well as the other #1 Footloose hit, Deniece Williams’ “Let’s Hear It for the Boy.” Later in the ’80s, Kenny Loggins scored with the soundtrack hits “Danger Zone” from Top Gun, “Nobody’s Fool” from Caddyshack 2, and “Meet Me Half Way,” from the Sly Stallone arm wrestling movie, Over the Top.

#4 Phil Collins – Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)

At #4, yet another soundtrack hit. And also the first in a string of seven #1 solo hits for this Prog Rock drummer who assumed lead vocal duties in his group Genesis in 1975 when front man and group co-founder Peter Gabriel left. In ’81, the now drummer and singer in Genesis did a solo album himself, but unlike Gabriel, he stayed in the group. His distinctive vocals and the trademark gate reverb effect on the drums on his records, though?  Integral to both his solo work and his stuff with Genesis in the ’80s, so even fans sometimes have trouble telling what’s what! His first #1 hit either as a solo artist or in Genesis: right on the heels of Genesis’s first top ten hit, “That’s All” earlier in the year, it’s Phil Collins, “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now).”

Phil Collins, “Against All Odds,” #4 as we count down the top ten from 1984 here on this week’s edition of Chartcrush: the title theme for the film of the same name starring Rachel Ward, Jeff Bridges and James Woods: a remake of the 1947 film noir classic Out of the Past. It got mixed reviews and played in less than 1,000 theaters, but the song gave it a boost at the box office.

Until Collins’s Hits compilation came out in the late ’90s, “Against All Odds” was only available as a single. And of course on the soundtrack. But it was one of those soundtrack albums with mostly score music and just a handful of songs by various artists, not the kind that’s loaded with hits and sells millions like Footloose.  So people bought the single and drove the song to #1 on the Hot100 for three weeks in the Spring.

#3 Tina Turner – What’s Love Got to Do with It

At #3, another astonishing comeback, by a female singer in her mid-40s who’d been recording and touring constantly in small venues, basically as a cabaret act, since her last charting hits in the early ’70s. She generated some buzz doing a stint at New York’s Ritz Rock club in ’83 and Capitol Records put out her cover of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” as a single, which did well, so she recorded an album for Capitolin just two weeks in the Spring, and by September its leadoff single was #1 and she was on tour opening for Lionel Richie. At the time she was the oldest female singer ever to top the Hot100. The comeback leadoff single from the album Private Dancer, by Tina Turner: the #3 song of 1984 and Record of the Year at the Grammys “What’s Love Got to Do with It?”

“What’s Love Got to Do with It,” 1984’s #3 song, Tina Turner. Two more top ten hits from the Private Dancer album followed in ’85, “Better Be Good to Me” and the title track, “Private Dancer” while she played a 177-date world tour and starred opposite Mel Gibson in the third Mad Max film, Beyond Thunderdome.

#2 Van Halen – Jump

Since the ’80s, MTV’s Video Music Awards, or VMAs, are of the year’s biggest music awards shows, held every year in late August or early September. Well, 1984 saw the very first MTV Video Music Awards show, hosted by Dan Aykroyd and Bette Midler at Radio City in New York. “Video of the Year” went to the lead single off The Cars blockbuster 1984 album Heartbeat City, “You Might Think,” and other winners included David Bowie’s “China Girl,” Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” ZZ Top’s “Legs,” Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” and our #2 song, which was the only major VMA winner that was among the top ten chart hits in the year. They won for Best Stage Performance in a Video. It’s Van Halen: the lead single from their blockbuster 1984 album, entitled 1984: “Jump.”

Van Halen won the VMA for “Best Stage Performance in a Music Video” thanks to front man David Lee Roth’s onstage martial arts antics in the video for “Jump,” our #2 song of 1984. The synth riff in “Jump:” the first prominent synth in a Van Halen song, and pretty controversial with the group’s devoted hard rock fan base who’d been with them since their first album in 1978. Rock fans, very leery of “New Wavey” keyboards in those years, perhaps foreshadowing the epic microgenre splintering of Rock’s audience in the ’90s and beyond. Guitarist Eddie Van Halen first came up with the riff in ’81, but it stayed on the shelf until other groups, notably Canadian Arena Rock trio Rush, made it safe for a Hard Rock group to add modern keyboards into the mix.

#1 Prince – When Doves Cry

And that brings us to the #1 song in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 1984. The album it was on came out right in the middle of the year, but wasn’t just any album release. Besides records, tapes and CDs, it was tied in with a blockbuster biopic in movie theaters, home video, merchandizing and even the artist’s live shows in a sustained, coordinated multimedia brand assault the likes of which hadn’t been seen for a pop culture commodity since Beatlemania. And it was all timed to hit just as the well of singles from the artist’s 1982 breakthrough album ran dry and the album itself, 1999, dipped into the lower half of the Top 200 Album chart from its peak in the top ten in mid ’83. At #1, the artist? Minneapolis, Minnesota’s Prince. The album, movie and tour, Purple Rain. And its single: the #1 of 1984: “When Doves Cry.”

Prince, “When Doves Cry:” the #1 song of 1984. Now in a year of huge soundtrack hits, it’s easy to forget that Prince’s Purple Rain was a soundtrack album too—to the semi-autobiographical movie Purple Rain, which grossed $72 million, ten times what it cost to make. One of the most prolific Pop artists of the ’80s and ’90s, he managed to integrate almost every style of music into what critics called the Minneapolis sound. But it’s really The Prince sound, since he was closely involved with almost all the other acts that came under that banner: The Time, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Morris Day, Vanity 6, Apollonia 6, Sheila E., The Family.

Three more singles from Purple Rain were top ten hits in 1984: the title track, “I Would Die 4 U” and “Let’s Go Crazy,” which was also a #1 hit. And he didn’t just top the Billboard charts: an album cut off Purple Rain topped the debut “Filthy Fifteen” chart released by Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center in ’84. “Darling Nikki” details Prince’s adventure with a woman he finds masturbating in a hotel lobby. But things were about to go from bad to worse for parents concerned about x-rated themes in Pop songs: at the end of ’84, Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” came out—not a deep album cut, a #1 single. Egads! In 1990, after Senate hearings and a heated debate over censorship, the Recording Industry Association of America introduced the “Parental Advisory—Explicit Lyrics” label to identify music with mature themes.

For his part, Prince was just getting started in 1984. He stayed hot on the charts all the way into the mid-90s even after changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol in ’93. When being a one-name superstar gets old, there’s always unpronounceable symbols!

Well that’s our countdown! Now some years there are big differences between our Chartcrush top ten and the top ten on Billboard’s published year-end Hot100 chart. Not so 1984. The point system Billboard used to rank the songs in ’84? Very similar to the system we apply consistently to every year at Chartcrush.

Only one song from Billboard’s year-end top ten not in our countdown, and that’s Paul McCartney’s duet with Michael Jackson, “Say Say Say.” But not because it lacked ranking points; four of its six weeks at #1 were at the end of calendar 1983, so we have it as the #3 song of 1983. As they do every year, Billboard had a cut off issue for the 1983 chart year to give themselves time to prepare the charts and get the year-end issue printed and mailed by New Years. For ’83, that was their October 29th issue, so “Say Say Say” got kicked into ’84.

And that’s going to have to do it for our 1984 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Check out our website, chartcrush.com, for written transcripts and streaming links for this and other Chartcrush countdown shows, plus chart run line graphs and other bitchin’ extras. We count down a different year every week from the beginning ofthe charts in the ’40s all the way up to the present, so tune in again next week, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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Welcome! I’m Christopher Verdesi, and this is The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Every week, we take a look back at a different year in pop music history and count down the top ten hits according to our recap of the weekly pop charts published at the time by the music industry’s leading trade publication and chart authority, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’ll be counting down 2002, the first year of the ’00s decade. And I mean that in a cultural sense, of course.

With some decades it’s hard to pinpoint when things changed. Not so the ’00s. Everything changed on 9/11/2001: the Al Qaeda terrorist attack that brought down the Twin Towers in New York, left the Pentagon broken and smoldering in Washington, and United flight 93 vaporized on impact in Pennsylvania. 9/11 was the deadliest act of terror in world history, and the trigger for America’s War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Before 9/11, from the start of the decade on the calendar, not much had changed. Which was weird! 50 years of science fiction had made dates starting with twos instead of ones seem like, well, science fiction! And then Prince in 1982 in his breakthrough hit, “1999:” “2000 zero zero, party over, oops, out of time.” But then people woke up after partying like it was 1999, and lights still on, stuff on TV, money still in the bank. No Y2K computer bug apocalypse. But no Moon colony, jetpacks or robot maids either. Just another day. And then on a sunny Fall Tuesday in September, 9/11.

Some of the distinguishing features of the ’00s emerged right away: a new skyline in New York, crazy security at airports, the Office of Homeland Security, the color coded terror alert level and, of course, war. And other features were already emerging: school security tightening after the Columbine shooting, cell phones doubling to nearly 40 million in the U.S. from ’99 to 2000. And then texting took off 2000 to 2001.

Digital cameras were flying off the shelves. Survivor sparked a cascade of reality shows when it was a hit for CBS in 2000. Sony’s Playstation 2, which could also play DVDs, so before long VHS tapes and VCRs started showing up in thrift shops. Friendster and Myspace didn’t launch until ’03, but platforms like Geocities, SixDegrees and of course America Online with its chat rooms were already scratching that itch on the internet.

As for music, never bigger after a decade of explosive growth in the ’90s, but between ’99 and 2015 when music streaming took hold finally, revenue only saw a single growth year and by the end of that 15-plus year slide, the music biz had shrunk to just a third of its size at the end of the ’90s thanks to online filesharing.

Courts shut down the original mp3 platform, Napster, in ’01, but the proverbial genie was out of the bottle and the industry spent the rest of the decade playing legal whack-a-mole vs. peer-to-peer services, and then users of those platforms. Once broadband internet became affordable, download times for songs went from minutes to seconds and by mid-decade literally billions of digital song files were changing hands every year, and labels weren’t getting a dime.

None of that frenzied, legally dubious music collecting showed up on the charts either: a huge blind spot. And all because labels had spent the ’90s pushing people to buy $16 albums on CD. Derailing that gravy train by offering individual song downloads? Yeah, no. We don’t think so! So the unthinkable happened: they lost control. But the industry’s revenue free-fall had only just begun.

#10 Avril Lavigne – Complicated

At #10 as we kick off our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2002, an 18 year-old Canadian newcomer who was pitched to the world as the anti-Britney. The anti-Christina too, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera having dominated the female side of Millennial Teen Pop since ’99.

Now one of the factors that’d made Millennial Pop so successful was that after a decade of jarring Gen-X Nu Metal, Grunge and Gangsta Rap, Millennials’ Baby Boomer parents liked a lot of the stuff their kids were into. It was accessible: “inside the box” of what Boomers thought of as Pop and Rock music. And now that Britney and Christina were 20-somethings and the kiddos had a new teen sensation, parents liked her even better, especially this song: a #2 hit on the Hot100 in the top ten for 16 weeks, but #1 for 16 consecutive weeks on Billboard’s Adult Top 40 chart, it’s Avril Lavigne, “Complicated.”

In a 2002 Entertainment Weekly piece, writer Chris Willman noted that the girls of America were no longer lowering their necklines in homage to Britney and Christina but, instead, learning how to knot a necktie like Lavigne. “Butt cheeks, dance beats, and gleeful artifice are suddenly out, while tank tops, rock, and ‘real’ are unexpectedly back in.”

Two big new things in Pop in ’02, Emo and Sk8ter Punk, both represented by the #10 song in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2002 by 18 year-old Avril Lavigne. “Complicated,” her first and biggest hit until ’07’s “Girlfriend.” Emo: Rock, usually with a Punk edge, that features personal and emotional lyrics. The very first top ten Emo hit? Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle,” which preceded “Complicated” on the charts by seven weeks.

#9 Jennifer Lopez featuring Ja Rule & Cadillac Tah – Ain’t It Funny (Murder remix)

So in 2001, our next act at #9 pulled a fast one on the charts, releasing a completely new song, but with the same title as a cut on her album, labeling it a “remix,” and thereby combining airplay and sales points for both songs into a single chart position according to Billboard’s policy for remixes. The title “I’m Real” sat atop the Hot100 for five weeks and was our Chartcrush #4 song of 2001. But was it the Hip-Hop song, or the completely different Dance Pop song on the album? Well, that depended on what radio station you were listening to!

Either way, “I’m Real” was a hit. So in ’02, they did it again! Why not? Same crew, same scam: Jennifer Lopez and Epic Records, helmed by Mariah Carey’s ex, Tommy Mottola, bringing in New York’s “it” rapper of ’01 and ’02, Ja Rule, to write a whole new song, but with the same title as the one they’d chosen as the next single off Lopez’s J. Lo album, Lopez adding her vocals and Epic releasing it as the “Murder remix” after Ja Rule’s label, Murder, Inc. And it worked again! Another #1 hit, this time for six weeks, and our #9 song of 2002: “Ain’t It Funny.”

Jennifer Lopez featuring Ja Rule and Cadillac Tah, the so-called “Murder remix” of “Ain’t It Funny.” Completely different song from the Latin Dance Pop cut with the same title that Adult Top 40 stations played once Epic Records released the single, but the two songs combined into one chart position, and “Ain’t It Funny” is #9 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 2002.

When the supposed “remix” dropped, Billboard’s reviewer groused in print that J. Lo’s label “Sony has got to be kidding,” called the ploy “a disturbing trend,” and soon Billboard, not wanting to find out what could happen if an artist released three, or five, or ten different songs with the same title, changed its rule to only allow remixes with the same melody to combine for chart positions.

#8 Vanessa Carlton – A Thousand Miles

Next at #8, a one-hit wonder. And the singer-songwriter herself told Elle in 2017 that she loves that expression because she wonders all the time how she ever had a hit. First heard on the big screen blaring out of a sorority house in the Reese Witherspoon flick Legally Blonde, once out as a single, it peaked at #5 and its 41 week run on the Hot100 was the third longest of ’02. Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles.”

Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles,” #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2002. Two years after it was a hit, the Wayans brothers comedy White Chicks came out, in which Shawn and Marlon play FBI agents disguised as White Chicks to foil a kidnapping plot. In one scene they nearly blow their cover after “A Thousand Miles” comes on and sparks a singalong with a carful of White chicks, and, being African-American men, Shawn and Marlon don’t know the words. Awkward! You see, White chicks in the mid-’00s were supposed to know every syllable of that song, don’t you know.

#7 Calling – Wherever You Will Go

After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, several hit songs were directly inspired by the attack and the war: Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye’s patriotic march “Remember Pearl Harbor,” musical comedian Spike Jones’s Hitler-mocking “Der Fuhrer’s Face,” and, most successful of all, Kay Kyser’s “Praise the Lord, and Pass the Ammunition.”

9/11’s ripple on the charts, though: much more subtle, and it mainly took the form of existing records finding new resonance. Whitney Houston’s 1991 Super Bowl performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” immediately re-entered the Hot100 for 16 weeks and got all the way to #6. But our song at #7, which had only scraped the Mainstream Rock chart after its release in May of 2001, began a slow, four-month crawl up the Hot100 after 9/11. It peaked at #5 and stayed on the chart until September ’02. Its 45 week run included 11 weeks in the top ten, making it our #7 song. It’s The Calling, “Wherever You Will Go.”

Inspired, according to songwriter Aaron Kamin, by a relative widowed after 50 years of marriage, but it took on a whole new meaning after 9/11. The Calling, #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2002. Like Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated,” it also topped the Adult Top 40 chart for an insanely long time—23 weeks—and was Billboard’s #1 year-end song of ’02 on that chart. Five for Fighting’s “Superman (It’s Not Easy),” another pre-9/11 song that assumed a new identity after the attacks.

#6 Nelly – Hot In Herre

Next up, the first cut by the only act with two songs in our ’02 top ten countdown. It’s a rapper, which underscores how pivotal a year ’02 was for Hip-Hop. After pushing at the ramparts of Mainstream Pop for over 15 years, influencing a generation of R&B and Pop acts and occasionally breaking through with a hit on its own terms, Hip-Hop now was Mainstream Pop. So it’s fitting that our act at #6, who spent an amazing 17 combined weeks at #1, was also the first to perform in a Superbowl halftime show—Superbowl 35 in ’01 along with Britney Spears, Aerosmith, NSYNC and Mary J. Blige.

His first album Country Grammar came out in 2000 and was on the album chart for 104 weeks: an album of Pop-accessible Hip-Hop party anthems, two of which were top ten hits. If one album marked the start of Hip-Hop’s so-called “Bling Era” in the ’00s, that was it. And then his second album dropped at the end of June ’02 and this song was everywhere in the Summer: #1 from the end of June all the way to the middle of August, seven weeks. It’s Nelly’s “Hot in Herre.”

The Band-Aid rapper, Nelly at #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2002, “Hot in Herre,” from—of all places—St. Louis, which didn’t even have a Hip-Hop scene. Nelly says his style had universal appeal because he took aspects from every region, but his Midwestern twang was something new and unique, and he leaned into it. Heck, it’s right in the title: the word “here” spelled H-E double R E, pronounced “herre”).

Incidentally, Nelly’s trademark facial Band-Aid? A tribute to his former collaborator Lavell Webb, a.k.a. City Spud, serving ten years in a Missouri jail for armed robbery and assault.

#5 Usher – U Got It Bad

At #5 we’re gonna hear from the ’90s teen star mentored by moguls L.A. Reid and P. Diddy, who, after a couple of false starts, came to occupy a sweet spot on the male pop R&B sexiness spectrum midway between Michael Jackson’s too-goodness, and Bobby Brown’s too-badness, as songwriter Manuel Seal put it.

As he was just turning 20 he hooked up with Atlanta producer Jermaine Dupri and scored a trio of top tens in ’97 and ’98 that updated the male R&B sound with Dupri’s Southern Hip-Hop production and beats. But not only that, his Hip-Hop-derived singing style—clustering syllables together like a rapper—set him up to be one of the biggest chart acts and heartthrobs of the ’00s after a second trio of top ten hits in ’01 and ’02 whose titles all begin with the word “you” abbreviated with the letter “U:” “U Remind Me,” “U Don’t Have to Call,” and the biggest, our #5 song, “U Got It Bad.” It’s Usher.

“U Got It Bad,” Usher: #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 2002. Producer Jermaine Dupri wrote the song after Usher couldn’t stop obsessing over a girl he’d brought with him to the studio. He says he knew right away that he was updating Usher’s first smoldering slow-jam hit, “Nice & Slow,” from 1998. The girl may or may not’ve been TLC’s Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas.

#4 Nickelback – How You Remind Me

At #4, the song that gets the prize for chart longevity in ’02: 45 weeks, including four at #1, which made it Billboard’s #1 song of the year. But on chart points, the top four are a tight cluster, and the three songs that edge it out in our Chartcrush ranking all had many more weeks in the #1 spot.

It’s more apparent looking at the top ten on Billboard’s year-end chart than ours, but ’02 was a really big year for Rock on the Pop charts: the strongest since the late ’80s. Billboard had four Rock cuts among its top ten for the year, and two of them make the cut in our Chartcrush ranking. We already heard The Calling’s “Wherever You Will Go” at #7; here’s Nickelback’s chart debut, “How You Remind Me.”

Canadian Rockers Nickelback, the #4 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2002, “How You Remind Me.” #1 for four weeks in January, and it stayed in the top ten for 23 weeks. The most played song on radio in the entire ’00s decade.

In the years since 2002, and especially after their Diamond-certified fifth album All the Right Reasons in 2005, Nickelback became Rock’s scapegoats and whipping boys: “the one band that virtually everyone is happy to mock relentlessly,” as Stereogum’s Tom Breihan put it. Why? Well, their success, of course. Also, there was a sameyness to the style and sound of the Post-Grunge bands that dominated Rock radio in the early ’00s, and that contributed. But even beyond that, nowhere was the fracturing of Pop into a gazillion genres and micro-genres more pronounced than in Rock, so the idea of a band getting as big as Nickelback got was kind of an anachronism.

#3 Ashanti – Foolish

Now as I touched upon when we heard Ja Rule’s “Murder remix” of J. Lo’s “Ain’t It Funny” at #9, Irv and Chris Gotti’s Murder Inc. Records was the hottest Hip-Hop label in New York in ’02, and our act at #3 had gotten in on the ground floor, writing and singing hooks and background vocals, including on the J. Lo tracks, and featuring on Hip-Hop releases by the label’s roster of Rappers. Those included Ja Rule’s biggest hit “Always on Time,” which catapulted her to instant stardom when it was in the top ten for 16 weeks starting in December ’01.

