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[Chartfridays]

Introduction

I thought that this might be an interesting exercise, it’s an overly ambitious project that will either never be finished or be finished in many years if I stick with it. I’ve deliberately not looked up the number of songs involved here so as to not scare myself off the idea. I’ll break it down by decade to start with - with the easiest decade to cover due to the lower length of the charts in the era - the 1950s.

Charting song by song - once a day - the new entries to hit the chart in the order that they first arrived on the countdown, given full focus to individual songs - instead of the more typical way these can sometimes be done of combining them with various other new entries from the week or highlighting the favourites of each year in turn or just focusing solely on the number 1 songs of the chart or top 10s.

The purpose of this is to allow each song to shine for discussion rather than the big hits of the week and favourites taking centre-stage and others being ignored. As well as experimenting in charting the changing face of pop music over the last 68 and a half years and beyond over the next few years if we do somehow catch up eventually.

Obviously with the changes in distribution of music throughout this time period as well as changes in calculation of the chart itself and length there will be some periods which have far more entries on this chart than others.

For the sake of my sanity this will focus on the Top 75 (once the chart gets that long) - allowing me to use the fabulous official chart books by Graham Betts as the source rather than the clunky and often erroneous official chart website. Although that will elongate the length of the project somewhat. If using these books as the source is a copyright issue, I’d appreciate it if a moderator could flag that now rather than months into the project. Unfortunately this method does lose some of the charm of focusing on the traditional top 40 alone but does give us a bigger pool of music to draw from. I'll attempt to keep my eyes peeled for songs re-charting due to unofficial remixes and treat the re-entries as new entries, but if anyone can flag these up as we get to close them that would be helpful.

We’ll be following the OCC’s lead with regards to which charts to use to compile this project in the pre-Official Charts era (NME 1952-1960 and Record Retail 1960-69) so for anyone old enough to remember (that doesn't include myself) there'll be some inconsistencies between the songs that may have been played on radio charts at the time and songs that feature in these lists. Sorry if this has been done before on the site, please let me know as I don’t want to duplicate other people’s projects.

So without further ado, let's focus on the first song from the first chart dated 14 November 1952, the first sales chart - having moved on from sheet music charts - which unsurprisingly contains New Entries - 15 of them in a Top 12, although quite a few of these had been hanging around the sheet music charts in the preceding months.

#1 - Walkin' My Baby Back Home - Johnnie Ray

Debut: 14 November 1952

Run: 12 / Peak: 12 / WoC: 1 / Woc T40: 1



A jazz/pop standard first written in 1930 by Roy Turk and Fred E Ahlert this song had already charted in America in the 1930s thank to versions by Nick Lucas, Ted Weems. The Charleston Chasers and Lee Morse. It has been covered by many artists including Louis Armstrong, Paul Anka, Elvis Costello and Nat King Cole - who released a version in 1951 that charted and No 8 in the US in 1951 and likely inspired to the Johnnie Ray cover, that version doesn't feature in the UK charts.

Johnnie Ray's song would spend a single week at the at the time lowest position of #12 on the UK sales chart before dropping out, although this will certainly not be the last time we see the 1950's icon on these charts, with him topping up plenty more hits in the years to come both on his own and as a member of duets with the likes of Doris Day and Frankie Laine - with him continuing to score success right up until 1959 was his star began to wane for various health related and personal reasons. He would have continue to sell out concerts worldwide and reminded incredibly popular in the UK as a live act - when he was well enough to tour.

This post has been edited by chartfridays: 4th September 2021, 11:53 AM