[Via The Global Sociology Blog] Here’s something fun for a Sunday evening. This website enables you to select any day of any year going back to 1892 and find out what the top song on the (American) charts was. It’s suggested that you find out what the hit of the moment on your birthday was. Mine’s “Love is Blue” by Paul Mauriat and his orchestra. I don’t know if there are any quasi-astrological influences on your future destiny, but anyway…
22 Responses to “Flashback charts”
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The song on my birthday is a regular on ‘worst ever lists’
click on my name to view the horror
I’m “Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree” by Tony Orlando and Dawn… whoever they are!
Ewww, that is scary, Michael S.
Bob Seger – Shakedown, which apparently is from Beverly Hills Cop 2. It’s fantastic.
Mark, coincidentally, I have been driven mad today by my son playing a video game with a tune which rips off Love is Blue. The first few bars are the same but then it does something else. *Tears hear*
Ahem. That should read Hair!
Yes, about the same time as that other orchestral thing, “Classical Gas”. Reminded me vaguely of Marianne Faithfull’s “Hot Summer Night”, with that harpsichord.
It was Madonna’s 50th birthday yesterday. Her song is “Volare (Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu)” by Domenico Modugno. If she’d been born instead on the same day in 1956, 1957, 1959 or 1960 she’d have had an Elvis tune! What does it all mean?
Ps – happy birthday, Madonna!
Terrific. I got the Singing Nun. I wonder if ‘The Flying Nun’ was on the tele at the same time
I can hum/sing every single one of those from memory so far. I can remember my parents singing Volare and dancing around the kitchen when I was five.
Well, according to that website, this is what was number one on the US charts when I emerged with attitude from my mother’s womb.
Also ‘love Is Blue’ is a great song despite the fact that if you you tube it you will be treated o some truly eyewatering interpretations.
What’s really worrying though is that I now have smurfs working for me that can’t remember the Sex Pistols or Duran Duran – because they weren’t even alive back then. I’ll now hobble off and put on the radiogram my 78 single of the Mound City Blue Blowers – then I’ll you tube whatever weirdness Julian Cope has come up with lately. Minus the fucking dolphins.
Oh priceless – I got All Shook up, which is really going to horrify my old Dad (still living) who always hated Elvis with the fire of a thousand suns. I can’t wait to tell him.
Yes that does mean 1957. There was a lot of wonderful bebop going on in that year too though.
Music Maestro Please. Tommy Dorsey..I was thinking maybe Paper Doll.
Well, I was born to the strains of Bobby Darin’s version of Mack the Knife, a song whose original lyrics were written by the well-known communist Bertold Brecht. Graeme Bird would say that this is not a coincidence.
Satisfaction ( I can’ get no) was tops when I popped out. It’s been covered by some ‘interesting’ acts (Vanilla Ice, Britney Spears and Cat power) but the Devo cover from ‘77 takes micknkeef’s rock and makes it all jerky.
“Moonlight Cocktail” by Glenn Miller
With Singapore lost, Darwin bombed, the 6th & 7th Divisions still heading home after Curtin (& Evatt’s) cable battle with Churchill, MacArthur still in the Philippines and the only Aussie troops between us and the Japs those whom the defence forces would not normally taken … not the most appropriate of tunes! That bit of King David’s psalms – “Out of the depths have I cried to thee, O my Lord …” was more in tune with the times.
Nor would “Moonlight Cocktail” have been appropriate a few days later when the troop carriers reached Perth and Macarthur flew into Brisbane. There’s a more appropriate bit of Georg Frederich Händel that’s more in tune with the almost hysterical joy of Oz newspaper headlines.
With the exception of DeeCee and (to a lesser extent) Dr Cat and Paul Norton, you’re all _so young_.
My particular tune is something called “The Thing”, recorded by Phil Harris. I’ve never heard (of) it, and I don’t think I want to.
“(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones
tyro rex @ 19:
Thee and me must be twins, or near enough.
Ah, the bleak midwinter of 1965… I was a bit too young to remember it, though.
Terangeree, early August is “I’m Henry the VIII, I am” by Herman’s Hermits, but most of July seems to be Satisfaction.
I scored “Grazing in the Grass” by Hugh Masakela. Wasn’t he married to Miriam Makeba? Her best of is one of me fave albs.
Here tis http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm3UWI19xH4
And just like me, its smoooooth as a river stone. :0)