Then, in February, her feature on Fat Joe’s “What’s Luv?” and her first solo single debuted simultaneously. With Billboard’s April 20 Hot100 chart, she became the first female ever to occupy the top two spots the same week. “What’s Luv?” was #2 for seven weeks and at #1 for five of those weeks? Our #3 song: it’s Ashanti’s “Foolish.”

That repeating piano figure in our #3 song, Ashanti’s “Foolish:” sampled from an album cut by 80’s R&B group DeBarge, but it had also been in rapper The Notorious B.I.G.’s biggest hit while he was alive. Biggie, gone just five years in ’02, so Ashanti protested when Murder, Inc. boss Irv Gotti gave it to her to write a song around. But Gotti said he knew what he was doing, and the sample, instantly familiar to Ashanti’s intended audience, helped “Foolish” shoot to the top of the charts, where it stayed ten weeks.

#2 Nelly featuring Kelly Rowland – Dilemma

We’re counting down the top hits of 2002 on this week’s edition of Chartcrush, and at #2 we have another rapper-singer duet, but unlike J. Lo and Ja Rule’s “Ain’t It Funny,” on this one the rapper is singing too. Not too many singing rappers before Drake emerged late in the decade.

And it’s also the first #1 hit for a member of early ’00s R&B uber-trio Destiny’s Child. Nope, not that member! Beyonce’s first #1 hit was “Crazy in Love” (with Jay-Z) in 2003; our #2 song features Kelly Rowland, and as for the rapper, we heard his “Hot in Herre” at #6, so this is the second of his two hits in our countdown: the only act with two. It’s Nelly featuring Kelly Rowland, “Dilemma.”

#1 for seven weeks, August and September, knocked down to #2 for two weeks, and then it returned to the top spot for another three weeks, October into November, Nelly and Kelly Rowland’s “Dilemma,” the #2 song of the year according to our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show ranking.

In the video, Kelly is shown doing something that was pretty cutting-edge in ’02: texting. Except she’s doing it on an Excel spreadsheet, not a texting app. Maybe she needed more than 160 characters? By the way, the song that bumped “Dilemma” to #2 in October? American Idol Season One winner Kelly Clarkson’s coronation single, “A Moment like This.”

#1 Eminem – Lose Yourself

And that gets us down to the #1 song in our countdown. In a year of very long runs at the top of the Hot100, this was the longest: 12 weeks. But don’t look for it in the top ten or even the top 20 of any Billboard year-end chart, because Billboard only counted activity up to its November 30 cutoff issue for ’02. Everything after that? Kicked into ’03. This song was #1 from November 9 to January 25 ’03, so in Billboard, it’s #63 for ’02 and #28 for ’03.

Well that’s not right! In fact, there’s a long list of year-straddling hits throughout chart history that’ve fallen through the cracks like that. So here at Chartcrush, what we do is count every song’s entire chart run, and then rank it in the year it earned the majority of its points. Which makes this the #1 song of 2002.

Are you ready? It’s a monster! Vanilla Ice was a distant memory and The Beastie Boys had thrown in with alt-rock; was the world ready for another White rapper? Capping off the year that Hip-Hop found its mojo at the top of the Pop charts, squarely in the mainstream of American Pop, from 8 Mile, the semiautobiographical film that made him a superstar, it’s Eminem “Lose Yourself.”

Eminem, out of Detroit, Michigan, “Lose Yourself.” #1 for 12 weeks on the Hot100 and #1 in our exclusive Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show ranking of the biggest hits of 2002. Eminem came into ’02 already a big star since The Slim Shady and Marshall Mathers LPs, in ’99 and 2000, respectively, and his top ten hit, “The Real Slim Shady” in 2000. But 8 Mile and “Lose Yourself” expanded his appeal way beyond Hip-Hop. His album The Eminem Show topped Billboard’s year-end album chart in ’02, and “Lose Yourself” won Best Original Song at the 75th Oscars.

Bonus

So our #1 song, “Lose Yourself,” one of the three cuts in our Chartcrush Top Ten for 2002 that were absent from the top ten on Billboard’s year-end Hot100. J. Lo and Ja Rule’s “Ain’t It Funny” and Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated,” the others at numbers 13 and 11 respectively on Billboard’s ranking.

So what songs from Billboard year-end top ten got bumped out of ours? Well as I said earlier, ’02 was a big year for Rock, which is better reflected on Billboard’s year-end top ten than ours.

#15 Puddle of Mudd – Blurry

Puddle of Mudd’s nihilistic Emo-Grunge song “Blurry” was #10.

“Blurry” was #15 on our Chartcrush ranking.

#11 Linkin Park – In the End

Unlike Kansas City’s Puddle of Mudd, Agora Hills, California’s Linkin Park continued charting top ten hits through the decade.

“In the End,” Linkin Park’s breakthrough, Billboard’s #7 song of ’02 and the second most played Rock song of the Aughts, behind Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me.” It just misses our Chartcrush top ten at #11.

#13 Fat Joe featuring Ashanti – What’s Luv?

And finally, Billboard’s #8 song was the other song in Ashanti’s two-fer at the top of the charts in April and May.

“What’s Luv?,” Fat Joe featuring Ashanti, missing our top ten at #13.

Well that’s the show! Thanks for listening to our 2002 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. On our website, chartcrush.com, you can get a written transcript and a link to stream this and other Chartcrush countdown shows on Spotify, plus chart run line graphs and other tight extras. Every week, we count down a different year from the beginning of the charts in the ’40s all the way up to the present, so tune again—same station, same time—for 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 count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re turning the clock back to 1958, Rock’s “toddler year,” the terrible twos and threes when Rock and Rock’s Teenaged fans with their frenzied fandom and record buying, really took over the Pop charts, kind of like how a toddler takes over the house.

American society gave birth to Rock ‘n Roll, now it had to tame it and assimilate it. Of course there’ve been many times since the ’50s when music’s youngest fans have planted their flag and made the Pop charts exhibit “A” in the generation gap, but the mid-to-late ’50s was the first time, and it wasn’t a gap, it was a chasm.

Columbia Records’ head of A&R, Mitch Miller, one of the most powerful men in the music biz, called Rock ‘n Roll, in 1958, “musical baby food” and “the worship of mediocrity,” adding that it’ll never last, and kids only like it because their parents don’t. In a French magazine, Frank Sinatra wrote that Rock is “the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it’s been my misfortune to hear. It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people.” And these sentiments resonated broadly because the music was so different, yes, but also, juvenile delinquency was making headlines.

Court cases involving Teens doubled from 1948 to 1957. Juvenile arrests in New York tripled in the ’50s, and as early as 1954, a subcommittee in the U.S. Senate was investigating links between juvenile delinquency and media. 1955, a banner year for movies about juvenile delinquency: Rebel Without a Cause starring James Dean as an emotionally confused middle-class suburban Teen, and Blackboard Jungle, adapted from author Evan Hunter (a.k.a. Ed McBain’s) book about the crime and violence he’d seen during an aborted teaching stint at a Bronx High School. That had “Rock Around the Clock” in its opening sequence, which helped push the song to #1, but also cemented the link in people’s minds between Teenage hooliganism and Rock music.

Of course not all parents in the ’50s thought Rock ‘n Roll was going to turn their kids into juvenile delinquents, but not many households had more than one TV, radio or record player. And consumer headphones? Nope, not for another ten or fifteen years. So parents heard the music, saw the TV shows and were more clued in to their kids’ media and culture than most people in later years can imagine, whether they wanted to be or not.

For ones that didn’t, transistor radios and portable record machines made great birthday or Christmas gifts. Stack your 45s on the spindle, drop the needle, instant dance party, but in your room, or better yet, over at a friend’s. “What do I have to do stop this racket and get a little peace and quiet around here?” “I don’t want you kids futzing with my hi-fi.” Tech to the rescue!

So Rock’s toddler year: things did get pretty silly, and we’ll hear that this hour. But more broadly, ’58 was a formative year in society’s grappling with a distinct “youth culture” that hadn’t been a thing before 1950 and was both formed and reflected by, but impossible without, mass media, and as separate from family as you could get in those days.

Looking back, music: an even bigger influence on “youth culture” than even the most peppery anti-Rock ‘n Roll crusaders in the ’50s could’ve credibly asserted or even imagined. Which of course is why we even talk about these silly sonic artifacts decades after they first cast their spell on a willing but unsuspecting public. So with that, let’s count down some songs, shall we?

#10 (#13) The Platters – Twilight Time

At #10 is a Black vocal group, heirs to a long tradition on the Pop Charts. 15 years before Rock ‘n Roll, The Ink Spots had notched three of the year’s top ten songs. And they stayed hot even after another Black vocal group, The Mills Brothers, debuted, scored the #1 hit of 1943 and nearly repeated in ’44. Then The Ink Spots were back with the #1 song of 1946.

Things cooled off in the Crooner years, but The Mills Brothers returned to the year-end top ten in ’52, and The Four Knights in ’54. In ’55, Rock ‘n Roll hit and our act at #10, under the tutelage of L.A. songwriter-producer-arranger Buck Ram, updated the vocal group sound with more prominent lead vocals and rhythms.

Ram finagled them a deal with Mercury, and they scored four top tens in the first eight months of 1956: romantic make-out classics like “Only You” and “(You’ve Got) The Magic Touch,” and the biggest of all, “The Great Pretender,” all Buck Ram songs. But it was a version of one of Ram’s old songs from the ’40s that became their first appearance in a yearly top ten, in 1958. #10 on our countdown, it’s The Platters’ “Twilight Time.”

Mercury wanted to sign a different group that Buck Ram was managing, The Penguins, on the strength of their top ten hit in early ’55, “Earth Angel.” Ram gave them The Penguins, but only on the condition that they also sign The Platters. “Twilight Time,” The Platters’ fifth top ten hit and the #10 song according to our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show ranking for 1958.

#9 (#12) The Champs – Tequila

At #9, an instrumental that burst into the American Pop consciousness by accident, and has never left. It was a jam session, based on a Mambo song “Como Mi Ritmo No Hay Dos” (“There Is No One Like You”) by Cuban musician Cachao, recorded in three takes by a group of L.A. studio musicians to put on the B-side of a single. A deejay in Cleveland started playing the B-side, and it shot to #1 for five weeks in March and April. Some critics have called it “the birth of Latin rock.” Here are The Champs “Tequila.”

“Tequila,” #9 in our 1958 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. Danny Flores, the man behind “Tequila,” playing the dirty saxophone and saying “Tequila.” And he got the sole writing credit on the song, but had to use a pseudonym, Chuck Rio, because he was under contract with another label. After it was a hit, the nameless ad hoc studio group actually became The Champs, but the law of diminishing chart returns applied on their follow-up instrumentals, “Too Much Tequila” and “Tequila Twist.” But keep an ear out, we haven’t heard the last of “Tequila” this hour!

#8 (#11) Conway Twitty – It’s Only Make Believe

Well we’re down to #8, and I have a confession to make: we’re actually counting down the top 13 songs of 1958 on this week’s show. How’s that? Well, when we crunched the data for the nearly 500 songs that made the charts in the year, same as we do for every year, there were three two-way ties among the top ranked songs. And they’re all in a row! Which is beyond unusual!

But the next six songs we’re going to hear are a series of three two-way ties on points using our ranking method. And since this is the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, that’s how we’re going to present them: tie at #8, tie at #7 and tie at #6.

So the first of our two songs tied at #8 is the chart debut by a future Country star who’s perhaps best known for his duets with the “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Loretta Lynn in the ’70s. It’s not a Country song, though; it’s a Rockabilly song, and he’s one of many major Country stars in the ’60s and beyond that scored their first hits in the ’50s as Rockers. Here’s Conway Twitty’s first hit, “It’s Only Make Believe.”

Conway Twitty, born Harold Jenkins but wanted a more memorable stage name, so he looked at a map and saw Conway, Arkansas, and Twitty, Texas. “It’s Only Make Believe,” #1 for two weeks in November ’58. Lots of folks first hearing that record thought it was Elvis, who’d just shipped out to Germany after being drafted into the Army. Twitty didn’t become a Country artist until after the British Invasion in the mid-60s, and Country radio was slow to embrace him after years of cutting Pop and Rock records. But he wasn’t the first and won’t be the last Rocker to make the switch. Hootie & The Blowfish’s Darius Rucker and Aaron Lewis of Metal band Staind, two 21st century examples.

#8 (#10) The McGuire Sisters – Sugartime

Next up, a trio of sisters from the Dayton, Ohio area, discovered by the ubiquitous early ’50s radio and TV personality, Arthur Godfrey. In the wake of Mercury success with The Crew Cuts Pop version of “Sh-Boom” in 1954, upstart labels Dot and Coral were both out with Pop versions of Doo Wop R&B hits by sister acts: Dot had The Fontane Sisters’ “Hearts of Stone;” Coral had this trio’s “Sincerely,” our #3 Chartcrush hit of 1955. After two years with no chart action they were back with this song, which is tied with Conway Twitty at #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1958. It’s The McGuire Sisters, “Sugartime.”

McGuire Sisters, Ruby, Dottie and lead singer Phyllis, “Sugartime.” It was never #1, but its ten weeks in the top ten was enough to get it into our top ten on the year. The McGuires never charted a record on Billboard‘s Hot100, which launched August 4, 1958, but they appeared often on TV variety shows, and were darlings of Greatest and Silent Generation music fans through the ’60s. That is, until the middle sister Phyllis’s affair with mob boss Sam Giancana became public. But even that blew over, and the McGuires performed for every President from Nixon to G.W. Bush.

#7 (#9) Sheb Wooley – The Purple People Eater

OK, that’s our tie at #8; on to our tie at #7: two of the silliest, wackiest songs in Pop chart history. First up, a sci-fi adjacent novelty hit the year Sputnik fell back to earth and The Fly and The Blob were in theaters. At first M-G-M Records rejected it, but reconsidered after execs noticed young staffers spinning it on lunch breaks and having a ball. It’s Sheb Wooley’s “The Purple People Eater.”

I told you we hadn’t heard the last of our #9 song, “Tequila!” Now most people assume that “The Purple People Eater” is a purple creature that eats people. Listen again: it’s a one-horned cyclops of indeterminate color that eats purple people. Which of course would be totally racist if there were purple people, but seems somehow less threatening since there aren’t.

Sheb Wooley, better known at the time as an actor in TV and movie Westerns, but his recording career went all the way back to 1945, and continued into the ’60s on the Country charts, including the #1 Country novelty “That’s My Pa” in 1962. In the late ’60s into the ’70s he was a regular on the Country variety TV show Hee Haw.

#7 (#8) David Seville – Witch Doctor

The chirpy, otherworldly voice of the “Purple People Eater,” of course, an effect achieved by recording a voice on tape, then playing it back at a faster speed. And the guy who first used it on a hit record is the other act in our tie at #7 in our countdown. As you listen, remember: no one at the time had ever heard sped-up voices like this on a record before. Here’s Ross Bagdasarian, under his pseudonym David Seville, “Witch Doctor.”

“Witch Doctor” hit #1 at the end of April 1958 and “Purple People Eater” just weeks later in early June. By the end of June, J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson was out with “The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor” on the flip-side of his big hit, “Chantilly Lace.” By Christmas, the guy who had started it all with “Witch Doctor,” Ross Bagdasarian as “David Seville” was unleashing “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)” on an unsuspecting world. That too topped the charts for four weeks. Before he started experimenting with tape speeds, Bagdasarian wrote the #1 hit that launched Rosemary Clooney’s solo singing career in 1951, the Mitch Miller-produced “Come On-a My House.”

#6 (#7) Elvis Presley – Don’t

Now in the car down on lover’s lane, at the drive-in movie or up at make-out ridge, or on the sofa when mom and dad were out for the evening, or during an unauthorized babysitting drop-in, when things were going too far, getting too amorous, too handsy, what’s the one word the guy didn’t want to hear? Well that word is the one-word title of our first song in yet another two-way tie at #6 in our Chartcrush countdown for 1958. It’s the song that was peaking on the charts in February and March just as its singer was reporting to basic training in Texas, a major news event heralded “the world’s most famous haircut.” Here’s Elvis Presley’s “Don’t.”

Elvis Presley’s “Don’t,” listed as a double-A-sided single on the Best Sellers chart with its upbeat flip-side “I Beg of You.” On Billboard‘s pre-Hot100 Top 100 chart, which ranked sides separately, “Don’t” reached #1 and “I Beg of You” peaked at #6. This ranking stuff can get complicated!

Even though Elvis was in the Army from ’58 to 1960 and that obviously interrupted his career, he recorded a bunch of songs between basic and AIT in June, and his label, RCA, made sure there was plenty of material to release while he completed his two years of service. Totaling up the chart points for all singles that factored into our 1958 ranking, Elvis was back as the #1 artist of the year after getting edged out by Pat Boone in 1957.

#6 (#6) The Kingston Trio – Tom Dooley

Our tie at the #6 spot on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1958: two songs with military nuances. In 1866 Civil War vet Thomas Dula returned home to the mountains of western North Carolina: hillbilly country, where he moved back in to the house he’d shared before the war with his lover Anne Melton, and Anne’s husband James, who apparently was fine with the arrangement.

Soon Anne’s distant cousin Pauline joined the household as a servant and Thomas started sleeping with her. Apparently Anne was fine with that. Then yet another cousin Laura moved to the area, and Thomas took up with her too. But then, syphilis. And finger pointing. And everything unraveled. Laura ended up getting the blame and was found stabbed to death in a shallow grave, pregnant with Thomas’s unborn baby.

Now there are lots of versions of that story, but they all have the same ending, which is a matter of public record. Thomas was tried, convicted and hanged for Laura’s murder despite lingering questions about his guilt. Now the Appalachians where all this went down was America’s most fertile region for folklorists, and sure enough, there was a local poem about the events, which found its way to our San Francisco act that’s tied with Elvis at #6.

They didn’t mean to, but with this song they brought back Folk to the top of the Pop charts. They pronounce the “a” at the end of the name in the hillbilly dialect that makes “opera” “opry,” so Tom Dula becomes “Tom Dooley,” the title of the song. In the intro, they call it a love triangle. Now that you know the story, you know it’s more like a hexagon. Here’s “Tom Dooley” by The Kingston Trio.

At the start of the ’50s, bandleader and Decca’s just-hired head of A&R, Gordon Jenkins, plucked Folk group The Weavers out of New York’s Greenwich Village, and they scored four top five hits including the biggest of them, “Goodnight Irene” and “On Top of Old Smoky.” But members Pete Seeger and Lee Hays were blacklisted when their ties to communist groups surfaced in the McCarthy era, and Folk completely disappeared from the Pop charts, until The Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley,” which we just heard in a tie for #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 1958.

They were out of North Beach in San Francisco: a club called The Purple Onion, a Beatnik hub, and “Tom Dooley” was a cut off their debut album. Capitol Records didn’t view them as a singles act at all until DJs started playing “Tom Dooley,” and once it was issued on a 45 it rose into the top ten for 12 weeks including a week at #1 just before Thanksgiving, after which Folk became one of the hottest sounds in music and labels scrambled to sign just about any act they could find: Peter Paul & Mary, Joan Baez, New Christy Minstrels, Bob Dylan and many others.

#5 Domenico Modugno – Nel Blu di Pinto di Blu (Volare)

So ties at numbers 8, 7 and 6 in our ranking for 1958, but from here to #1, it’s just a straight countdown, and at #5, another left-field hit. The “Jet Age” began in 1958. Literally. The first passenger jet flights. National Airlines. Boeing’s 707. The world was getting smaller and smaller, and Americans were eager to travel, learn and engage. Billboard and the trades took notice when Neapolitan bandleader Renato Carosone’s “Torero,” sung in Italian, cracked the top 20 in May of ’58.

But everyone took notice when our #5 song, also by an Italian singer and sung completely in Italian, shot to #2 in only its second week on the Hot100 in August, and went on to become the bestselling single of the year. That despite the availability of a bilingual version by well-known crooner Dean Martin. Deano’s version got to #15, but here’s Domenico Modugno, who co-wrote the song, the #1 version of “Nel Blu di Pinto di Blu” better known as “Volare.”

In the same issue of Billboard that “Volare” hit #2 in only its second week, is a mention of a DJ on New York’s WNEW who played eight different records of that song back-to-back. Not to be outdone, a DJ in Connecticut found yet another version, and played nine. Then he played all the “B” sides!

