[75
years ago this week, Billboard magazine
released its first chart of American popular music hits. So this week, I’ll
AmericanStudy five #1 hits and their cultural and social contexts. Share your
thoughts on these and any other pop hits, classic or contemporary, for a
chart-topping crowd-sourced post!]
On the #1 hit
that stands alone, and why it’s worth remembering.
By the late
1950s, rock ‘n roll (or at least the emerging genres and artists that would
come to constitute it) was here to stay, as illustrated by Elvis Presley’s back
to back end-of-year #1 hits, “Heartbreak Hotel”
(1956) and “All Shook Up”
(1957). But I’ve written a good bit in this space about both
the complex Presley and the cross-cultural rise
of rock ‘n roll, so I wanted here to focus on a very different late 1950s
#1 hit, a song distinct both from its contemporaries and from just about any
other hit on the end-of-year
list: Johnny Horton’s 1959 country music cover of
Jimmy Driftwood’s American
folk anthem “The Battle of New Orleans,” itself based on the classic fiddle
tune “the 8th
of January” (the battle’s date). Horton’s version was not only the #1 pop and country song of 1959, but was ranked
by Billboard as the 28th
ranked song and #1 country song from the chart’s first 50 years, making it one
of the most successful songs of the century by these measures.
The
collaborative nature of popular music about which I wrote in yesterday’s post
is even more evident, and more multi-part and unique, in Horton’s hit. Driftwood
was a high school principal in Arkansas who decided to write lyrics about the
battle and set them to the folk tune’s existing music; his version became
popular, and he was discovered by country artist
and producer Don Warden and given an RCA contract in 1958 to record a dozen
songs. The song has since been covered many times, but never as successfully as
its first cover, by the newly popular country and rockabilly artist Johnny
Horton; Horton’s cover appeared on his debut album, The
Spectacular Johnny Horton (1959), and not only catapulted the song to
international visibility but launched a brief craze for “historical ballads” by
Horton and others (as exemplified by Horton’s second album, Johnny
Horton Makes History [1960]). Had Horton not tragically been killed in
a car
accident in November 1960, who knows how many other such American histories
he might have turned into #1 hits.
“The Battle of
New Orleans” represents more than just a collaborative creation and a pop
culture trend, however—it also validates Driftwood’s initial impulse and illustrates
the power of cultural texts to educate. I’m not suggesting that the
song’s lyrics can take the place of a history book, although the references
to geography, chronology, and Old Hickory are accurate as far as they go (the
lines about using an alligator as a substitute cannon, not so much). But more
importantly, the song could serve, as so
many folk songs do, as a starting point for learning more
about the American histories to which it refers—and in this case, those
histories are among our nation’s most interesting, cross-cultural, and too
often forgotten. Moreover, as a moment
featuring the song on the first season of Treme indicates, the song remains a vital part of the history and
culture of its unique American city. All good reasons to keep singing the most
unexpected #1 hit in Billboard history.
Next #1 hit
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other hits you’d highlight?
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