Trying to get a handle on the popularity of a pop single, even in this age of ever-present metrics, is nearly impossible, thanks to the proliferation of outlets. How do you effectively add up iTunes purchases, YouTube plays, Soundcloud streams, unauthorized downloads, and radio play on both terrestrial and satellite stations? Fifty-eight years ago, Billboard magazine tried to answer a different version of the same question. Until then, pop singles had been ranked in three separate charts, one for radio rotation, one for jukebox plays, and one for sales at stores. On November 12, 1955, the magazine attempted to combine all three charts into one, and the result was the first Top 100 list. That vital historical document is now the subject of a new double-album set that collects all hundred songs.
The year 1955 was a strange one in pop music, the calm before the storm of 1956, which brought Elvis and everything else. (“Heartbreak Hotel” arrived in January, along with his national TV début.) The pop landscape was dominated by popular songs interpreted by popular vocalists, a trend that would soon give way to a revolution. The set kicks off with two illustrations of this principle. The top spot is occupied by the Four Aces’ rendition of “Love is a Many Splendored Thing,” the theme song from the 1955 movie of the same name. With music by the Broadway veteran Sammy Fain and lyrics by Paul Francis Webster, it’s one of the towering ballads of its time, so much so that the Four Aces’ chart-topping version is only one of several that appeared on the same Top 100: Don Cornell at No. 30, David Rose at No. 60, and Woody Herman at No. 79.
The top two hits give a strong indication of what the rest of the Top 100 looks like: straightforward interpretations of established standards, generally by smooth vocalists soothing a nation. Frank Sinatra charts with “Love and Marriage,” Perry Como with “Tina Marie,” and Gogi Grant with “Suddenly There’s a Valley,” which also appears on the list in a version by Jo Stafford, whose career on the charts was winding down. There’s also lots of Western mythology, including Mitch Miller’s orchestra-and-chorus take on “Yellow Rose of Texas” and multiple versions of the pocket epic “The Shifting Whispering Sands.”
Billboard also maintained a separate Rhythm-and-Blues chart. Fats Domino’s “All by Myself,” the reigning No. 1 on that chart, doesn’t even appear on the Top 100, though other songs do, including Chuck Berry’s epochal “Maybellene,” which had topped Rhythm and Blues in August and is at No. 42 here. But cultural segregation ensured that the Top 100 was composed mostly of white singers. There are some notable exceptions: the Platters’ “Only You (And You Alone),” one of the crowning achievements of a vocal group that hovered on the edge of rock and roll, is here, along with a weaker version by the Hilltoppers. It would later appear on the influential “American Graffiti” soundtrack, of course, and be covered by Ringo Starr, with Harry Nilsson on backing vocals and a flying-saucer video.
Hovering at the bottom of the Top Ten is another African-American artist, Al Hibbler, who charted with “He,” a moving example of pop-gospel. Hibbler, blind from birth, had joined up with Duke Ellington’s orchestra in the forties, and sung on some of the group’s most famous hits, including “Do Nothing ’Til you Hear From Me,” in 1944. Hibbler was going strong as a popular singer in the fifties, and continued for decades after that, becoming a civil-rights activist (he led marches in Birmingham in 1963) and even recording a duet with Rahsaan Roland Kirk in 1972.
The racial dimension of the 1955 chart extends beyond a simple count of white and black artists, into a deeper investigation of the way that white artists recycled black sounds for commercial gain. This discussion would begin all over again with Elvis the following year, but here it centers on Pat Boone, who is at No. 8 with his cover of the El Dorados’ “At My Front Door” and at No. 21 with his cover of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame,” far above Domino’s original, which is at No. 86. And the sitcom actress and singer Gale Storm is in the Top Ten with “I Hear You Knocking,” the Dave Bartholomew classic that was a Rhythm-and-Blues hit for Smiley Lewis earlier that year and for dozens of artists after.
The whitewashing by Boone and others is just one indication of the overall cultural conservatism of the chart. There’s very little risk of any kind represented: not much social dissent, not much psychological turmoil, not much sex. Instead, there’s an idealized portrait of America that’s maybe best illustrated by a Canadian group, The Four Lads, who chart at No. 3 with “Moments to Remember.” It’s about small-town romance, football games, and ballroom dancing, and the one non-gauzy moment is still fairly gauzy: “The drive-in movie where we’d go / And somehow never watched the show.”
There were stirrings in other areas of the culture, of course. Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” was published in Paris in September of that year, the same month that James Dean collided with Donald Turnupseed and became an instant icon. But that sense of rebellion and reassessment surfaces very rarely on the Top 100, though Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” which had been played over the opening credits of the movie “Blackboard Jungle” in March, had topped the pop charts (in their pre-Top 100 incarnation) in July, and it’s still hanging around in the lower half of the chart here, along with “Rock-A-Beatin’ Boogie,” a Haley original. Both would be featured the following year in the film “Rock Around The Clock,” a showcase for Haley and the Comets and one of the earliest rock-and-roll film musicals. Nascent rock and roll is there, at the very bottom of the chart, with Johnnie Ray’s “Johnnie’s Coming Home,” a minor hit for a man who had many major ones, including the epochal “Cry.”
Within a few years, of course, everything would be different. Little Richard would record “Long Tall Sally,” in an attempt to make a song too fast for Pat Boone to cover, and take it to No. 6 on the Top 100. Jerry Lee Lewis would chart with material far more risqué than the 1955 list could ever imagine. By 1958, while stalwarts like Perry Como and Mitch Miller were still holding on, the chart was increasingly dominated by acts like Buddy Holly, the Coasters, and Ricky Nelson. The 1955 chart, with rock and roll just creeping in, serves to illustrate, via negative space, how much great music was to come, not just the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin and Nirvana but also Jimi Hendrix and the Hampton Grease Band and Blondie and the Ramones and Mary Margaret O’Hara and Fishbone and M.I.A.
Photograph of Pat Boone by Bettmann/Corbis.