The Modugno version was Billboard‘s #1 song of 1958, but it’s #5 on our Chartcrush ranking because three of the four songs remaining in our countdown, numbers 4 through 1, had chart runs that either started in ’57 or ran into ’59, and when you count their full chart runs (as we do for every song), they end up with more points. Billboard‘s year-end charts only count activity for weeks within their chart year.

#4 The Teddy Bears – To Know Him Is to Love Him

We are counting down the top ten songs of 1958 here on this week’s Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

Now, before he was a big-time producer/entrepreneur and inventor of the so-called Wall of Sound heard on records like The Ronettes “Be My Baby” and The Righteous Brothers’, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” and way before he was convicted of murdering actress Lana Clarkson in the ’00s and sentenced to 19 years in prison, where he died, Phil Spector wrote, arranged, played on and produced our #4 song and recorded it with his L.A. vocal group.

With lead singer Carol Connors, not to be confused with the ’70s adult film star, it’s The Teddy Bears’ “To Know Him Is to Love Him.”

Teddy Bears, “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1958, written by future record producer Phil Spector right out of high school, inspired by the inscription on his fathers’ grave. It was #1 for three weeks in December, and stayed in the top ten through most of January. Because it was a hit so late in the year, Billboard couldn’t count most of its chart run so it was only #44 in the ranking published in the December 15, 1958 issue.

#3 Danny and The Juniors – At the Hop

Similar deal with our #3 song, but this one’s run on the charts started in ’57 and carried over into ’58.

Philadelphia had a fertile youth music scene in the ’50s, and as the new host of a local TV show called Bandstand, DJ Dick Clark was right in the middle of it. One day some label guys played him a recording by a Philly Doo-Wop group called The Juvenaires of their song “Do the Bop,” which Clark liked but advised them to rewrite the lyrics and change the name of the group, which they did and the record was a local hit in the Summer of ’57.

Meanwhile, Bandstand got picked up by the ABC network, became American Bandstand, and immediately started drawing millions of teenaged viewers in its after school timeslot. In December ’57, the former Juvenaires got their big break when Dick Clark asked them fill in for a no-show act on American Bandstand, and the retitled record by the renamed group shot to #1. At #3 on our ranking, it’s Danny and The Juniors, “At the Hop.”

Danny and the Juniors, “At the Hop,” #3 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1958. With seven weeks at #1 in January and February it’s hard to see how it was only #20 on Billboard‘s year-end chart, but it got a second life on Oldies radio after ’50s revivalists Sha Na Na played it at Woodstock, and then when it appeared in George Lucas’ pre-Star Wars nostalgia-fest American Graffiti in ’73.

Their next single “Rock & Roll Is Here to Stay” cracked the top 20, also in ’58, and they continued putting out records, but were no match for newer Italian-American vocal combos like Dion & The Belmonts and The Four Seasons into the ’60s. American Bandstand, with Dick Clark hosting, continued on TV all the way to 1989.

#2 The Everly Brothers – All I Have to Do Is Dream

At #8, the most successful duo on the charts all the way until the ’80s when Hall & Oates surpassed them. After being signed by Archie Bleyer’s Cadence Records, they were on a roll! Their first Cadence single, “Bye Bye Love” went to #2 in July of ’57, and their second, “Wake Up Little Susie,” was #1 for two weeks in October. After those two upbeat hits, they toned things down and this slower song was their second #1, sitting atop either the Best Sellers or DJ chart for six weeks in May into June ’58. It’s The Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream.”

“All I Have to Do Is Dream,” #2 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1958: The Everly Brothers, Don and Phil, actual brothers. Those assertive, folky close harmonies sounded pretty fresh in 1958. As teens growing up in Liverpool, writing songs together in their early pre-Beatles days, John Lennon and Paul McCartney would pretend to be The Everly Brothers. After “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” they weren’t done for ’58: two more top five hits in the year, “Bird Dog” and “Problems.” On total chart points for all eight of their singles that factored into our ranking, they were the third top chart act of the year, behind only Elvis Presley and Teen Idol Ricky Nelson.

#1 Tommy Edwards – It’s All in the Game

And that gets us down to our #1 record, a song that’d been a top 20 hit for the same singer, on the same label, with the same bandleader/arranger, seven years before in 1951. Lots of artists over the years have re-recorded songs. In ’58 with stereo just being unveiled as the next big thing in records, there was about to be a parade of Crooners and Pop singers doing sparkling new hi-fi stereo versions of their old hits from the shellac 78 era.

But not too many acts have scored hits with different versions of the same song, and this one, again a remake of his own 1951 hit, was a whopper: #1 for six weeks in the Fall. Accompanied as he was in 1951 by Leroy Holmes and Orchestra, on M-G-M, here’s our Chartcrush #1 song of 1958, Tommy Edwards’ “It’s All in the Game.”

Neil Sedaka re-did his 1962 chart topper, “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” as a ballad in 1975, and it got to #8: as far as we know the only other remake of a hit that was also a hit for the same artist. Tommy Edwards’ rock-era remake in 4/4 time of his 1951 hit that was in 3/4 waltz time, “It’s All in the Game,” the #1 song of 1958 according to our Chartcrush ranking. Billboard had it at #9 on the year because it only factored weeks through the end of November. Remember, they have to get their year-end chart tabulated, printed and mailed ahead of New Years, and Edwards stayed on the chart into January.

A few sources make kind of a big deal about that record being the first #1 hit by a Black artist on the Hot100. Which it was. But the Hot100 had only existed for nine weeks, and in the year prior, African-American acts The Coasters, Platters and Sam Cooke had all scored #1s on the earlier Top100 chart.

Thanks to counting songs’ full chart runs, though, and our exclusive Chartcrush ranking method (which by the way applies to all years), we’re happy to report that Tommy Edwards not only scored the first #1 by a Black artist on the weekly Hot100 a few weeks after the chart launched, he scored the #1 hit of the year. The first Black artist to top a published Billboard year-end Hot100: Bobby Lewis, with “Tossin’ and Turnin'” in 1961.

Bonus

So there you have them: our top ten songs of 1958 according to our Chartcrush ranking. Now, Billboard published a year-end top 50 chart in its December 15 issue, and there are some big differences between their “official” top ten vs. ours, as I’ve been mentioning throughout the show. Here at Chartcrush, we base our rankings for all years on performance on Billboard‘s weekly charts, but that was a little tricky for 1958 because again, the Hot100 launched mid-year, in August. Before that, there was a weekly Top100 chart, similar to the Hot100, that started in November of 1955, plus separate weekly Best Sellers and DJ Airplay charts. Billboard discontinued its Jukebox chart in June of ’57.

For our ranking, we used the Hot100 for August to December, obviously, but for the first seven months before the Hot100 debuted, we used our combined ranking that’s derived from the Best Sellers and DJ charts, same as we do for years back to the early ’40s.

To calculate its year-end top 50, Billboard used the Hot100 for August on like we do. And you’d think they would’ve used their combined Top100 chart for the first part of the year, but nope. Instead they went with Best Sellers, which goes a long way toward explaining why all the songs that were in Billboard‘s year-end top ten but not ours peaked before the Hot100, and are much more representative of the adult side of Pop music in 1958.

Looking at sales only, in all eras you get the records preferred by older, more affluent fans, which might’ve been just fine with the folks at Billboard with so many big Rock ‘n Roll hits in the year. Just speculating.

At #10 on its 1958 year-end chart, Billboard had Dean Martin.

No, not his version of “Volare,” it was “Return to Me,” the third of Dino’s four top five hits in his long career. But like his version of “Volare,” it’s bilingual. He sings the last verse in Italian, so along with our #5 song, Domenico Modugno’s “Volare” (Billboard #1 song of the year), that’s two of Billboard top hits of 1958 sung in Italian. “Return to Me” is #23 on our Chartcrush ranking.

The first record ever to be certified Gold for sales of a million by the Record Industry Association of America, was Billboard‘s #7 song of 1958.

Crooner Perry Como’s final top ten hit on the Pop charts, #36 on our Chartcrush ranking, “Catch a Falling Star” peaked at #9 in February ’58 after Como sang it, wearing his trademark cardigan sweater, of course, in a “Sing to me, Mr. C.” segment on his top-rated Saturday night NBC TV show, The Perry Como Show. Fun fact: Perry Como took top male vocalist honors in the 1958 Gilbert Youth Survey of 5,000 American teens, beating Frank Sinatra, Pat Boone, and the 1957 winner, Elvis Presley.

At #6 Billboard had an instrumental.

Billy Vaughn’s “Sail Along Silvery Moon,” Billboard‘s #6 song of 1958; #17 on our ranking. Vaughn was the most successful orchestra leader of the Rock era: 28 charting singles between ’55 and ’66, all with his trademark harmonized “singing saxophones” style. Before that Vaughn had been in vocal quartet The Hilltoppers, who helped put Dot Records on the map in ’52 and ’53 with the label’s only two top ten hits, until Dot honcho Randy Wood made him head of A&R and Musical Director, and the label hit pay-dirt with huge hits by The Fontane Sisters and Pat Boone.

Over on Billboard‘s year-end top ten for 1958, the #5 song was an instrumental by “The Mambo King.”

Now that one just missed our Chartcrush ranking, #11. Cuban bandleader Perez Prado’s “Patricia:” the last #1 on Billboard‘s “Top100” singles chart before the “Hot100” debuted August 4 with Ricky Nelson’s “Poor Little Fool” at #1.

And speaking of Ricky Nelson, as I mentioned earlier, on total chart points, he was the #2 overall singles artist of the year between Elvis at #1 and The Everly Brothers at #3, with seven songs factoring into our ranking.

“Poor Little Fool” was the very first #1 hit on the Hot100 chart, and the biggest of Nelson’s seven chart hits in the year.

And finally, if you rank 1958’s songs using a straight inverse point system that doesn’t reward things like weeks in the top ten or weeks at #1, a method Billboard used for most of its early year-end charts, and, if you count its full chart run that extended into January of ’59, this comes out the #1 song of 1958!

The Big Bopper’s “Chantilly Lace,” 25 weeks on the Hot100, the most of any 1958 song, and it peaked at #6, but its nine weeks on the chart after Billboard‘s November 30 cutoff for the 1958 chart year, ignored. Otherwise it likely would’ve been among Billboard‘s top ten on the year.

Well that’s our show! I hope you enjoyed our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1958. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Now if you like what you heard, check out our website, chartcrush.com, where you can find written transcript and links to stream this and other Chartcrush shows on Spotify, plus chart run line graphs and other lid-flippin’ extras. Every week, we count down a different year from the beginning of the charts in the ’40s all the way up to the present, so tune again, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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Welcome! This is The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, and I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we dive deep into a different year in Pop music and count down the top 10 songs 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 turning the clock back to 1990, a transitional time in, not just America but the World.

The Berlin Wall came down in 1989: a symbolic end to the Cold War as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev tried to modernize the Soviet system and open things up with his glasnost and perestroika policies. There wasn’t much of a choice. President Reagan’s reforms had pulled the West out of its ’70s “malaise” into a decade of prosperity that made the differences between the two opposing philosophies in the Cold War too glaring for anyone to ignore. Elsewhere, Nelson Mandela was freed from prison and South Africa’s racist apartheid segregation system was on its way out. And there were free elections in a Soviet satellite country behind the Iron Curtain, Poland. A McDonald’s even opened up in Moscow! Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters staged a star-studded production of his opus The Wall in Berlin in 1990, and German Heavy Metal group Scorpions released their song “Winds of Change.”

But a different wind was blowing in U.S. culture. It had been breezin’ and gustin’ for decades in Lenny Bruce’s biting, vulgar comedy, Andy Warhol’s Pop Art, Punk’s primitivism and studied irony, cult movies by Martin Scorsese, David Lynch and the Monty Python gang. All of those, quirky oddities when they appeared, so they could be safely giggled at and ignored if what activist-intellectual Susan Sontag had labeled in the ’60s “the new sensibility” wasn’t your thing.

But right at the moment when the arc of world history bent decisively in America and the West’s favor, postmodernism achieved critical mass and the line between “lowbrow” and “highbrow” wasn’t just being blurred; as critic Roger Kimball observed a few years later, it was being erased and even inverted, so that “lowbrow” became “highbrow.” Gangsta rappers like Ice-T, Public Enemy and N.W.A. didn’t go mainstream despite being “ghetto,” but because they were “ghetto.” In Rock there was Jane’s Addiction, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Grunge which had been underground for years; in R&B, Bobby Brown and the ultra-steamy bad boy Slow Jamming of Jodeci and Silk. Even in Country, you can think of Alan Jackson, Garth Brooks, Neo-Trad and “Friends in Low Places” as part of the inversion.

Which reached its tipping point in 1990, even if it was two more years before insurgent candidate Pat Buchanan made headlines by slapping a label on it in his prime-time “Culture War” speech at the ’92 GOP convention. Pop of course had contributed to social change before 1990, but the big difference after 1990: in Postmodernism, as theorist Marshall McLuhan put it in the ’60s “medium is message.” Now, music was change: shock and envelope pushing on all fronts, the rule, not the exception. Even having standards suddenly rendered unhip and fringy. Pop culture was now simply “culture.”

#10 Michael Bolton – How Am I Supposed to Live Without You

Don’t expect an hour of trailblazing bottom-is-now-top milestones though, in our Chartcrush Countdown for 1990. You’ll hear a few echoes of it for sure, but the Postmodern taste inversion played out over years and decades. ’90 was just the pivot point. #10 as we kick things off: a Singer-Songwriter who by the ’00s was doing Crooner tribute albums. But in the first half of the ’90s, his blend of Rock, Blue-Eyed Soul and Power Balladry was a down-the-middle bullseye for the Pop charts. Here is Michael Bolton’s own version of his song that singer Laura Branigan had already scored a hit with in 1983. It was his first #1: “How Am I Supposed to Live Without You.”

Hard to believe, but Michael Bolton’s band before he went solo—a Hard Rock outfit called Blackjack—opened for Ozzy Osbourne. Even after scoring his first AC hits he didn’t sever his Hard Rock roots, co-writing KISS’s 1990 Power Ballad “Forever.” “How Am I Supposed to Live Without You,” #10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, just missing Billboard’s year-end top ten at #12 because the first few weeks of its chart run were in Billboard’s 1989 “chart year.”

#9 Damn Yankees – High Enough

That’s what Billboard uses when it compiles its year-end charts, a discrete “chart year,” usually November to November. Only activity within the chart year is counted. It’s a baked-in problem since they have to print and mail an issue with their year-end charts before New Years, but it’s problematic because that’s not how charts work. Charts are a continuum, and not every song’s full run falls within one of Billboard’s chart years. For songs that are still on the chart when the chart year ends—the points for year-end rankings get divided between two years: a distinct disadvantage vs. songs with runs all in the same year. Well there are five—count ’em five—songs like that in our 1990 countdown. And as you’d expect given what I just laid out, none are in the top 10 of any Billboard year-end chart. They’re in our Chartcrush Top Ten though, because with the benefit of hindsight we get to correct this by counting every song’s full chart run toward whichever year it earned the most points based on weekly Hot100 chart positions. Cool, huh?

Anyway, “How Am I Supposed to Live Without You,” was the first of the five, and the only one that entered the chart in 1989. Phil Collins’ massive hit, “Another Day in Paradise” was split between Billboard’s ’89 and ’90 chart years, and Billboard has it as the #7 song of 1990. But by our Chartcrush ranking, it saw most of its chart action in ’89, not ’90 and shakes out as our #1 song of 1989!

Now the #9 song in our countdown didn’t make the top 10 until mid-December 1990 after a three-month climb, and then it stayed on the chart all the way into April: the first of four songs we’re gonna hear this hour that started on the chart in ’90 and went into ’91. It’s by a Rock supergroup, one of several that formed in the late ’80s, this one with ’70s guitar God Ted Nugent, plus Tommy Shaw and Jack Blades from Arena Rock bands Styx and Night Ranger, respectively. During the Gulf War they incorporated patriotic displays into their live shows, and that turned out to be the start of Nugent’s long career as an outspoken political activist. Here are Damn Yankees, at #9: “High Enough.”

Damn Yankees, “High Enough,” the #9 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 1990.

#8 Bette Midler – From a Distance

So the Gulf War. Mission: repel Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait. Hostilities didn’t start ’til January ’91. But Operation Desert Shield—the buildup—began just days after the Iraqi invasion in August of ’90. It was America’s first major military involvement since Vietnam, and the public was riveted. Yellow ribbons for the troops were everywhere: lapels, porches, cars, even on the cover of Rolling Stone. Yellow ribbons for loved ones being kept away from home, a meme that started in the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1979, inspired by Tony Orlando & Dawn’s 1973 hit “Tie a Yellow Ribbon (‘Round the Ole Oak Tree).” Music acts from The Rolling Stones to Lenny Kravitz & Sean Lennon chimed in (“High Wire” and a remake of John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance,” respectively). There was even a We Are the World-type celebrity assemblage called Voices That Care—as if the only thing missing from the ’80s stadium benefit frenzy had been a war to protest, and now here one finally was!

“Voices That Care” peaked at #11, and Whitney Houston’s “Star-Spangled Banner” from Superbowl XXV got to #20. But by far the biggest Gulf War hit was our song at #8, the second of our four songs that charted ’90 into ’91. Billboard has it at#15 on the year 1991, but it was recorded months before Iraq invaded Kuwait, came out right after and resonated: ten weeks in the top 10 November to January, peaking at #2 for a week, it’s Bette Midler’s “From a Distance.”

Bette Midler, fresh off her #1 hit in ’89, “Wind Beneath My Wings” from the movie Beaches, which she also starred in. That was Record and Song of the Year at the 32nd Grammys held in 1990. And then “From a Distance” won Song of the Year at the 33rd Grammys in ’91, first recorded by Texas Country-Folk singer Nanci Griffith and a hit in Ireland in ’88. But timing, of course, is everything, and Bette Midler and the Gulf War took it global.

#7 Madonna – Vogue

Next up on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1990, harkening back to my intro about the triumph of postmodernism, the singer that scholars who study and write about this stuff for a living (including consumer branding guru Stephen Brown in 2003) almost all agree is the “personification of postmodernism” Quote: “If, as someone once argued, the postmodern condition is characterized by fragmentation, de-differentiation, pastiche, retrospection and anti-foundationalism, [she fits the bill]… the blurring of sexual, ethnic and artistic boundaries; the serial shock tactics.” Of course, she never would’ve gotten away with any of it without the demographic current of Generation X, having internalized lifelong rebellion as a supreme virtue, looking to differentiate itself from the older Baby Boom who’d instilled that value by endlessly hyping how their Hippie counterculture had turned everything upside down in the ’60s! Boomers aged 26 to 45 in 1990: getting a little long in the tooth! And the singer (a Boomer aged 32) doubled down on shock in 1990, getting her video banned on MTV and then selling nearly a half million copies of the videotape and then showing up on the ABC News show Nightline to talk about it for the full half-hour. At #7, it’s not that song, “Justify My Love,” but it was 1990’s #1 best-selling single, about and inspired by a dance she’d seen in New York’s Gay club scene, using hand gestures and body poses to imitate Hollywood stars, and models from the dance (and song’s) namesake fashion magazine. It’s Madonna with “Vogue.”

“Strike a pose!” #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1990, Madonna’s “Vogue.” That video and the one MTV banned, “Justify My Love:” black and white photography with costumes and themes evoking the late Robert Mapplethorpe’s ultra-pornographic but artsy Gay sex photography that was making headlines in 1990. The uproar over the National Endowment for the Arts using tax dollars to fund Mapplethorpe exhibits in museums and galleries led to the NEA revoking several grants. But as much attention as all that got as a flashpoint in the Culture Wars, no one brought it all to America’s living rooms like the artist Billboard had just named “Artist of the ’80s Decade,” Madonna.

#6 Wilson Phillips – Hold On

Next, the song Billboard had at #1 on its year-end Hot100 chart for 1990, pushed down to #6 on our ranking by factoring other songs’ full chart runs, but also, the extra juice we award for weeks at #1. Despite nine weeks in the top 10, the song only topped the chart for one week. It’s a trio of California Gen-Xers: Carnie and Wendy Wilson, and Chynna Phillips: daughters, respectively, of ’60s legends Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, and John and Michelle Phillips of The Mamas & Papas. Their debut album sold millions and produced three #1s, making them the best-selling female group up ’til then—a record previously held by The Supremes. A lot was made at the time about generational baton passing and such. At #6, the lead single from that self-titled debut album, Wilson-Phillips, “Hold On.”

