What was the first movie soundtrack to be certified gold?
Have you ever opened the curtains up in the bedroom on a particularly sunny day and sung to yourself, ‘Oh what a beautiful morning’? Most of us have. Well, the only reason we do that is thanks to the musical Oklahoma! – or more precisely, the 1955 movie adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein production, one of the biggest-selling soundtracks of all time.
The original musical had been a Broadway mainstay since it was first unveiled in 1943, running for an astonishing 2,000 performances, telling the story of a young farmgirl being courted by two very different men, a cowboy and a farmhand. Written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, the musical earned the pair a Pulitzer Prize, and a decade later, Hollywood came calling.
The first movie filmed in 70mm widescreen, the 1955 adaptation starred Gordon MacRae and Gloria Grahame and was on an epic scale. Aside from paying a record million dollars to secure the rights to film the musical, the studio invested $11million more into producing it, around $150m in today’s money, so sure were they that it would be a hit.
It wasn’t quite that simple when it came to release, however. While the film was a success in the United States, Oklahoma! struggled outside of it, perhaps due to the intrinsic ‘Americana’ involved in the setting and the musical numbers.
Critics loved it, however, especially the opening ‘Morning’ tune, which broadsheet writers felt was so harmonically powerful that it changed musicals forever. At the Academy Awards, the film was nominated in four categories and won for two – ‘Best Musical Score’ and ‘Best Sound Recording’.
Macrae, who sang that first song, was a handsome leading man who had appeared in five previous hit musicals opposite Doris Day, and would go on to star in another Rodgers and Hammerstein film the following year, called Carousel. Thanks to the success of Oklahoma!, he was handed his own network TV show in 1956.
And once the soundtrack, on which all songs were performed by the actors, was released the following year, it went straight to number one in the charts and has been in print ever since. Originally released in mono, it was then updated to a stereo version, and by 1958, it had become the first ever album to be certified as gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which meant it had shifted more than a million copies.
It has since gone on to be certified as double platinum, meaning 2million copies of the album have been sold in the decades since. A CD version was finally brought to market in 2001 and proved equally popular, expanding the original OST by another 80 minutes of music, including that used during the overture when cinemas screened the film.
Oklahoma! has some way to go before it gets anywhere near RIAA’s highest-selling album of all time, however, the honour of which goes to the Eagles‘ Greatest Hits (1971-75), which is currently rated as having gone 38x Platinum for sales both physical and streaming. Michael Jackson’s Thriller trails it, having gone 34x Platinum.