Wilson-Phillips “Hold On,” #6 as we count down the top 10 hits of 1990, here on this week’s edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Now those straightforward, innocent harmonies really stood out in 1990, influencing or at least foreshadowing countless female Alt- and Indie-Pop and Rock bands later in the decade. Chynna Phillips exited after another less-commercial sounding (and less successful) album in ’92, and that was it for Wilson-Phillips until their reunion album in 2004, which only got to #35 on the Album chart.

#5 Roxette – It Must Have Been Love

Our #5 song was #2 on Billboard’s 1990 ranking, and beat Wilson-Phillips in our Chartcrush ranking by just one point, so practically a tie. And it was a hit at the same time, Spring into Summer. It’s the first and only soundtrack song in our countdown, from Pretty Woman, the movie starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, by a Swedish Pop duo that had a string of top 10s from ’89 to ’91. Roxette: “It Must Have Been Love.”

“It Must Have Been Love” from Pretty Woman: #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten countdown for 1990.

#4 Mariah Carey – Vision of Love

So Madonna was Billboard’s artist of the 1980s decade. Up next at #4, the debut by the singer who went on to be Billboard’s artist of the 1990s decade. And the song entered the chart the same week that Madonna’s “Vogue” spent its third and final week at #1. She wasn’t after Madonna’s edgier, younger, Dance-oriented audience though. The Adult Contemporary format had undergone a huge transformation in the ’80s, becoming the new home for smooth R&B—which was great news for Lionel Richie, Dionne Warwick, Patti Labelle, Billy Ocean, Anita Baker—even Whitney Houston, all of whom anchored themselves on AC, and then crossed over to the more fickle Pop charts to score some of the biggest hits of the ’80s. The stage was thus set for ’90s Divadom and Mariah Carey. The very first of her record 18 career #1’s: “Vision of Love.”

Mariah Carey’s “Vision of Love,” the first big hit since Minnie Ripperton’s “Loving You” in 1975 with vocals in the whistle register. And Mariah also gets the credit for popularizing melisma in modern Pop: stretching syllables out over multiple notes: something new in 1990. Mariah, not the only ’90s Pop Diva debuting in 1990. After a decade singing in French, Canadian Celine Dion’s first English-language hit “Where Does My Heart Beat Now,” entered the chart in December on its way to #4.

#3 Sinead O’Connor – Nothing Compares 2 U

Now for all of 1990’s significance as a cultural cusp year, our #3 hit is really the only song in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown that can be called “Alternative.” It’s a song written by Prince from a 1985 album by one of his side-projects, The Family, but got a makeover in 1990 by an Irish singer with a shaved head and lots of in-your-face stands on controversial issues. It’s Sinead O’Connor. Her first and only hit: “Nothing Compares to U.”

Sinead O’Connor “Nothing Compares to U” at #3. Author Ken Partridge wrote in Billboard in 2014 about 1990 that “Aging boomers must have been even more confused than teenagers trying to decide if Jane Child’s ear-to-nose chain was a better look than Sinead O’Connor’s shaved head.” Jane Child, the other female act besides Sinead who debuted in 1990 with a bold new look, scored one hit (“Don’t Wanna Fall in Love”) and then vanished from the Pop charts. Not sure what happened to Jane Child’s career, but Sinead took the iconoclastic pose too far. Fellow disruptor Madonna’s quintessentially postmodern response to accusatory finger-pointing was typically a big smile and “Well you don’t understand, it’s all ironic, don’t take it too seriously.” By contrast, Sinead wrote angry open letters, tore up the Pope’s picture on live TV, cancelled gigs where they were going to play the national anthem and refused her Grammy. The first and only time she met Prince, who wrote “Nothing Compares,” he told her she shouldn’t cuss so much in interviews, which she didn’t like so she punched him and walked out.

#2 Mariah Carey – Love Takes Time

At #2, it’s the second Mariah Carey song in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown her breakout year, 1990. “Vision of Love,” which we heard at #4, was also in the top 10 on Billboard’s year-end chart, but this one, yet another song whose chart run was split between ’90 and ’91, so it wound up Billboard’s #76 (!) song of 1990. If you count its full chart run, though, it’s even bigger than “Vision.” #2 on the year by our Chartcrush reckoning. Again, Mariah Carey, the ballad, “Love Takes Time.”

The second of two year-end top tens for Mariah Carey her first year on the charts, 1990: “Love Takes Time.” What a start! Columbia Records, then headed by Carey’s future husband Tommy Motolla, had spent over a million bucks launching her, and she was back in the top 10 for 1991 with the title track off her second album, “Emotions,” on her way to becoming Billboard’s #1 Hot100 artist of the ’90s decade. The million was money well-spent.

#1 Stevie B – Because I Love You (The Postman Song)

And that gets us to #1 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1990. It topped the Hot100 for the last four weeks of the year and stayed on the chart ’til March: yet another year-straddler, which Billboard ranked at #12 on the year 1991. That’s not bad, but again, counting it full chart run in the calendar year it had the most chart action, it comes out Chartcrush’s #1 song of 1990! Stevie B’s “Because I Love You (The Postman Song).”

Now John Legend’s “All of Me” in 2014 was the first record with only piano and vocals to top the Hot100. Stevie B’s “Because I Love You (The Postman Song)” has strings and bass so it doesn’t qualify, but it scratched the same itch in 1990 as “All of Me” did in 2014: the intimacy of just a Singer and his or her instrument.

It wasn’t a typical song for Stevie B. He’d emerged from the Miami Club scene with his Dance hit “Party Your Body,” But just as Glam Metal acts were scoring massive hits with heartfelt stripped-down acoustic songs, so Stevie B scored big with “Because I Love You.”

Bonus

OK, so that’s the top 10. Now as I’ve been saying, several songs from our countdown were absent from the top ten on Billboard’s year-end Hot100 because their chart runs, split between adjacent Billboard “chart years.” Let’s review those real quick.

Michael Bolton’s “How Do I Live,” our #10 song: its first few weeks, in Billboard‘s 1989 chart year so it’s #12 on their year-end Hot100 for 1990. And three songs we heard this hour, kicked into Billboard’s 1991 chart year: Damn Yankees’ “High Enough,” our #9 song, Billboard‘s #14 song of 1991. Bette Midler’s “From a Distance” which we heard at #8, #15 for ’91 in Billboard, and of course Stevie B’s “Postman Song,” also kicked into ’91, but the first several weeks of its chart run, not counted, so it’s just #12 on the ’91 year-end Hot100 for Billboard. Counting its full chart run in 1990, the calendar year it saw most of its chart action, makes it the #1 song of 1990. And finally our #2 song, Mariah Carey’s “Love Takes Time,” also split between ’90 and ’91. In Billboard it’s the #76 for 1990 and #69 for ’91.

So what are the five songs that Billboard had in its top ten for 1990 that were displaced by those five? Let’s have a look at those.

#21 Jon Bon Jovi – Blaze of Glory

At #10, Billboard had Jon Bon Jovi’s song for the neo-Western Young Guns II, “Blaze of Glory.”

Emilio Estevez, who produced and starred in Young Guns II had approached Bon Jovi about using their 1987 top 10 “Wanted Dead or Alive,” but instead, Jon Bon Jovi wrote “Blaze of Glory” for the film and brought in Jeff Beck to do the solo. “Blaze of Glory” notches in at #21 on our Chartcrush ranking.

#19 Billy Idol – Cradle of Love

Next in our mini-countdown of the hits from Billboard‘s year-end top ten that didn’t make the cut for our Chartcrush top ten we counted down this hour, another soundtrack hit. This one from politically incorrect Comedian Andrew Dice Clay’s movie The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. Billboard had at #9. Billy Idol’s “Cradle of Love.”

“Cradle of Love,” the biggest hit of Billy Idol’s career: Billboard‘s #8 song of 1990; #19 on our ranking. A bad motorcycle accident in February derailed Billy Idol’s career right at its peak. He had to shoot the video from the waist up, and never again reached the level of success he enjoyed in 1990.

#15 En Vogue – Hold On

In 2014, a Billboard flashback feature cleverly pointed out that 1990 “was such a scary and exciting time that we needed two songs called ‘Hold On.'” We heard Wilson-Phillips’ at #6. The other? Billboard‘s #8 song of 1990: the breakthrough hit by the first of the ’90s R&B Girl Groups, En Vogue.

En Vogue’s “Hold On,”#15 on our Chartcrush ranking for 1990; #8 on Billboard‘s as we continue our mini-countdown of Billboard‘s year-end top tens for 1990 displaced by five different songs that ranked higher in our Chartcrush ranking.

Billboard‘s #7 song of the year was Phil Collins’ “Another Day in Paradise,” #1 the last two weeks of 1989 and the first two weeks of 1990. For Billboard, almost all of that chart run was in their 1990 chart year that began November 18, 1989, but going by the calendar as we do at Chartcrush puts it in 1989. You can hear that one in our 1989 episode.

#17 Bell Biv DeVoe – Poison

But finally, Billboard’s #4 song of 1990: the year’s top New Jack Swing hit that was in the top 10 for an impressive ten weeks, May to July, but only got as high as #3 so it just misses our Chartcrush ranking at #11, Bell Biv DeVoe’s “Poison.”

Bell Biv Devoe, three guys from the multi-Platinum ’80s Boy Band New Edition re-branding for the ’90s and New Jack Swing on “Poison.”

Well, I hope you enjoyed our 1990 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. On our website, chartcrush.com, you’ll find a written transcript for the show along with a link to the streaming edition on Spotify, plus other “schwingy” extras like our full Top100 chart and interactive line graph of the actual Billboard Hot100 chart runs for our top ten songs. And we do that for every year we count down, ’40s to the present. It’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com. Meanwhile, be sure and 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 count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re turning the clock back to 1976, a watershed year in music, for a lot of reasons, some of which were obvious at the time; others, not so much.

On the obvious side, Disco. After ten years, dancing was back. All the structured dances of the early-to-mid sixties: the mashed potato, the swim, the frug, the jerk: casualties of the Hippies’ “Do Your Own Thing” ethic and zoned-out free-form body swaying a la Woodstock. In the early ’70s the idea of going to a “dance?” Like, you mean at the junior high school? Nah, that was something your little sister did.

But fueling that, quantum leaps in sound quality had ushered in a golden age of listening to music, on vinyl LP’s or FM radio at home with your hi-fi rack system, bitchin’ speakers and state-of-the-art headphones, or sitting in a seat at the new civic center or arena, or in your car on eight-track tapes. The technology to fully immerse yourself in sound: almost all Americans could now afford. And for their part, the record biz delivered: sprawling, ambitious, mind-blowing stereophonic Progressive Rock and Soul concept album masterpieces that you could totally lose yourself in, which were now being reviewed as important artistic and cultural statements, not only in Rolling Stone and other upstart music journalism outlets, but even in highbrow dailies and glossy mags. And of course, also in those years, sonically-superior FM radio grew by leaps and bounds catering to album-oriented listeners.

But let’s face it, we humans? We have a basic need to get out on that dancefloor and shake our booties. One undeniable truth of pop culture history: people gonna find a way to dance. In the mid-’40s it seemed like the government and other powerful institutions had conspired to wipe out dancing, and Big Band Swing went extinct. That’s a story for another episode, but eventually, young people started seeking out R&B records that you could dance to and Rock ‘n Roll happened. And in the mid ’70s, Disco happened.

Its roots were in Funk, Latin Salsa, and of course the Philly Soul sounds of producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff showcased (yes, with actual dancing) on the syndicated TV show Soul Train starting in 1971. A string of danceable hits had made the top ten in ’74 and ’75, but it was the underground Gay community, in New York especially, that took all of that and fashioned it into the late ’70s Disco scene, with its whole hedonistic, upscale aesthetic of flashing lights, snazzy clothes, and edgy (you could even say defiant), urban sophistication.

Women, looking for ways to express their newfound social and sexual freedoms, were immediately drawn to it. And as any club owner can tell you, get the women in the door, and the straight men follow. So Disco brought back dancing, which was the whole point of Disco music: the beat, the groove. Deep, meaningful lyrics and musical complexity though? Not just extraneous, but deadly to a track’s success on the dancefloor.

And at the same time Disco was erupting, a more frontal assault was coalescing to the whole pop-culture-as-high-art media Establishment. Namely, Punk. First The Ramones out of New York’s Lower East Side, with their February 1976 album of noisy, primitive two-minute songs. Sure, Disco went against everything critics considered artistically important, but for a reason: dancing. The Ramones’ though? Their only reason seemed to be: to go against everything critics considered artistically important!

You’d think critics would’ve been horrified, and some were, but most couldn’t deny the coolness of what The Ramones were doing. Why? Irony. Intentional irony: doing what’s considered low-brow and unsophisticated, not because that’s all you can do and don’t know any better, but because it’s low-brow and unsophisticated: as a conscious rebellion against assumptions and orthodoxies. Well, that was something new! And for aspiring musicians: “You mean I don’t have to double major in music theory and medieval literature to be a rock star? Where do I sign up?” Everywhere The Ramones played, new Punk bands formed. Youngstown, Ohio? The Dead Boys. U.K.? The Sex Pistols and The Clash. L.A.? Too many to count. And that set the attitudinal template for New Wave and Alternative Rock for the next 30-plus years.

The British tabloids covered Punk as the next big thing in music and fashion, and The Sex Pistols actually landed two singles in the UK’s year-end ranking for 1977. In the U.S., it took Blondie’s unlikely marriage of Punk and Disco on “Heart of Glass” (with Disco being by far the dominant partner in that marriage) to get New York’s Punk scene anywhere near the American charts in 1979. The Ramones barely dented the Hot100 in their ’70s heyday. But if you listen for it, you can definitely pick up on the new ironic attitude shift that was happening in music in 1976 in a couple of the tracks we’re gonna hear this hour.

#10 Elton John and Kiki Dee – Don’t Go Breaking My Heart

Not in our #10 song, though. It has a touch of Disco but it’s as down-the-middle a straightforward Pop song as you could get in the mid-’70s, conceived as a nod to Marvin Gaye’s duets with Tammi Terrell and Kim Weston in the ’60s, by one of only two artists since the start of the Hot100 in 1958 to land hits in the top ten of our yearly rankings four years in a row. Needless to say, one of the biggest stars of the early ’70s. It’s Elton John, duetting here with singer Kiki Dee, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.”

So “Crocodile Rock,” our #7 song of 1973, “Bennie and the Jets,” #3 in ’74. “Philadelphia Freedom,” #3 in ’75 and his duet with Kiki Dee we just heard, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” #10 on the year 1976 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. Top ten hits of the year in four consecutive years: Elton John. The only other artist since the ’50s to pull that off: Mariah Carey, ’93 to ’96, and even pre-Hot100 there were only two: Bing Crosby, ’42 to ’45 and Patti Page, ’50 to ’53. That’s how big Elton John was in the ’70s.

His duet partner Kiki Dee, had just scored a #12 hit on the Hot100 with her soulful recording of “I’ve Got the Music in Me,” and she was one of Elton John’s go-to backup singers on a lot of his early classics. But she wasn’t Elton John’s first choice for “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” She only got the gig after Britain’s most famous blue-eyed soul singer, Dusty Springfield, turned it down due to illness.

#9 Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr. – You Don’t Have to Be a Star (To Be in My Show)

At #9, it’s another Soft Rock-Motown Disco-adjacent hybrid, definitely a winning formula in 1976, and our second duet in a row, by a husband and wife who were founding members of vocal group The Fifth Dimension. The husband, most famous for his ad-libbed, shouted counterpoints in the second half of the group’s era-defining 1969 Hair medley, “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In;” and the wife, for her solo vocals on their follow-up hit “Wedding Bell Blues” and every Fifth Dimension top ten after 1969.

In ’75 they branched off as a duo and their second single slowly but steadily climbed the chart after entering in September, not reaching the top ten ’til December and not peaking at #1 until January ’77. But long chart runs like that make for good placements on yearly rankings, especially when you factor full chart runs regardless of whether they’re all in the same year or not, as we do for every song here on Chartcrush. #9 on the year 1976 because that’s when it earned most of its chart points: Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, Jr.’s “You Don’t Have to Be a Star (To Be in My Show).”

Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, Jr., “You Don’t Have to Be a Star (To Be in My Show),” #9 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown show of the biggest hits of 1976. In summer ’77 while the song was going gold and winning its Grammy award, McCoo and Davis became the first Black couple to host their own primetime network variety show, all six episodes of which featured up-and-coming comedian and future Tonight Show host Jay Leno.

Their follow-up album was a commercial disappointment in ’78 but it did include McCoo’s first recording of the song that became Whitney Houston’s first #1 hit in 1985, “Saving All My Love for You.” Gen-Xers may better remember Marilyn McCoo as the host of the countdown show Solid Gold in the early ’80s. In 2019, McCoo and Davis had clearly survived the “Wedding Bell Blues” when they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.

#8 The Manhattans – Kiss and Say Goodbye

Up next at #8, one of the most successful of a string of slow R&B songs in the ’70s that featured a sexy deep-voiced spoken part, precision calibrated to make women go weak at the knees. Barry White, definitely the most enduringly famous artist in that style with his string of top tens from ’73 to ’77, but not the only. Here are The Manhattans: a #1 hit in the summer of ’76 that went on to be Billboard’s #3 year-end Soul/R&B hit of 1976 as well as our Chartcrush #8 Pop hit: “Kiss and Say Goodbye.”

“Kiss and Say Goodbye,” The Manhattans at #8 as we count down the top ten hits of 1976 here on the Chartcrush Countdown Show. Winfred “Blue” Lovett of The Manhattans wrote “Kiss and Say Goodbye.” And yep, that’s him with that groovy spoken introduction.

#7 Chicago – If You Leave Me Now

Now car radios, of course, have preset buttons, so if you don’t like a song, you push the button and change the station. Well in the ’70s, you only had four or five mechanical presets, and most folks set them to different types of stations. Well imagine a song being so ubiquitous that you’re in your car pushing the preset buttons, and all the stations are playing it at the same time. According to a writer at the music site PopMatters, in the Fall of ’76 in New York, our #7 song was that ubiquitous. It was by a band whose Greatest Hits album covering their first five years and nine top ten singles had just come out at the end of ’75, and then, not missing a beat, their next album of new material dropped in June of ’76. And its second single became their first and only #1 hit in the ’70s. It’s Chicago, not the first but the biggest of their hit ballads sung by bassist Peter Cetera before the ’80s, and the first to emphasize strings over the group’s trademark horns, “If You Leave Me Now.”

“If You Leave Me Now,” Chicago, #7. Bassist Peter Cetera’s last-minute addition to the album it was on, Chicago X, which featured the group’s script logo from all their albums on the cover, but this go-’round, embossed on a chocolate bar: a no doubt coincidental announcement of the new, more sugary sweet direction the group was being pulled in to keep scoring chart hits: ballads with strings, minimal horns and Peter Cetera at the mic. Their next top ten hit in ’77 was another Cetera lead with strings: “Baby What a Big Surprise,” their big, funky horn section on earlier hits reduced to a solo piccolo trumpet, which, unlike producer James William Guercio’s Flamenco-y guitar on “If You Leave Me Now,” was at least played by a band member!

#6 Barry Manilow – I Write the Songs

Now speaking of saccharine songs with strings… You know, I really shouldn’t introduce a song all snarky like that, but in this case, I really don’t think the artist would mind, because of all the artists throughout chart history who’ve scored big ballad hits, this guy was going for exactly that: big big ballad hits, in more than just a chart sense. Power ballads before there even was such a thing, and they built and sustained not only one of the longest and most successful careers in Pop history, but a record label and an entire radio format: Arista Records and Adult Contemporary, respectively. Even in a decade that brimmed with lush, sentimental ballads, there was nothing quite like a Barry Manilow song. Written by Beach Boys sideman Bruce Johnston, it’s Manilow’s second #1 hit after his breakthrough “Mandy” in 1975, “I Write the Songs.”

“I Write the Songs,” Barry Manilow, #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1976. How that song starts off slow and mellow and swells gradually to a thunderous orchestral crescendo that Phil Spector couldn’t have even imagined: all of Barry Manilow’s hits are like that, and he racked up nine of them in four-and-a-half years. Towards the end of that run of top tens in 1979, pop wiseguy Ray Stevens, whose novelty number “The Streak” was #1 for three weeks in 1974, nearly cracked the top 40 again with a send-up of the style called “I Need Your Help Barry Manilow.”

#5 Rick Dees and His Cast of Idiots – Disco Duck

So here we are at #5 and all we’ve heard are ballads and mid-tempo pop records, where’s the Disco? Well it’s time to put on your dancing shoes, picture the mirror ball and flashing lights, and boogie down! The #5 and #4 hits in our 1976 countdown: we couldn’t have chosen a better pair of artifacts to reflect the magnitude of the cresting Disco wave. And I say “reflect,” because neither are the object itself. There are plenty of straight-up Disco records in our ’77 to ’79 countdowns (and for that matter ’75 too!). No, both of these records are more properly regarded as reactions to a pop culture phenomenon, Disco, that arrived very suddenly and very unexpectedly in the mid-’70s. First at #5, a Memphis radio deejay’s goofy side-hustle song about a guy dancing at a party who gets the sudden urge to flap his arms like a duck. Next thing he knows, everybody’s doing it! Here’s Rick Dees and His Cast of Idiots: “Disco Duck.”

Rick Dees and His Cast of Idiots: “Disco Duck,” #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1976. Now you’re probably thinking to yourself, “wait a minute, do ducks cluck?” No, ducks don’t cluck! As any kindergartner can tell you, chickens cluck; ducks quack. But quack doesn’t rhyme with duck, so the Disco Duck clucks instead of quacks. But no self-respecting Donald Duck imitator would ever commit that gaffe, right? So you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that it’s not Rick Dees quacking on the record. It’s not Clarence Nash either, the original voice of Donald Duck from the Disney films (Disney has had to officially distance itself from involvement in “Disco Duck” numerous times). No, the duck voice on “Disco Duck” is one Ken Pruitt, who’s the guy at Rick Dees’ local gym who inspired him to write the song in the first place.

#4 Wild Cherry – Play That Funky Music

Now Billboard’s National Disco Action Top 30 chart debuted August 28, 1976: the first chart to document the popularity of Dance music. Eventually it evolved into the Dance Club Songs chart. “Disco Duck” never made the Dance chart despite being a top ten Pop hit from September to December. Our next record, however, was #18 on that first Dance chart and stayed on it for 12 weeks, making it not just a reflection of the Disco phenomenon, but a disco hit in its own right.

It’s the first and only top 40 hit by a hard-working regional Rock band that’d been playing club gigs since the start of the ’70s, grinding ’em out four, five, six nights a week, in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio. Then suddenly all the rock clubs are shutting down and Dance music is the happening new thing, with discos springing up everywhere, even where they were in Appalachia. So what’d they do? Well, the song tells the story. It got them their first major label record deal and was an immediate hit, catapulting them overnight from obscurity to the top of, not only the Hot100 for 3 weeks, but the Soul/R&B chart, and a pretty good showing on the Dance chart too. At #4 it’s Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music.”

“Play That Funky Music,” Wild Cherry, #1 for three weeks and the #4 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1976. White rapper Vanilla Ice had a #4 hit in 1990 with his Rap version of “Play That Funky Music.” Not a straight cover, but Ice sampled the Wild Cherry record quite liberally, without permission or co-writing credit. Well, you can probably guess what happened next. Big lawsuit; big payout: 85% of Ice’s royalties. Rob Parissi, Wild Cherry’s front man who wrote “Play That Funky Music,” says it amounted to nearly a million bucks, more than he made from the record in the ’70s!

#3 Walter Murphy – A Fifth of Beethoven

OK, so “Disco Duck” and “Play That Funky Music,” two reactions to disco that resonated in the culture massively enough to propel them both to #1. At #3 on our countdown, we head straight into the white hot center of Disco, with a Disco reimagining of one of Classical music’s best-known themes, and one of the few cuts that were on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack album, but were hits before film came out.

Walter Murphy was making a living on Madison Avenue writing ad jingles when something possessed him to adapt Beethoven for discos. No, apparently the Punk scene didn’t have a monopoly on irony in ’76. It’s an instrumental, the last in a Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown: Walter Murphy “A Fifth of Beethoven.”

Now although “A Fifth of Beethoven” was in fact all Walter Murphy, the label thought it would sell better if it was marketed as by a band. So “Big Apple Band” was tagged on after Murphy’s name on the single. But there was a real band with that name, so “Big Apple Band” was removed from later pressings of the record. The damage was done, though, and the real Big Apple Band had to change their name, to Chic: Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards’s outfit who scored the #1 song of 1979 according to our Chartcrush ranking, “Le Freak.”

#2 Wings – Silly Love Songs

Now our song at #2 as we close in on the #1 hit of 1976 here on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1976: you may not think it’s a Disco song, but the artist kind of did, on the strength of its bassline. Being a bass player, he thought it was one of the best things he ever did on the instrument, and bass players to this day marvel at videos of him effortlessly playing it live, a driving rhythm, while singing the melody. It’s former Beatle Paul McCartney, with his group Wings. Their Wings Over America tour, McCartney’s first since The Beatles, helped propel the song on the charts. #2: Paul McCartney and Wings, “Silly Love Songs.”

Paul McCartney and Wings, “Silly Love Songs,” the #2 song of 1976. Now after The Beatles broke up, the Fab Four released even more music individually than they had as a group. They’d always had their individual styles of course, even when they were together. But at their best as a band, their different approaches combined into… well, into Beatles songs.

As solo acts in the ’70s though, there didn’t need to be any of that compromising with bandmates, and with McCartney, that meant he could indulge his most sappy and sentimental tendencies that had come through on Beatles songs like “When I’m 64,” “Yesterday” and “Penny Lane.” He took a lot of heat for it though, from Rock critics, sure, but even from his former bandmate John Lennon, whose public disses must’ve stung pretty bad. So “Silly Love Songs” was his response. “Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs. What’s wrong with that?”

AllMusic writer Stephen Thomas Erlewine called the song “so lightweight that its lack of substance seems nearly defiant.” Well, against the backdrop of uber-serious mid-70s Rock and soul-bearing Singer-Songwriter confessionals (to say nothing about angsty punk rock), “Silly Love Songs” was defiant. And it was #1 for five weeks, Chartcrush’s #2 song of 1976 and the song Billboard named the #1 song of the year! So take that, critics!

#1 Rod Stewart – Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright)

Now the only reason “Silly Love Songs” isn’t our #1 song of the year too is: the song Billboard named its #1 year-end Hot100 song of 1977, was really a 1976 hit. It was #1 for eight weeks starting November 13. But Billboard has never been able to count big hits late in the year towards year-end rankings because they have to call a cut-off week to give themselves time to tabulate the year-end charts and get their year-in-review issue out before New Years. It’s a flaw that’s been baked-in to Billboard’s year-end rankings since the beginning, which we correct here at Chartcrush by counting every song’s full chart run in whichever calendar year it accumulated the most points.

Fortunately for this song, Billboard did count its weeks at #1 in late ’76 toward its 1977 rankings, which made it the #1 song of 1977. But those weeks, being in calendar ’76, make it our #1 song of 1976. The artist: no stranger to ballads, but he was mainly thought of as a Blues Rocker from his start in the late ’60s in the Jeff Beck Group, then the British album rock group Faces and his early solo records like “Maggie May” and “You Wear It Well” in the early ’70s. Here is Rod Stewart’s big Pop comeback, “Tonight’s the Night.”

So as we heard in the first half of today’s show, the mid-’70s, not just when Disco and Punk erupted, but also one of the great chillout periods in Pop history. Another example, the #1 song in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1976, Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night.” What we just heard, by the way, is the single edit. The sexy French pillow-talk heard in the fadeout of the slightly longer album version, courtesy of Stewart’s then-girlfriend Britt Eklund: a bit too racy for AM Top 40 in 1976, so it was omitted from the single.

Bonus

Well that’s our countdown. Before we wrap up the show, though, let’s take a look at the songs that made Billboard’s year-end top ten that we didn’t hear this hour.

#16 Gary Wright – Love Is Alive

First, a Prog Rocker whose album in ’76, The Dream Weaver, was one of the first done almost entirely with synthesizers, and the two hit singles from it both peaked at #2. The one Billboard had at #9 on the year, though, was on the chart seven more weeks than the title track thanks to its funky bassline, which was, you guessed it, a synth! It’s Gary Wright’s “Love Is Alive.”

#16 on our Chartcrush ranking for ’76, but #9 on Billboard’s, Gary Wright’s “Love Is Alive:” All synths except the vocals and drums. Wright, not a Brit despite seven years with the English Prog Rock group Spooky Tooth; he was an American from New Jersey.

#26 Paul Simon – 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover

At #8, Billboard had Paul Simon’s first and only solo #1 hit, “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.”

Wait, Paul Simon only gives us five ways to leave your lover: “Slip out the back, Jack. Hop on the bus, Gus,” et cetera. Where does “50” come from?

Now Billboard in ’76 gave massive bonus points in its year-end ranking if a song’s weeks at #1 were consecutive. “50 Ways” had three consecutive weeks and they ranked it #8, but without that extra juice, no way it makes the top ten with only 17 weeks total on the chart. The average total weeks for #1s in ’76, 21. We have “50 Ways” at #26 on the year.

#11 The Miracles – Love Machine, Part 1

Not even close, but Billboard‘s #7 song with 28 weeks on the chart just misses our top ten at #11: the biggest post-Smokey Robinson Miracles hit, “Love Machine.”

Smokey Robinson left the Miracles in ’72 to be a full-time executive at Motown, but the group kept going with Billy Griffin singing lead, and “Love Machine” was their biggest hit ever, with or without Smokey, produced by Freddie Perren, Billboard’s Top Singles Producer of ’76.

#12 The Four Seasons – December 1963 (Oh What a Night)

Billboard’s #4 song, another one that benefitted from Billboard‘s extra bonus points in ’76 for consecutive weeks at #1. It also had three, like Paul Simon, but was on the chart six weeks longer, so it comes out at #12 on our Chartcrush ranking. It’s The Four Seasons’ “December 1963 (Oh What a Night).”

Fun fact: according to Songwriter Bob Gaudio, the original idea for “December 1963 (Oh What a Night)” was to pay tribute to the date Prohibition was repealed, December 5, 1933, but no one liked that, so he re-wrote it to be about an imaginary romantic memory in December 1963, which were The Four Seasons’ salad days just before the Beatles and the British Invasion.

#13 Johnnie Taylor – Disco Lady

Finally, Billboard’s #3 song of the year is another one where those extra bonus points that they awarded for consecutive weeks at #1 made all the difference. It had four, but only two more weeks on the chart than “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” 19. We have it at #13.

It’s the first #1 with “Disco” in the title, beating “Disco Duck” which we heard back at #5 by six months. And it’s also the first single to be certified Platinum by the RIAA for sales of a million. Not the first million-seller, but the first to be Platinum certified. ’76 the first year for that. It’s Johnnie Taylor’s “Disco Lady.”

When Memphis’s Stax Records folded in 1975, Columbia snapped up Johnny Taylor up along with his longtime Producer Don Davis, and “Disco Lady” was his first #1 ever, and first top ten since 1968’s “Who’s Making Love.”

Well that’s gonna have to be a wrap. Thanks for listening to our 1976 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. On our website, chartcrush.com, you can get a written transcript and streamable Spotify version of this and other Chartcrush Countdown Shows, plus chart run line graphs and other off-the-hook extras. Every week, we count down a different year from the beginning of the charts in the ’40s all the way up to the present, so tune again, same station, same time, for 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 dive deep into a year in Pop music and count down the top 10 songs according to our recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s leading trade publication, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush it’s 1963, The last year before The Beatles hit in February ’64 and everything changed in American Pop. Or so say most pop culture critics and writers since the ’60s, almost like an article of faith.

Beatlemania was a huge pop culture event, no doubt: a sudden mass hysteria over four English guys no one had even heard of just a few weeks before. And a lot did change, and very quickly. But the problem with looking at it like that, like some kind of BC/AD moment: everything that happened before matters less, or not at all.

As much as Beatlemania might’ve seemed like a random thunderbolt out of the sky, it didn’t happen in a vacuum; what was happening in ’63 and before set the stage. For starters, teenagers’ disposable incomes had been rising for years, and by the early ’60s there were millions to be made targeting them with their own movies, records, TV shows and products. This was already abundantly clear by 1963, and thanks to the Baby Boom entering their teens, there were going to be more and more teenagers every quarter as far as the eye could see. Over 14 million babies born in the last four years of the ’40s, and the first born in ’46 turned 16 in 1962. So it should come as no surprise that the average age of artists scoring #1 hits reached an all-time low of just under 23 in 1963. Both the youngest female and male solo acts ever to score #1 hits scored them in 1963. So the kiddos were preferring records by other kiddos. But they were also suddenly (before The Beatles) preferring records from other countries and cultures, with the Jet Age just beginning to bring nonstop transatlantic travel within reach for millions of Americans.

Billboard’s music editor from 1947 to 1973, Paul Ackerman, picked up on this in his feature story in the year-in-review issue for 1963, writing that the music scene is “richer and more varied than at any period in past history” and “more international than ever before,” ranging “far afield to acquire hit material from European countries.” Again, that was in late ’63, before The Beatles hit. Our countdown of the top ten hits of ’63 has not one, but two records that aren’t in English!

#10 Little Peggy March – I Will Follow Him

But kicking things off, the aforementioned youngest female solo act to ever score a #1 hit on the Hot100, beating Brenda Lee by about six months. Lee was also 15 when her first hit, “I’m Sorry” topped the chart in July of 1960. Some others have come close over the years. Tiffany had just turned 16 when her first #1, “I Think We’re Alone Now” peaked in 1987. Lorde was also 16 when “Royals” hit #1 in 2013. Teen chart toppers Debbie Gibson, Monica, Britney Spears and Olivia Rodrigo: all 17 when they notched their first #1s. No, the youngest remains our singer at #10, whose second single hit #1 in April ’63 just after her 15th birthday. It’s Little Peggy March, “I Will Follow Him.”

“I Will Follow Him” at #10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 1963. Margaret Annemarie Battavio, discovered at just 13 singing at her cousin’s wedding by big-time RCA-Victor producers Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore, who had their own distinctive “Hugo & Luigi” logo stamped on every record they produced. Hugo & Luigi, best known for producing all of Sam Cooke’s hits at RCA. Anyway, Margaret’s birthday was in March, so she became Little Peggy March. Later in ’63 into ’64, RCA followed up “I Will Follow Him” with four more singles in rapid succession, but nothing else cracked the top 20. She did, however, continue scoring hits in Germany, where she decided to move in ’69 and was a major star through the ’70s.

#9 Steve Lawrence – Go Away, Little Girl

At #9, an act whose appeal went beyond the teen market, having gotten his start in the mid-’50s as a regular singer—duetting with his future wife Eydie Gormé—on the first late-night network TV talk show, NBC’s The Tonight Show, co-created and hosted until 1957 by comedian Steve Allen, succeeded through the decades by Jack Parr, Johnny Carson, Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon in that order. The singer had already established himself as a top Easy Listening talent by ’63 when Columbia signed him and his first record for the label became his first #1 hit on the pop charts. It’s our #9 song: latter-day traditional pop crooner Steve Lawrence, “Go Away, Little Girl.”

#9, Steve Lawrence, soloing without wife Eydie Gormé, on 1963’s #9 hit according to our ranking here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. The song, by Brill Building power songwriting couple, Gerry Goffin and Carole King. “Go Away, Little Girl” topped the Hot100 for two weeks in January ’63, and returned in 1971 in a cover version by teen heartthrob Donny Osmond. Since the Hot100 began in 1958, only nine songs have reached #1 by different artists, and two of them, written by Goffin and King. The other: “The Loco-Motion,” first a hit for Little Eva in 1962, then the hard rock version by Grand Funk Railroad in ’74.

#8 Kyu Sakamoto – Sukiyaki

Now the pop charts had been making nice with our former World War II enemy Germany since 1949 when two versions of “Forever and Ever,” the theme song of the German Luftwaffe, with new English lyrics, were among the year’s top 10 records. ’49, the year of the Berlin Blockade and then the Allies’ epic airlift of food and fuel that’d stopped West Berlin being absorbed into Soviet-controlled East Germany at the start of the Cold War. Other German songs had topped the charts since, as Germany remained a nexus of Cold War tensions. The biggest, English singer Vera Lynn’s “Auf Weiderseh’n Sweetheart” in ’52 and Joe Dowell’s “Wooden Heart” in ’61.

’63, by the way, the year of President Kennedy’s historic trip to West Berlin and his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” (“I am a Berliner”) speech. But it took a lot longer for the Pop charts to make nice with our Pacific Theater foe in World War II, Japan, and that happened, yep, in 1963, when one of the two foreign language songs in our countdown topped the chart in June. Disco group A Taste of Honey took their remake of it to #3 on the charts in 1981, but here’s the original: Kyu Sakamoto’s “Sukiyaki.”

Kyu Sakamoto’s “Sukiyaki,” the only Japanese language song ever to top the U.S. pop charts: #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1963. Now, just so you know, “Sukiyaki” isn’t actually the real title of that tune. The real title is “Ue O Muite Aruko,” which translates to “I Look Up When I Walk.” It got retitled to “Sukiyaki” by a British label exec worried that DJs might have trouble with the title, and Capitol Records followed suit when they put it out in the U.S. a few months later.

Now are you ready for this? In Japanese, “Sukiyaki” is… a beef stir-fry dish! But few Brits or Americans in 1963 knew or cared. They loved the song though, enough to make it not only the first song in Japanese, but just the second song in any foreign language to top the Hot100. Domenico Modugno’s “Neu del Pinto de Blu” in Italian (better known as “Volare”) was the first in 1960.

#7 Little Stevie Wonder – Fingertips, Part 2

So at #10 we heard the youngest ever female solo act to score a #1 hit, Little Peggy March’s “I Will Follow Him.” At #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1963, the youngest ever male solo act to score a #1. It’s the chart debut—just his fourth single—by an African-American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist musician and producer who entered the seventh decade of his chart career when “Where Is Our Love Song” made the R&B and Adult Contemporary charts in 2020. In that time, eight of his nearly 60 Hot100 charting singles have been #1s, starting with this one that reached the top of the chart when he was just 13. It’s also the first live record to hit #1. Here’s Little Stevie Wonder, billed by Motown as “the 12-year-old genius” (he was 12 when it was recorded), “Fingertips.”

#7, Little Stevie Wonder, “Fingertips” on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 1963—a two-part song that spanned both sides of the 45 it came out on. The hit we just heard was Part Two, starting with Stevie yelling “Everybody say yeah.” Oh, and guess who’s playing drums on that record? It’s Marvin Gaye, whose first top 10 hit was also in 1963, “Pride and Joy.”

#6 The Angels – My Boyfriend’s Back

OK, next at #6, we have the first record by a White Girl Group to hit #1. Black Girl Groups The Shirelles, Marvelettes, Crystals and Chiffons (in that order) had all done it previously. This group from the New York ‘burbs in Jersey scored their big hit with a song written and produced by one of the members’ boyfriends at the time, Jerry Goldstein, who with his partners Bob Feldman and Richard Gottehrer racked up a long, impressive list of writing and production credits in the ’60s and ’70s, including their own Pop group The Strangeloves in ’65. Their big hit, “I Want Candy.” At #6, The Angels on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1963: “My Boyfriend’s Back.”

#6, The Angels, “My Boyfriend’s Back,” counting down the top hits of 1963 on this week’s edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show: one of the most familiar ’60s Girl Group songs. But did you know that there was an answer song on the charts in ’63? Yep. Bobby Comstock’s “Your Boyfriend’s Back,” in which the rebuffed suitor who’s gonna be in trouble in “My Boyfriend’s Back” promises to produce pictures and letters to show Mr. Awful Big ‘n Strong and let him know what’s really up! Uh oh! The answer song, incidentally, also written and produced by Goldstein, Feldman and Gottehrer.

#5 Paul & Paula – Hey Paula

At #5 we have a song written by a college basketball player, Ray Hildebrand, while coach was letting him live in the gym over the summer. Now Ray didn’t live in the gym all year. When school was in session he stayed at a boarding house. And the landlord at the boarding house had a niece, Jill Jackson, who got a chance to sing live on the radio and tapped Ray as her duet partner—and they decided to do the song Ray had written over the summer in the gym. Well, a DJ at the radio station recorded the performance and started playing it on the air like it was a record. When requests started pouring in, Ray and Jill sought out a producer with a small label in nearby Ft. Worth, Texas to cut a record, and when that became a regional hit, it got picked up by Phillips for national release. But first, Ray and Jill had to change their names on the record to Paul and Paula so they’d match the names in the song. At #5, it’s “Hey Paula.”

Yeah, it might not have had the same impact if it’d come out under their real names, Ray and Jill. But as Paul & Paula, they scored the #5 hit of 1963, “Hey Paula,” and started a duet craze on the Pop charts as labels immediately scrambled to pair up, for example, Nino Tempo & April Stevens and Dale & Grace, who topped the Hot100 back-to-back in late ’63.

#4 Bobby Vinton – Blue Velvet

We are counting down the top ten hits of 1963 on this week’s Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, and we’re down to #4. It’s by a singer whose very first charting single in 1962 was a #1 hit and the #4 song of 1962. To follow that up, he decided to do an album of 12 songs, all with “Blue” in the title. “Blue Skies,” “Blue Moon,” “Blue Hawaii,” “Blueberry Hill,” “Little Miss Blue,” and so on. Ironically, the title of the #1 hit in 1962 that started it all was “Roses Are Red (My Love).” Here’s Bobby Vinton at #4: “Blue Velvet.”

“Blue Velvet,” Bobby Vinton, #4: a hit first for Crooner Tony Bennett early in his career all the way back in 1951. In the U.K., Vinton’s version did not make the charts until 1990, when it was used in a commercial for a certain brand of hand moisturizer that comes in a blue container, and went all the way to #2.

The song, of course, shares its title with and is featured throughout Twin Peaks director David Lynch’s 1986 cult film Blue Velvet. Vinton scored again late in the year with a cover of Vaughn Monroe’s 1945 hit, “There! I’ve Said It Again,” which is our Chartcrush #6 song of 1964, and the last #1 song before Beatlemania and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” swept America in February ’64.

#3 The Singing Nun – Dominique

So, back at #8 we heard the first of the two foreign language records in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown: Japanese singer Kyu Sakamoto’s “Sukiyaki.” At #3 is the second, and it’s in French. It’s also the last record entirely in a foreign tongue to top the Hot100 until Los Lobos’s version of “La Bamba” in 1987.

Jeanne-Paule Marie Deckers was a Dominican nun in a convent in Belgium who liked to write songs and accompany herself on guitar. With encouragement from her fellow sisters, she cut an album that included this song about the saint who founded her order, St. Dominic, and DJs turned to it after President Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas to soothe listeners, whereupon it rocketed to the top of the charts for the four weeks of December. Here’s “Sister Smile,” The Singing Nun: “Dominique.”

“Dominique” by The Singing Nun at #3. Now, the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963 initiated one of the most tumultuous (and unusual) couple of months in Pop history, late ’63 into ’64: a crucible in which the nation’s profound mourning, confusion and distress intermingled with the already-manifesting restlessness, seeking, and boundless energy of the emerging Baby Boom generation.

“Dominique” topped the charts for a whole month right after, followed by Bobby Vinton’s next hit after “Blue Velvet,” the cover I mentioned earlier of Vaughn Monroe’s massive 1945 hit that every older American knew: “There! I’ve Said It Again.”

For six of the combined eight weeks that The Singing Nun and Vinton were on top, the #2 song was The Kingsmen’s monumentally inept “Louie Louie,” propelled to its chart heights by teen Boomers investigating rumors of swear words and pornographic themes in the song’s hopelessly unintelligible lyrics. Then, in early February ’64, just like that, Beatlemania seemed to wipe the whole slate clean.

By the way, in ’66, a movie called The Singing Nun inspired by Jeanne Deckers starring Debbie Reynolds was a hit, in which Reynolds sings “Dominique.”

#2 The Chiffons – He’s So Fine

So maybe you’ve noticed: lots of female acts in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1963. We’ve heard three so far plus a male-female duet, and our #2 song is another: a new high watermark for the ladies after coming up short at the top of the charts for most of the late ’50s and early ’60s. And it came the same year Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published and JFK signed the Equal Pay Act into law: part of his New Frontier Program.

By our reckoning here at Chartcrush, ’63 was the strongest year for female acts in the top ten until 1977. We already heard from The Angels at #6; at #2, another Girl Group: The Bronx, New York’s own Chiffons, “He’s So Fine.”

Doo-lang doo-lang doo-lang, The Chiffons at #2 on the year 1963 with “He’s So Fine:” the plaintiff song in one of the first high-profile music plagiarism lawsuits against Beatle George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord,” his first solo hit and our Chartcrush #5 song of 1971. It took years for that case to wind its way through the courts, and The Chiffons even went back in the studio to do a version of “My Sweet Lord” to bolster the case. The ruling went against the former Beatle, but then it was many more years before Harrison had to pay up, about a half a million dollars. ♫ Cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching!

By the way, 1963, not just an important year for women; Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was in August ’63, at the historic Civil Rights March on Washington. Exactly a year later The Supremes scored the first of their five consecutive #1s, and four of the top ten records of 1964 were by Black artists.

#1 Jimmy Gilmer & The Fireballs – Sugar Shack

Another development in pre-1964 pop that helped pave the way for Beatlemania and the British Invasion: the concept of Rock bands: young musicians working as a unit, playing instruments and writing songs. Until instrumental Rock and Surf groups started scoring hits, it was all soloists, orchestras and vocal groups on the Pop charts. The Champs’ “Tequila:” the first big instrumental Rock ‘n Roll hit credited to a band in early 1958, then The Virtues’ “Guitar Boogie Shuffle” and Johnny & Hurricanes’ “Red River Rock” in ’59, The Ventures’ “Walk, Don’t Run” in ’60, String-a-Longs, Tornadoes and Rebels in ’61 and ’62, and then, of course The Beach Boys—all pre-British Invasion. And the #1 song of 1963, a mostly instrumental group out of New Mexico who’d scored minor hits with instrumentals “Torquay” and “Bulldog” in 1959 and ’60, but found that they could increase their audiences’ attention spans by sprinkling a few vocal numbers into the set. And one of those became by far their biggest hit. It’s The Fireballs with Rockabilly singer Jimmy Gilmer, #1 for five weeks in October and November, “Sugar Shack.”

The #1 song of 1963, Jimmy Gilmer & The Fireballs’ “Sugar Shack,” on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show: a song about a coffee shop. Or about a girl who works at a coffee shop. Well I guess that depends on what time of day you’re listening, right? I don’t know about you, but first thing, I’m all about the coffee! What girl?

Coffeehouses had become hipster teen hangouts in the early ’60s thanks to Beatnik Folkie culture, but songwriter Keith McCormick wrote “Sugar Shack” while enjoying his morning joe, not at a hipster hangout, but at his aunt Faye’s house. And he gave her a songwriting co-credit on what wound up being a #1 hit, just for supplying the name of the sexy tight pants all the Folkie Beatnik hipster coffeehouse chicks were wearing. It’s in the lyrics: she’s got bare feet, and a black… “leotard.”

Later in 1963, a singer named Georgia Lynn recorded a soundalike answer record from the girl’s point of view: “Sugar Shack Queen.”

And that is our Chartcrush top ten for 1963 here on this week’s Chartcrush Countdown show.

Now for our bonus segment in the time we have left, we’re gonna do a mini-countdown: the top three from Billboard’s originally published 1963 year-end Hot100 chart, none of which made our Chartcrush top 10! Now admittedly, that does seem a little weird, that the top three on Billboard’s official year-end ranking are absent from our top 10, but in those days before there was a computer on everyone’s desk, Billboard was using a much simpler ranking method that tends to grossly overemphasize longevity on the chart, at the expense of songs that reached the top 10 or #1. Sure enough, none of the three songs (again, Billboard’s top three for 1963) ever made it to #1, and all had chart runs that were longer than the average for songs that reached the top 10 in ’63: 13 weeks. Well, with the benefit of technology we can apply a more modern ranking method like what Billboard evolved in later years retroactively to the weekly chart data and get a much more accurate ranking for 1963, and that’s exactly what we do here at Chartcrush.

Bonus: The Cascades – Rhythm of the Rain

So first up at #3, counting down Billboard’s top three that weren’t in our top ten countdown, a song that was on the chart 16 weeks but only peaked at #3. Group member John Claude Gummoe wrote the song on watch in the U.S. Navy during a thunderstorm and recorded it with his group after he was out of the service. Despite it being a massive hit, and their best efforts to follow it up, it was their only hit. Here are The Cascades, “Rhythm of the Rain.”

Cascades, “Rhythm of the Rain,” Billboard’s #3 song of 1963; #15 on our Chartcrush ranking. Like The Fireballs, whose “Sugar Shack” we heard at #1 on our countdown, The Cascades were originally an instrumental group called The Thundernotes. Inspired by fellow Californians The Beach Boys, they decided to add vocals, and changed their name to The Cascades after seeing, I kid you not, a box of dishwasher soap!

Bonus: Skeeter Davis – The End of the World

Next in our bonus segment here on our 1963 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, the #2 song on Billboard’s published ranking, again ranking high due to its longer-than-average chart run of 17 weeks. We have it at #17. It’s a female singer who’d been racking up top ten hits on the Country charts for five years, but didn’t cross over to the Hot100 at all ’til a DJ started spinning this record on one of New York’s biggest Top 40 stations, WABC. It’s Skeeter Davis, “The End of the World.”

You know, sometimes you have to read between the lines a little to figure out why certain songs became hits. “The End of the World,” of course, is about a devastating breakup; but it came out in October ’62, just as the U.S. and Soviet Union were on the brink of nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis. So doomsday fears, combined with the alarming title and Skeeter Davis’s innocent, childlike voice? Kind of the perfect ironic complement, to early ’60s Cold War tensions. It debuted on the Country chart in December, but didn’t start climbing up the Pop chart until the middle of January, whereupon it climbed steadily to its peak at #2.

Bonus: The Beach Boys – Surfin’ U.S.A.

And that gets us to the #1 song on our mini-countdown of Billboard’s top three hits of 1963 on its original published year-end Hot100 chart. Like “End of the World,” the song stayed on the chart 17 weeks but never got to #1. Our Chartcrush ranking puts it at #22 on the year. But it’s an important song by one of 1963’s top acts: The Beach Boys, “Surfin’ U.S.A.”

That California Surf sound was a pretty big deal the year before the British Invasion hit. One Surf song did make it to #1 during the year. That was Jan & Dean’s “Surf City” for two weeks in July, and at #13 it outranks “Surfin’ U.S.A.” at #22 on our Chartcrush ranking. But again, “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” #1 on Billboard’s published year-end Hot100 for the year.

Bonus: The Kingsmen – Louie Louie

OK, the top three from Billboard’s year-end ranking for 1963, none in our Chartcrush top 10 for the year. Very strange indeed, and in that spirit, we’re gonna wrap up our 1963 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show with a song I’ve mentioned a few times this hour: one of the most ineptly performed and recorded records ever to make the top 40, let alone the top 10, yet it sat at the #2 spot for six weeks, in the top 10 for nine weeks, and was of the songs that bridged the gap between the Kennedy assassination and The Beatles. Here now, the birth of American Garage Rock in the ’60s: The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie.”

National Lampoon’s Animal House prominently featured “Louie Louie” even though the writers knew the record didn’t exist yet in 1962 when the movie is set. But really, what other song could they have used as a backdrop for the drunken antics at Delta House fraternity during pledge week?

The early ‘sixties ’60s after the payola scandal in ’59 and ’60 had such a chilling effect on rock ‘n roll labels, radio stations and personalities: not many straight-up, gritty, sloppy rock ‘n roll hits to choose from. British Invasion acts like the Rolling Stones and Kinks usually get the credit for filling that void, but “Louie Louie” and American Garage Rock was there first.

And that’s gonna have to do it for our 1963 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Check out our website, chartcrush.com, for written transcripts and streaming links for this and other Chartcrush countdown shows, plus chart run line graphs and other neato extras. We count down a different year every week from the beginning of the charts in the ’40s all the way up to the present, so tune in again next week, same station and time, for 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 count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in the music industry’s top trade publication, Billboard magazine. This week on Chartcrush, we’re turning the clock back to 1949, when the biz emerged from the second and final musicians’ strike over royalty payments by record labels by James C. Petrillo’s American Federation of Musicians.

Both so-called “Petrillo bans” had prohibited union musicians (basically all professional musicians in the ’40s) from cutting records, and the first, which lasted two years from 1942 into ’44 had been a crushing blow to Big Bands. Swing Jazz: all but extinct by ’48.

So during the second ban, record labels focused on other things, like inventing new kinds of records!

Up ’til the late ‘40s, the fragile, breakable ten-inch 78 rpm shellac record was the only format for music. Each side could have about three and a half minutes of music: a song. They were singles. The word “album” (what we still call a collection of songs packaged together): until 1948 when Columbia launched the 33⅓ rpm vinyl LP record (LP short for “long playing”), an “album” was literally an album, like a book or photo album, of 78s that you put on a bookshelf. An LP has, what? 10 songs or tracks? Well, that would be five 78s in an “album” of records.

Not to be outdone, in 1949, Columbia’s arch-rival, RCA-Victor, introduced the 45 rpm vinyl record. At launch, RCA pitched the 45 as not only a new format for singles, but as a competitor to the LP. People were already used to discs with one song on each side, and you could stack 45s in any order and play a whole “album” of them or even create your own album. Plus, they were smaller and more portable, and RCA, also the biggest consumer electronics company, was ready with several models of players with changers for 45s.

Of course, what ended up happening was: the LP became the format for “albums” for the next 40 years, and the 45 became the format for singles, eliminating the shellac 78. But in 1949, when union musicians could record again, unbreakable LPs and 45s were the new media, and vinyl itself, a kind of plastic: this new, atomic-age synthetic stuff: it was all very futuristic and exotic and exciting.

Now before we start counting down the songs, a note about how we compile our rankings for the pre-Hot100 era here on Chartcrush. Billboard launched its Hot100 chart in 1958. Before that there were three different weekly Pop charts, Best Sellers in Stores, Most Played by DJs and Most Played on Jukeboxes, which Billboard compiled from weekly nationwide surveys of participating retail proprietors, radio DJs and jukebox operators.

The Hot100 combined these sources and streamlined things, but actually, the three separate charts give us more, not less, information about what was popular and with whom than the combined ranking compiled from the same sources behind the scenes.

If you do a search for the top songs of 1949 or any other pre-Hot100 year, chances are what you’ll find is Billboard’s year-end Best Sellers chart, as if every household had an expensive record player and a collection of 78s lying around: certainly not the case in the ’40s and even for most of the ’50s. As in all eras, looking only at sales of physical media paints a picture that skews older and richer.

But that was even more true pre-Hot100. So rather than fall back on Best Sellers, what we’ve done here at Chartcrush is: just what Billboard did when it created the Hot100: combined the three pre-Hot100 charts (Sales, Airplay and Jukeboxes) with equal weight for each into a single weekly ranking. And then from there we apply the exact same methodology we use for Hot100 years to get our year-end rankings.

#10 Perry Como – Forever and Ever

OK, so now that that’s out of the way, let’s spin some records! Our artist at #10 was back as the year’s top Crooner after holding that distinction two years in a row in ’46 and ’47. But not only that, he was the top artist in ’49, after slumping in 1948. Of the 15 sides he cut in a frenzy in late ’47 before the musicians’ strike went into effect, only one made the top ten. But in ’49, he had his best year yet, with six top tens. What a comeback! More about how and why after the song. Here’s Perry Como’s “Forever and Ever.”

Perry Como, “Forever and Ever,” #10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1949. As I said before the song, ’49 was Perry Como’s best year yet after being on top for two years, then slumping in ’48. Of course, dramatic comebacks have happened throughout chart history, and while it can sometimes be a chore to try to figure out why, with Perry Como it’s pretty easy. Television!

’49 was the tipping point when prices dropped and everyone who could afford one went out and bought a TV: 100,000 sets a week were selling in ’49, with new stations popping up everywhere, not just in big cities. And it wasn’t just Perry Como. Also in ’49, a previously unknown Chicago Pianist-Singer’s very first record (Al “Flying Fingers” Morgan’s “Jealous Heart”) rocketed up the Best Sellers chart after his half-hour TV show premiered, proving that early TV adopters were also big-time record buyers.

But even before that, at the end of ’48, NBC decided to wheel some cameras in to televise established artist Perry Como’s usual Friday evening network radio show since 1944, The Chesterfield Supper Club. And from there all the way ’til 1967, Perry Como was one of TV’s highest rated variety hosts and a top Crooner on the charts.

#9 Russ Morgan – Forever and Ever

Now we’ll be hearing from Perry Como again in our countdown, but we’re not quite done with that song, “Forever and Ever,” either, because it’s also our #9 record, by a different act. That’s right: two versions of the same song at the same time! Almost unheard of since the ’60s, but common in the ’40s into the ’50s. When a new song was published or was a hit, every record label’s A&R guy would scramble to match it up with an artist on their roster. That was their job: matching artists to repertoire: A and R. Often, many versions would chart, and occasionally more than one would be a big hit.

So, “Forever and Ever” started out as an old German folk song that was published and a big hit in Germany in 1940. When London Records noticed a sales spike in 1948, they thought “wow, what if this song was in English?” and recruited New York ukulele pioneer May Singhi Breen (“The Ukulele Lady”) to write English lyrics, whereupon multiple versions appeared of what Time described in 1949 as “the kind of lilting, easygoing melody in 3/4 time that almost everyone thought he had heard before, but no one could remember exactly where or when.”

London’s version by English singer Gracie Fields was the first to come out, but the two that were the biggest hits were also the first to chart: Perry Como’s and the one we’re about to hear at #9 by a Bandleader who’d been at it since the early ’20s. He’d had some minor chart successes earlier in the ’40s, but ’49 was his year, with four top tens including two #1’s—all waltzy, singalongy carnival-sounding numbers like this. Here’s Russ Morgan & His Orchestra: the biggest hit version of “Forever and Ever.”

Russ Morgan—”Music in the Morgan Manner”— the tagline on all his records and the title of his radio program since the ’30s, joined by vocal group The Skylarks: their version of “Forever and Ever,” beating out Perry Como’s in our ranking by just a hair, the #9 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 1949.

Now as I mentioned, “Forever and Ever” was a song that was a hit in Germany in 1940, with new English lyrics written in 1948. Well the original German song’s title translates to “Fly Home with Me,” and get this: it was the theme song of the German Luftwaffe in World War Two! So how in the world did the theme song of Hitler’s air force become a hit less than four years after the War? Well, it’s doubtful that many in the West knew any of this, but Germany was very much top of mind in ’48 and ’49 because of the Berlin Blockade and Airlift.

The Soviet Union had refused to join the other Allies in winding down the occupation of Germany and pulling out troops. So Britain, France and the U.S. combined their respective occupied sectors and formed a new, democratic, capitalist nation state, West Germany. The Soviets were not at all happy about this. So since Germany’s biggest city and capital, Berlin, was situated deep inside the Soviet-occupied Eastern sector, completely surrounded, the Soviets cut off the electricity and launched a military blockade, a siege to starve and freeze the Allied-occupied Western half into submission and absorb all of the city into East Germany.

It didn’t work. Public sympathy for suffering Berliners mounted, and the Allies’ Berlin Airlift, incredibly, kept over two million West Berliners warm, fed and clothed through the Winter by flying hundreds of tons of supplies over the blockade into West Berlin via previously-agreed-upon air corridors. Finally in the Spring of ’49, the Soviets lifted the blockade after nearly a year, but to make sure they were ready if it happened again, the Allies formed The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO.

#8 Margaret Whiting & Jimmy Wakely – Slippin’ Around

OK, moving on now to #8, which was the first of seven top 20 hits for the unlikely Duet pairing of a top Female Pop singer since her early hits with pianist Freddie Slack’s Swing band in 1942, and a western movie Actor turned Singing Cowboy who’d just scored his first top ten Country crossover hit in ’48 with  “One Has My Name (The Other Has My Heart).”

The naughty (but playful) Duet shot into the top ten in late September, and stayed all the way ’til February 1950. It’s Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely, doing Western Swing and Honky Tonk trailblazer Floyd Tillman’s Country hit from earlier in the year, “Slippin’ Around.”

“Slippin’ Around,” the #8 song on our Chartcrush Countdown Show for 1949: Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely: the longest stay in the top ten of any song in 1949, 21 weeks.

Capitol Records, eager to follow-up Whiting’s first playful-but-naughty Duet hit with Johnny Mercer on “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” which of course became a Winter holiday standard, but, fun fact, was first a hit in July and August of ’49 before AC was everywhere and people needed songs like that to help them “think cool” while watching the blowing ribbons on their oscillating fans in the dog days of Summer.

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” banned by some platforms in the 2010’s over sexual harassment connotations, but “Slippin’ Around” didn’t have to wait 60 years to become controversial. Adultery, the sensitive issue in ’49. But before “Slippin’ Around” had even exited the charts, songwriter Floyd Tillman, Capitol Records and Whiting & Wakely were out with “I’ll Never Slip Around Again,” a soundalike sequel in which the “Slippin’ Around” couple is now married to each other and working through some pretty well-founded trust issues!

#7 Perry Como – Some Enchanted Evening

Up next at #7, a song from the 1949 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific: one of the most successful Broadway musicals ever, which had everything to do with the millions of young Pacific theater war veterans who were now back home, aged late 20s to early 30s, building their lives and giving birth to Baby Boomers. The so-called “Greatest” or “GI” Generation, at the peak of their cultural sway in ’49.

The song is the biggest hit, not just from South Pacific, but from any Rodgers and Hammerstein show, with seven versions on the Billboard charts between May and November ’49 including Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Jo Stafford, plus the original cast version by Italian opera singer Ezio Pinza, who played the lead on Broadway opposite legendary stage actress Mary Martin.

And six of those versions were top ten hits. But the biggest was by 1949’s top crooner, who we’ve already heard in our countdown. Here again, Perry Como, his biggest hit of the year: “Some Enchanted Evening.”

Perry Como, the Singer whom the original Crooner, Bing Crosby, called “the man who invented casual,” “Some Enchanted Evening” from 1949’s biggest musical, South Pacific, the #7 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

#6 Blue Barron or Russ Morgan – Cruising Down the River

And as we get set to spin our #6 song, recall that large touring big-name Swing Bands had ceased to be economically viable for a variety of reasons: the war and draft, the Petrillo AFM recording bans, gas and tire rationing and a crushing federal cabaret tax on dancing establishments. By ’46, most of the Big Bands had dissolved. So what happened to all those Jazz players? Well, no doubt a lot of them took day jobs, but the most committed among them formed small, nimble combos that could find a niche and get gigs, and that became Bebop: serious, complex Jazz meant for listening, not dancing, and not the Pop charts.

But some bands did survive into the era of TV and massive record sales: the so-called “sweet bands” or “society orchestras,” who tended to have a profitable long-term radio or venue engagement in a single city, so didn’t need to tour, and weren’t even really affected by tax-related “no dancing” policies because they played light, innocuous, unchallenging pop, like “Forever and Ever” which we heard earlier, and like our song at #6, which had eight—eight!—versions on the charts in ’49. At #6, “Cruising Down the River.”

“Cruising Down the River,” the #6 song on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1949. Now, if you’re listening on radio, you just heard the biggest of the eight versions, by Blue Barron & His Orchestra. Barron’s version isn’t on Spotify though, so if you’re listening to our podcast show, we subbed in the version that’s #12 on our ranking by Russ Morgan & His Orchestra, the Sweet Band who’s very similar sounding, waltzy “Forever and Ever” we heard at #9.

Both Barron and Morgan’s versions, quite similar to each other, were on Billboard’s charts for 22 weeks, but radio preferred Barron, possibly because they were already playing other Russ Morgan hits.

The song “Cruising Down the River” holds the distinction of being the first by British composers to top the U.S. charts, submitted to a songwriting competition by two middle-aged English ladies and winning, then becoming a hit in the U.K. in 1946 for bandleader Lou Preager before us Yanks got a hold of it in ’49.

#5 The Andrews Sisters – I Can Dream, Can’t I?

At #5 as we continue counting down the top ten from 1949 here on this week’s Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, one of America’s most successful recording acts in the ’40s. So if we’re making a list of Pop institutions that survived and thrived the demise of Big Bands, as evidenced by the 1949 charts, we’ve got to add this trio of sisters to Sweet Bands and the other, Vocalist headliners, which we’ll get to in a few minutes.

The singing siblings had already been making hit records for a couple years when the Billboard charts started in 1940. And they were tireless boosters of the war effort with USO tours and bond drives. They charted hits every year in the ’40s, over 20 of ‘em all told up to this one, their second #1 after 1945’s “Rum and Coca-Cola.” Here are Laverne, Patty and Maxene Andrews: The Andrews Sisters at #5 with the Ballad, “I Can Dream, Can’t I?”

The Andrews Sisters with Patty Andrews singing the solo parts, “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” backed by bandleader Gordon Jenkins who’d just become Musical Director at Decca Records, and was about to unleash one of the top hits of 1950, Greenwich Village Folk group The Weavers’ “Goodnight Irene.”

Radio loved The Andrews Sisters. “I Can Dream” was Billboard’s #1 DJ song of 1949, and they had another good year in 1950 with multiple hits including the #1, “I Wanna Be Loved,” again featuring Patty singing the solo parts. In ’51, Patty split for a solo career which yielded one minor chart hit, but The Andrews Sisters were eclipsed by other Sister Acts in the ’50s, Fontanes and McGuires most notably, despite reuniting and cutting a dozen singles on Capitol from ’56 to ’59.

#4 Vic Damone – You’re Breaking My Heart

So from the week of August 20 when our #7 song, Perry Como’s “Some Enchanted Evening,” first hit #1, to the end of the year, it was all Crooners at the top of the charts—which, it turned out, was a much more significant development in late ’40s Pop than Sweet Bands or even the evergreen Andrews Sisters.

For many years, Bing Crosby had been the only successful Male Vocalist headliner on records. Early in the Depression, society just wasn’t ready for effete, tuxedoed Singers whispering sweet nothings in women’s ears behind closed doors, so the first wave of Crooners in the late ’20s and early ’30s provoked a backlash. Flapper heartthrob Rudy Vallee, the most prominent target.

Alone among that group of first-gen Crooners, Crosby managed to carve out a zone where Pop singing and masculinity could co-exist until Frank Sinatra, then Perry Como caught on in the ’40s. But all three (Crosby, Sinatra and Como) continued to play it pretty safe, even after the floodgates opened and dozens of new Crooners appeared, swinging for the fences.

Which was already starting to happen in 1949, evidenced by our singer at #4, one of the first to break through with the Italian-inflected romantic singing style that was about to dominate the charts in the early ’50s. But in ’49, he was one of the Singers who was blazing that trail, with his #1 hit, an English version of the Italian song, “La Mattinata.” It’s Vic Damone, “You’re Breaking My Heart.”

#4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1949, Italian-American crooner Vic Damone “You’re Breaking My Heart.” Damone’s first charting record in 1947, “I Have but One Heart” also has a verse in Italian, but with a much more restrained vocal, in line with the template set by Crosby and Male Singers who’d been successful as featured performers on records behind Bandleaders.

In the late ’40s no one really had a handle on what the public wanted or would tolerate from Male Singers, but tastes were changing and by the end of ’49, one thing that was abundantly clear was: Italian guys definitely had a leg up. Sinatra, Como, and now Vic Damone: all Italian-Americans. And every new Crooner with a hit record was testing the waters and expanding the possibilities.

#3 Evelyn Knight & The Stardusters – A Little Bird Told Me

At #3, we have a cover version by a White Female Pop Singer of a song by a Black Female R&B Singer, and both versions hit the charts at the same time, with a couple more soon after. Now as you’ve been hearing, multiple versions of songs was the rule, not the exception, in the ’40s. But with this, the vocals on the Pop version were so similar to the R&B version that it sparked a lawsuit that produced a landmark court decision.

The original by the Black Singer, Paula Watson, got to #6 on the Pop DJ chart, and a version by another Black Singer, Blu Lu Barker, got to #4 on that same chart a few weeks later, which was pretty amazing for R&B crossover in 1949. But the dominant version was the supposed “Pop” version by the White Singer who’s clearly imitating Watson’s vocal: #1 on all three Billboard Pop charts (Sales, Airplay and Jukeboxes) for five solid weeks in January and February. It’s Evelyn Knight, “A Little Bird Told Me.”

Evelyn Knight, “A Little Bird Told Me,” #3 as we count down the top ten from 1949 here on this week’s edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Knight hit #1 on the Jukebox chart again in March with her follow-up, “Powder Your Face with Sunshine.”

Now more about that lawsuit. Knight’s cover of “Little Bird” was so similar to the original by Black Singer Paula Watson that Watson’s label, the west-coast indie Supreme Records, sued Decca for lifting the arrangement, texture, and vocal style. They were so close that even musical experts called as witnesses couldn’t tell the difference. Still, the court upheld a previous court’s ruling that you can not copyright an arrangement or sue over interpretations of a style. That ruling, still in force.

#2 Frankie Laine – That Lucky Old Sun

Next at #2, another Male Singer whose big chart breakthrough was in 1949. Country-Western was beginning to exert a strong influence on Pop, which accelerated over the next few years as the major label A&R men started plundering the Country charts for Pop hits.

Mitch Miller, the leading plunderer as the head of A&R at Columbia, where he launched Crooner Tony Bennett’s career in 1951 with Hank Williams’s “Cold, Cold Heart” (which Bennett hit out of the park).

But before that, in ’49 at Mercury Records, Miller prodded this Italian Singer from Chicago whose emotive style hadn’t yet connected, to steer away from Jazzy Crooning and take up Country and Blues material. And 1949 turned out to be the year the world caught up to Frankie Laine. His first #1 hit and our #2 song of 1949, “That Lucky Old Sun.”

Frankie Laine’s first #1, “That Lucky Old Sun,” the #2 song on our Chartcrush Countdown of the top ten hits of 1949. Laine topped the chart later in 1949 with “Mule Train,” which came complete with whip snaps and hoof sounds. Gimmicky Novelty hits, a Mitch Miller trademark. Not surprisingly Elvis Presley later cited Laine as a major influence, and he became ubiquitous on movie Western soundtracks in the ’50s. His version of “High Noon” did even better than the Tex Ritter version that was in the actual film starring Gary Cooper.

When Mel Brooks made his classic 1974 comedy send-up of movie Westerns, Blazing Saddles, Frankie Laine was the natural choice to sing that theme song too! Six versions of “Lucky Old Sun” charted in 1949: Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong and others, but Frankie Laine’s biggest competition with the song came from our artist at #1.

#1 Vaughn Monroe – Riders in the Sky (A Cowboy Legend)

Some years it’s close, but 1949 was not one of those years: by far the top Sales, Airplay and Jukebox song of the year: #1 on all three simultaneously for eight weeks, May into July. And it seemed to just come out of nowhere, this record.

The Singer: already a big name but it was unlike anything he’d done before; unlike anything anyone had done before really. And almost certainly the catalyst for Frankie Laine’s sudden course correction into Western music at Mitch Miller’s urging. (Its run on the charts came months before Laine’s two hits late in the year).

The artist being on RCA, it was also one of the first records issued on a 45. It’s Vaughn Monroe, the original hit version of a song that’s been covered many, many times, “Riders in the Sky (A Cowboy Legend).”

Vaughn Monroe with that deep baritone: one of the most instantly recognizable voices in the history of Pop: the #1 song of 1949, “Riders in the Sky (A Cowboy Legend).”

It really was a cowboy legend: when he was 12, songwriter Stan Jones says he was working on a ranch in Arizona, and one day he decided to take his horse on a shortcut over a mountain to get home before a storm rolled in, and he came across an old cowpoke who pointed up at the sky and said “Son, look up and you’ll see the red-eyed cows of the devil’s herd.”

Well by golly, 12-year-old Stan looked, and what he saw looked just like a heard of red-eyed cattle in the clouds. “You be careful now,” the man said as a terrified Stan rode off, “or else you’ll end up one of those ghost riders chasing that herd across the sky for all eternity.”

Jones recorded the song himself. Then Folk Singer Burl Ives did a version, but it was Vaughn Monroe’s version that connected, and boy did it! Some of the more memorable covers of the song down through the years: instrumental Surf bands The Ramrods and Ventures in the early ’60s, Johnny Cash in the ’70s, and Southern Rockers The Outlaws in the early ’80s: “Riders in the Sky.”

And there you have ‘em: the top ten songs of 1949 according to our recap of Billboard’s combined weekly Sales, Airplay and Jukebox charts here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

Bonus: Hank Williams – Lovesick Blues

Since there’s some time left, we have a couple great bonus cuts for you. First up, Billboard’s #1 Country bestseller of 1949: the explosive chart breakthrough for a gaunt Alabama Singer-Songwriter that earned him a spot at The Grand Ole Opry after they’d rejected him in 1946. And he sure wowed ’em: an unprecedented six encores. It’s Hank Williams: “Lovesick Blues.”

Hank Williams’s first big hit: #1 on the Country charts for a staggering 16 weeks, and it even dinged the pop DJ chart for a week “Lovesick Blues:” a Tin Pan Alley song from the ‘20s that Country singer Rex Griffin reinterpreted in 1939. Hank didn’t really add anything new to the Griffin version, but it was getting such a reaction from crowds that he recorded it over the objections of his label and even his band. Interestingly, no one else put out a version of “Lovesick Blues” in 1949, but since the late ’50s it’s easier to list the top Country acts who haven’t attempted it.

Bonus: Paul Williams – The Hucklebuck

Now, it’s always nice when we’re doing these excavations for the Chartcrush Countdown Show to uncover a forgotten morsel of period slang in a big hit. The term “hucklebuck” was everywhere in 1949, long understood among Black folks as a sexual position, at some point it became a dance in which the Male partner hung back behind the Female with one hand on her waist and the other on her shoulder, and the couple gyrated hips in unison. Very sexy. Of course, every dance craze needs a song, and in this case the song was the #1 R&B record of 1949, Paul Williams & His Hucklebuckers, “The Hucklebuck.”

Paul Williams, “The Hucklebuck,” Billboard’s #1 R&B song of 1949 here on the Chartcrush Countdown Show. The hucklebuck dance went national and cross-racial in 1949. Lyricist Roy Alfred wrote words: “Wiggle like a snake. Waddle like a duck. That’s the way you do it when you do the hucklebuck,” and Big Bandleader Tommy Dorsey took a stab at it, attempting a comeback after dissolving his band in 1946: a great Swing version that got to #5 on the Best Sellers chart, followed on the chart by a version by none other than Frank Sinatra.

Well that’s gonna have to do it for our 1949 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi, and I want to thank you for listening! On our website, chartcrush.com, you can get a written transcript and a link to stream this and other Chartcrush countdown shows on Spotify, plus chart run line graphs and other jake extras. Every week, we count down a different year from the beginning of the charts all the way up to the present, so tune again—same station, same time—for another edition of Chartcrush.

::end transcript::

::start transcript::

Welcome! This is 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 count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in Billboard magazine, the music industry’s top trade publication and chart authority. This week we’re turning the clock back to 1955, the year Marty McFly returns to in the 1985 time travel movie Back to the Future, and the year the first Rock ‘n Roll song, “Rock Around the Clock,” hit #1 on a Billboard Pop chart.

Before the Hot100 streamlined things in 1958, there were three different Billboard Pop charts: Best Sellers in Stores, Most Played in Juke Boxes and Most Played by Disc Jockeys. Bill Haley & The Comets’ so-called “first rock ‘n roll song” first hit #1 on the Best Sellers chart the week of July 9, 1955, then topped the Jukebox and DJ charts over the next couple weeks, finally winning Billboard’s “Triple Crown” in the August 6 issue when it was #1 on all three simultaneously.

Now I say “so-called first rock ‘n roll song” because over on Billboard’s R&B chart, there were lots of Black R&B records all the way back to the mid ’40s that had that same beat, sound and attitude. Rock ‘n Roll, you could even say, was the sound of black America in those pre-Elvis years, when the Pop charts (by contrast) were dominated by Crooners, Pop singers, Hollywood and Broadway Show Tunes, and Mitch Miller’s gimmicky Novelty productions. Notably absent from the Pop charts in the early ’50s? Anything kids could dance to.

Mambo sparked an adult Dance craze that made a few Cuban bandleaders famous and had the top Crooners and Pop Singers all cutting Mambo records, but besides that, you have to go back more than ten years to the early ’40s, the World War 2 years before a 40% federal cabaret tax on dancing establishments, plus wartime gas and tire rationing, the draft, and a two-year musicians’ strike hit Big Band Swing like a wrecking ball to find the last time upbeat Dance music was big on the charts.

So no wonder that in 1951, when DJ Alan Freed started playing R&B records for the first time on a powerful radio station, Cleveland’s WJW, it caught on, especially with the up and coming generation of young White people, who’d never even been exposed to this kind of music before, or really anything like it, so it was dangerous and exciting. And Freed totally played that up, treating his overnight audience of Silent Generation teens with flashlights under their blankets like some kind of secret Hipster society, which he dubbed “The Moondoggers.”

By ’54, Alan Freed was on a 50,000-watt station in New York, WINS, and R&B was the new wellspring of energy and ideas in Pop. White Crooner Johnny Ray had become a proto-Teen Idol star with his R&B-style emotive ballads, but the point of no return was “Sh-Boom,” an indie record by a Black Doo-Wop group from the Bronx (The Chords) that cracked the top ten on both the Pop Jukebox and Sales charts with barely any radio support at all in July 1954, followed just a week later by the major label cover version by The Crew-Cuts, a White Canadian vocal group, that hit #1 on all three Billboard pop charts for four weeks.

#10 Bill Hayes – The Ballad of Davy Crockett

And then there was TV. AT&T completed the first coast-to-coast cable system for live broadcasts in 1955, and the number of American homes with a TV set passed two-thirds. TV was about to become a huge vehicle for Rock ‘n Roll and Teen music, but the first TV-ignited mass-cultural hysteria gripped those same kids when they were even younger, via Walt Disney’s five-part miniseries about an American folk hero from Tennessee who opposed Andrew Jackson’s Indian Relocation policies in the 1820s as a Congressman and died defending the Alamo.

The show put four different versions of its theme song on the Pop charts making it the #3 song of the year. Until 1963, Billboard actually had a chart that ranked songs just by their titles with all recorded versions combined, and factoring sheet music sales: the “Honor Roll of Hits.” So if we were counting down songs, it’d be #3. But counting down records, at #10 is the one version of the four that snagged Billboard’s “Triple Crown” when it hit #1 on all three disc charts (Sales, Airplay and Jukeboxes) on April 23. Here’s “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.”

“Ballad of Davy Crockett,” the #10 song of 1955 according to our exclusive ranking here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. Again, four different versions of that song on the charts during the Crockett Craze inspired by Disney’s Davy Crockett miniseries that aired December ’54 to February ’55, but the most successful version was the one that producer Archie Bleyer cut with singer Bill Hayes.

Before the miniseries aired, Roy Disney, Walt’s brother, had been shopping around a version of “Ballad” sung by the actor who played Crockett, Fess Parker. But it was nothing like the one kids heard in the actual show sung by Folk group The Wellingtons, so after watching on TV, Bleyer had Bill Hayes in the studio the next day. After it started shooting up the charts, Columbia snapped up the Fess Parker version, but neither it or the Tennessee Ernie version on Capitol could overtake Hayes’. All the versions peaked in May and June of ’55, when Disney’s repackaged wide-screen Technicolor feature version of the miniseries was in theaters, and every boy in America was walking around in a Davy Crockett coonskin tail hat!

#9 Roger Williams – Autumn Leaves

So Rock ‘n Roll’s opening salvo on the Pop charts came in the Summer, soon after that burst of Davy Crockett mania, the one-two punch of “Rock Around the Clock” followed by Pat Boone’s version of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame.”

After that, Rock percolated under the radar for a few months while the top of the Pop charts got very conservative, as if a horrified public was recoiling at what it’d just heard and needed a “safe space.” Well that’s one way to look at it, but at the same time, an obsession was budding among grownups: hi-fi: newly-minted home audio enthusiasts gearing up their swanky mid-century living rooms with all the cutting edge equipment that was coming out, and buying records that would make that gear sound like the money it cost.

At #9 is one that topped the Best Sellers chart in those months as the weather got colder, not the DJ or Jukebox charts, just Best Sellers, which is telling. It’s pianist Roger Williams’ unique instrumental take on what was already a familiar standard, having been recorded by many top artists since its appearance in 1945. Appropriately titled for when it was a hit on the calendar, “Autumn Leaves.”

Imagine for a moment that you’ve never in your life heard recorded music sound good before. In the ’40s when American Federation of Musicians president James C. Petrillo railed against “canned music” during the AFM’s musicians’ strikes against record companies, people knew exactly what he was talking about. With 78 rpm shellac records, even when they were played on the radio, listeners could easily tell that it wasn’t a live performance.

Well, starting in the early ’50s thanks to vinyl, there was a quantum leap in sound quality, on radio, yes, but even right in your own living room, thanks to all-American hi-fi brands like Marantz, Bogen, Jenson, Fairchild, National, McIntosh, Sonotone, Fisher, H.H. Scott, along with British imports Garard, Goodman and Quad, and a flurry of startup hi-fi mags that appeared overnight to collect their money for full-page ads.

Hi-fi shops opened in every city, where you could go and hear this new miracle of modernity for yourself. Then, having made what was by no means an insignificant investment, you needed a record like “Autumn Leaves,” lushly orchestrated instrumental hits that defined a whole new genre, Easy Listening.

Classical, by far the top genre for audiophiles, but Roger Williams’s innovative descending scales and arpeggios at the piano representing the random falling and blowing of leaves in Autumn scratched that itch too: #9 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1955, the only piano instrumental ever to hit #1 on a Billboard chart. Williams scored big again in 1966 with his instrumental and chorus rendition of “Born Free.”

#8 The Four Lads – Moments to Remember

Now I mentioned The Crew-Cuts in the intro: the Canadian vocal quartet who scored in 1954 with their cover of The Chords’ “Sh-Boom.” Well the two founding members of The Crew Cuts got their start singing in a quartet with two of the founding members of the group with our #8 song. All of ’em were alumni of St. Michael’s Choir School in Toronto.

In 1951, Mitch Miller, Columbia’s powerful head of A&R, signed them to sing backup on what became Johnnie Ray’s breakthrough hit, “Cry.” After charting three top tens in rapid succession with Ray, they started headlining their own records, and by ’55 they’d charted nine of ’em. But this was the biggest of their career. The song, written specifically for Crooner Perry Como, but he passed on it and The Four Lads got it. #8: “Moments to Remember.”

The Four Lads “Moments to Remember,” #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 1955. These clean-cut collegiate foursomes were quite a phenomenon in the ’50s: Four Lads, Four Coins, Four Freshmen, Four Preps, and the biggest of them all still to come in our countdown. It can get confusing!

The Four Lads followed up “Moments” with two more top-five hits heading into ’56, then two more in ’57. After that the hits dried up and Columbia didn’t renew their contract, but they continued to release records on various labels, and even dented the Easy Listening chart a couple times in the late ’60s.

#7 The Chordettes – Mr. Sandman

At #7, a song that has become a symbol of mid-’50s innocence, maybe even innocence itself, thanks to its appearance in dozens of movies and TV shows since for that express purpose. It’s often used in a jarringly ironic way, like in Deadpool or the first film to use it, 1981’s Halloween 2, but sometimes just to anchor the viewer to the time and place that produced it: mid-’50s America.

Given how ubiquitous it’s been since the ’50s, people are surprised when they look it up and see it at a middling #18 on Billboard’s 1955 year-end Best Sellers chart, which is what you’ll likely find if you do a search for “top songs of 1955” on the Web. But it’s one of the many records throughout chart history that peaked over the holidays, so Billboard split its ranking points between two different years. Counting its full chart run including its weeks in late 1954, however, as we do for every song here at Chartcrush, it’s #7. It topped at least one of Billboard’s three charts for nine straight weeks, Thanksgiving ’54 to the end of January ’55, here are The Chordettes, “Mr. Sandman.”

Chordettes, “Mr. Sandman,” the #7 song of 1955 according to our exclusive Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show ranking tabulated from positions on all three of Billboard’s weekly Pop charts before the Hot100 debuted in late 1958: Best Sellers, Radio Airplay and Jukebox Plays.

It’s the second of the two hits in our countdown produced by Archie Bleyer, the guy behind the hit version of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” That’s Bleyer himself doing the hands-on-knees percussion and saying “Yes?” in the third verse. Both “Sandman” and “Davy Crockett” were on the label Bleyer founded and ran, Cadence Records, which later launched The Everly Brothers.

#6 “Tennessee” Ernie Ford – Sixteen Tons

So like Black R&B, Country-Western (or “Hillbilly Folk,” as it was also called) has had an on-again/off-again flirtation with the Pop mainstream over the decades.  Things got interesting, though, after Singing Bandleader Vaughn Monroe scored 1949’s runaway smash Pop hit with a Western song, “Ghost Riders in the Sky (A Cowboy Legend).”

Within weeks of that, Mitch Miller, then at Mercury, had Crooner Frankie Laine singing rugged Western songs like “Lucky Old Sun” and “Mule Train,” and Capitol put out the first of Pop Singer Margaret Whiting’s many duets with Singing Cowboy Jimmy Wakeley, a cover of Honky Tonker Floyd Tillman’s adultery song “Slippin’ Around.” Decca’s Gordon Jenkins signed New York Folk group The Weavers, and “Goodnight Irene” was one of the top hits of 1950, and then the mic drop when Mitch Miller, now at Columbia, paired Italian Crooner Tony Bennett with Hank Williams’s “Cold, Cold Heart.”

Meanwhile in San Bernardino, California, a morning DJ doing a Country show forged a crazy, over-the-top Hillbilly persona and parlayed that into a deal with Capitol and multiple hits, including four twangy Whiting & Wakely-inspired duets with Pop Singer Kay Starr. By the end of ’55 when our #6 record hit, he was on national TV hosting Ozark Jubilee on ABC (the first national show that featured country music), plus a quiz show and a recurring role as country bumpkin Cousin Ernie on I Love Lucy. He only recorded the song after Capitol gently reminded him in the midst of all that TV glory that he still had a disc left on his contract. And it was issued a “B” side. But DJs played it and made it his biggest hit and signature tune, #1 for six weeks in December into January ’56, and also the #1 Best Seller on the Country chart for ten weeks. It’s Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons.”

An ode to coal miners who were paid in scrip that was only good at the store owned by the mining company: “Sixteen Tons,” Tennessee Ernie Ford’s version, the #6 song in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1955, first recorded in 1946 by the Kentucky Songwriter who wrote it, Merle Travis.

#5 The Four Aces featuring Al Alberts – Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing

So back at #8 when we heard The Four Lads’ “Moments to Remember,” I ran down the list of all the clean-cut, fresh-faced male collegiate-styled foursomes that charted hits in the mid ’50s. At #5 is the biggest of ’em, and it was their version of “Mr. Sandman,” not the Chordettes’, that soundtracked the scene in Back to the Future where Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly first sees his hometown in 1955 after travelling back in time in Doc Brown’s souped-up DeLorean.

But they were best known for majestic, cinematic-sounding versions of title songs from blockbuster movies. Their version of “Three Coins in the Fountain” out-charted the one in the movie sung by Frank Sinatra in ’54. And then in ’55, their biggest hit was another cover version of an Oscar winning theme from a epic technicolor Hollywood romance film, this one starring William Holden and Jennifer Jones. And it did even better than “Three Coins.” #1 for the six weeks in October and November right before “Sixteen Tons, it’s The Four Aces featuring lead singer Al Alberts: “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.”

In all The Four Aces scored ten top tens between ’51 and ’55, culminating with the #5 song in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1955, “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” later used as the theme of a CBS daytime soap opera that ran from the late ’60s into the early ’70s  also called, yep, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.

#4 Mitch Miller and His Orchestra and Chorus – The Yellow Rose of Texas

Now at #4, a traditional folk song, well known in Texas and the South, that dates back to at least the 1850s. But according to a Billboard piece from when the song was #1 on the charts, it first resurfaced in the 1950s as part of a songbook published by the copyright-clearance organization BMI, Songs of the Confederacy.

The book inspired a Columbia Records album that collected Confederate marching songs, and a companion album compiled Union songs. Columbia’s President at the time, Goddard Lieberson: a big Civil War buff. Well, that project, in turn, inspired one of Lieberson’s subordinates, again, Mitch Miller, Columbia’s A&R head but also a bandleader himself, to do a re-worked version of one of the Confederate marching songs on Columbia’s The Confederacy album, and it turned out to be the record that dethroned “Rock Around the Clock”  from the top of the Best Sellers chart, staying at #1 for six weeks and becoming the #4 song of 1955. Here is Mitch Miller headlining his own record, leading His Orchestra and Chorus: “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”

A folksier version of “Yellow Rose of Texas” by singer Johnny Desmond was also a hit on the Pop DJ and Jukebox charts in 1955. And a version by Ernest Tubb on the Country charts. But Mitch Miller’s more military-sounding version we just heard came out on top and was the #4 record of the year.

Okay, so let’s break this down: a Confederate marching song, a year after the Supreme Court’s landmark school desegregation decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, but Southern states and cities fighting those rulings throughout 1955, and the Civil Rights movement on the ground barely underway. Rosa Parks didn’t stay in her seat on that bus in Alabama until December 1955. So in the middle of all that, “The Yellow Rose of Texas” shoots to #1 on the Pop charts for six straight weeks in the Fall: a Confederate marching song.

Not to question Columbia Records or Mitch Miller’s motives for making the record, but it seems like the song’s huge popularity once it was out there in the wild might’ve had more than a little to do with the backlash against Civil Rights. As an October 1955 Billboard article reported though: since the Davy Crockett phenomenon in the Spring, “pioneer-type material” was all the rage, and “Yellow Rose” was just the latest in a string of hits in that mold. So that was another factor. But always fascinating to look at these song rankings in the context of when the songs were popular, and what else was happening in the world.

The political overtones weren’t lost on the pop culture at the time. Satirist Stan Freberg put a send-up of “Yellow Rose” on the charts (also in ’55) that opens with a rebel yell by the heavily-accented singer, whose irritation at the snare drummer for playing too loud increases until he finds out that the drummer is a Yankee and threatens to secede from the band “so help me Mitch Miller.”

#3 The McGuire Sisters – Sincerely

At #3 in our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1955 is a Girl Group whose first charting single entered the charts literally the same week as The Crew-Cuts “Sh-Boom” in July of ’54, and it too was a Pop cover of a song by a Black Doo-Wop group, The Spaniels’ “Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight.” It didn’t do nearly as well as “Sh-Boom,” but then in ’55 they offered up this sublime reinterpretation of a Doo-Wop song by future Motown co-founder, executive and Marvin Gaye mentor Harvey Fuqua. His group The Moonglows had taken it to #1 on the R&B Jukebox chart in December ’54; then The McGuire Sisters (Ruby, Dottie and Phyllis) made it their first #1 Pop hit in early ’55: “Sincerely.”

Billboard’s #1 Best Seller for six weeks, but it topped the DJ chart for ten weeks, mid-February to mid-April, pre-Davy Crockett and “Rock Around the Clock:” The McGuire Sisters’ “Sincerely,” #3 as we count down the biggest hits of 1955 here on The Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show.

The McGuire Sisters scored another #1 in ’57 with “Sugartime” and continued into the 1960s, but stopped performing in the late ’60s, because Phyllis, the middle girl and soloist in the group, got mixed up romantically with Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana. And there was a trial and Phyllis had to testify, so it was all very public and a big scandal. But they got back together in ’86, still looking and sounding great, for a series of nostalgic nightclub engagements in Vegas, New York, Atlantic City, et cetera.

#2 Bill Haley and His Comets – (We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock

And that brings us to the #2 song on our countdown. I’ve been talking about it since the start of the show because it’s the most important song of 1955. On July 9, it became the very first Rock ‘n Roll record to reach #1 on the Billboard Pop chart. And it stayed at #1 for eight weeks: our #2 record of the year: Bill Haley and His Comets, “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock.”

Record jobbers and retailers were telling Billboard in 1955 that they’d never seen anything like the way “Rock Around the Clock” was selling. And lots of people had never heard anything like it either. A reviewer who saw a show in Chicago wrote that Haley & The Comets “are masters of mob psychology and mass hysteria, building slow but hard, and by the time they hit their last three numbers, there’s hardly a member of the audience, young or old, who isn’t keeping cadence clapping and foot stomping.” So there’s a data point for you: clapping and foot stomping equaled mass hysteria in Chicago in 1955.

Now over in the U.K., audiences were more demonstrative: fights and riots broke out in theaters showing the movie that introduced “Rock Around the Clock” to a mass audience in the opening credits: Blackboard Jungle, starring Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier, about juvenile delinquency in urban schools. Suffice it to say, Rock ‘n Roll started off with a big bang heard around the world on the Pop charts, and music was never the same. Bill Haley & The Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock:” the #2 song of 1955.

#1 Pérez Prado – Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White

But it wasn’t #1. And that brings us to the other big Pop music story in ’54 and ’55: Mambo: the fusion of swing and Cuban music. And the artist at #1 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1955 is the guy who introduced mambo in 1951 at the Tropicana Hotel in Havana. He also put out an album that year, Mambo-Jambo, and sparked a dance craze that continued through the ’50s.

So while the kiddos were dancing again to R&B and Rock ‘n Roll, grownups were signing up in droves at Arthur Murray Dance Studios, learning the rhumba box step (and other Latin dances). And buying records like our song at #1. It’s Pérez Prado and His Orchestra, “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White.”

Pérez Prado’s “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White:” Billboard’s #1  Best Selling record of 1955, #1 on its year-end Jukebox chart too. Radio DJs though? Not as enthusiastic: #7 on that one. And it was by no means the end of Prado’s impressive career on the Pop charts: he was back in 1958 with “Patricia.”

And speaking of I Love Lucy (the #1 show in America in 1955 with over 15 million viewers, which is half of the households with TVs), in its fourth and fifth seasons. Lucy’s husband Ricky Ricardo, of course, a Cuban bandleader, who it’d be reasonable to assume was modeled after a guy like Prado. But not so. It’s actually the other way around. Desi Arnaz, who played Ricky and was Lucille Ball’s real-life husband: also a Cuban bandleader in real life. A protégé of the original Latin bandleader, Xavier Cugat in the 1940s, when Prado was still tickling the ivories in Cuba. Not to diminish Prado’s achievements or title as the Mambo King at all, but I Love Lucy premiered on TV the same year that first Prado album came out: 1951.

Bonus

So, that’s our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 1955, but we’re not quite done. As I’ve been mentioning throughout the show, Billboard had three separate survey-based Pop charts in 1955 to rank songs by Record Sales, Radio Airplay and Jukebox Plays. Well at Chartcrush, for pre-Hot100 years like 1955, we merge the three into a single combined weekly chart, and then get our rankings for the year the same way we do Hot100 years, factoring every song’s full chart run so a song like, say, “Sixteen Tons” that spanned ’55 into ’56 doesn’t get lost in the shuffle as so often happens with Billboard’s year-end rankings based on discrete “chart year” time windows.

Well when you use our Chartcrush mojo for the individual charts (Sales, Airplay and Jukeboxes), there are songs that come out in the top ten on the year on one chart but not the others. I mentioned that Prado’s “Cherry Pink” didn’t do as well on the Airplay chart as Sales and Jukeboxes, for example. That one was strong enough on two of the charts, though, that its still the #1 song of the year in the ranking from the combined chart. Others, though? Not so lucky! And there are six of those. A ragtime piano medley was the #10 Jukebox hit of the year.

Pianist Johnny Maddox’s version of a medley originally by “Der Schrage Otto” (“Crazy Otto”), a German comedian, big on Jukeboxes, but radio in 1955 didn’t know what to do with that song, #36 on that ranking. It comes out #20 on our combined ranking.

The #5 hit of the year on Jukeboxes is only #19 on both the DJ and Best Sellers rankings.

Georgia Gibbs’ “Dance with Me Henry,” a cover of Etta James’ “The Wallflower” that was a #1 hit on the R&B chart, but too risqué for the Pop mainstream in ’55. Etta’s original says “Roll with Me, Henry.” Gasp!

Gibbs, a White singer, had just scored with another R&B cover, of Black Chicago singer LaVern Baker’s “Tweedle Dee,” prompting Baker to sarcastically name Georgia Gibbs the beneficiary on a supplemental life insurance policy she took out before a flight to Australia, saying “you need this more than I do because if anything happens to me, you’re out of business!” “Dance with Me Henry,” #17 on our combined ranking for the year.

Yet another cover of an R&B hit by a White artist was among the top ten Jukebox hits of the year.

The Fontane Sisters cover of Otis Williams & The Charms’ “Hearts of Stone,” a #1 R&B hit in late ’54 that actually did cross over to the Pop Bestsellers chart in January, before the Fontanes version overtook it the following month. Dot Records co-founder Randy Wood, the guy who relaunched the Sisters as a teen-targeted Girl Group doing R&B covers after poaching them from RCA-Victor when the well ran dry on their string of hits with Crooner Perry Como in ’49 and ’50. Wood, taking his cue from the success of Mercury’s Crew Cuts covering The Charms’ crossover Doo-Wop hit “Sh-Boom” in ’54.

The reasoning was that, notwithstanding Alan Freed, big radio just was gonna play most R&B records no matter how much the kids wanted to hear them. Because racism, yes, but also for the same reason they wouldn’t play most Country records: just too unpolished sounding alongside Crooners and lushly-orchestrated Hollywood hits. So Dot and many other labels got White artists to record covers of R&B hits, completely reinventing them for a mainstream Pop audience. “Hearts of Stone,” another massive Jukebox hit that’s not among the top ten Sales or Airplay hits of the year, so it notches in at #14 in our combined ranking.

But Dot’s greatest success of ’55 was what’s since come to be regarded as the ultimate “Whitewashed” R&B hit.

Yet another Jukebox hit that didn’t do quite as well on radio and in stores: Pat Boone’s cover of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame,” a very respectable #13 on our combined ranking.

Domino didn’t harbor any ill will towards Boone for stealing his chart thunder. His original, also a top ten Jukebox hit in ’55 (his first of over 60 chart hits from ’55 to ’68). But as the songwriter, he collected royalties on Boone’s version and bought himself a big piano shaped diamond ring, which he showed off at gigs and told the crowd, “Pat Boone bought me this ring with this song” introducing “Ain’t That a Shame.”

So those are all the hits that were among the top ten Jukebox hits of the year but didn’t make the top ten when combined with Sales and Airplay. Next, the #8 song of the year on the radio Airwaves that missed the top ten on Jukeboxes and in record shops. Radio has always had a special place in its heart for Frank Sinatra.

Frank Sinatra’s comeback to the top of the charts after his messy divorce from Ava Gardner and slumping badly in the late ’40s and early ’50s (ironically right at the height of the Crooner era), “Learnin’ the Blues,” Sinatra’s first #1 on any chart since 1947.

In ’55 he had a new label (Capitol), a new bandleader, arranger and collaborator (Nelson Riddle), a Best Supporting Actor Oscar (for From Here to Eternity) under his belt, and a new sound that updated Swing Jazz for the Rock era. Despite the misfortune of being a hit at the same time as “Rock Around the Clock,” “Learnin'” peaked at #2 (by our combined ranking) for five of the weeks Bill Haley was #1 in July and August. It just narrowly misses our combined top ten at #12 on the year.

And finally, the biggest hit version of a song that’s been recorded over 1,500 times since it first appeared in 1955, and with three records of it making the top ten, it was the #1 song of 1955 combining all versions. Like our #9 hit, Roger Williams’s “Autumn Leaves,” it did best on the Best Sellers chart: a perfect record for all the new audiophiles buying their first hi-fi sets. But while “Autumn Leaves” was also a big Jukebox hit; this one, not so much, #20 on the Jukebox ranking.

Band- and chorus leader Les Baxter’s “Unchained Melody,” numbers 7 and 10 on the yearly DJ and Sales rankings, respectively, which makes it the #11 song on our combined Chartcrush ranking for ’55. Baxter, no stranger to the charts after backing Nat King Cole on “Mona Lisa” in 1950and “Too Young” in ’51, and on his own scoring numerous top tens in the early ’50s. And he was back with an even bigger hit in ’56, “The Poor People of Paris.” Not bad for what most folks (from about 1970 on)would dismiss as “elevator music.”

Baxter died in 1996, just as Hipster Lounge music savants were reviving his career as the gravitational center of a subgenre of Lounge called “Exotica.” Baxter’s 1951 LP Ritual of the Savage: the origin point that inspired other exotica notables like Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman and Juan García Esquivel. Jet age ersatz tropical and primitive sounds for armchair explorers equipped with brand new hi-fi equipment: good stuff for your cocktail hour!

And we’re gonna have to end on that note because we are out of time! You’ve been listening to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show for 1955 and I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Thanks for tuning in, and be sure to check out our website, chartcrush.com, for written transcripts and streaming links for this and other Chartcrush countdown shows, plus chart run line graphs and other nifty extras. We count down a different year every week on this show, from the beginning ofthe charts in the 1940sall the way up to the present, so come back next week, will ya?, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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