What was the first posthumous number one album?
In music, as in life, we don’t know what we’ve got until it’s gone. This is something that’s being weaponised by bands all the time, “splitting up” after a huge and lucrative tour, letting people miss them and then coming back more beloved than ever. With solo artists, though, it’s never that calculated and always a lot more tragic. We lose an artist, and it’s only in a posthumous way that we realize just how much we love them, even if we didn’t realise it at the time.
After all, they’re rock stars, they’re larger-than-life icons, and larger-than-life icons can’t die, surely!? Yet, these icons are as human as any of us, and those left behind afterwards are left with only our memories of them. Along with, hopefully, a lesson learned about letting those we are blessed to still have in our lives know that we love them while we still can.
When it comes to our favourite musicians, grief and love are often expressed in the album charts, with their latest record becoming the best way of expressing just how much we miss them. The first artist to hit number one on the UK album charts this way was the dearly missed Otis Redding, who died in a plane crash in December 1967 at the frighteningly young age of 26.
Before his passing, Redding had recorded a new song that his label was convinced would be a giant hit. Afterwards, even though the song wasn’t entirely finished, they released it and were proved absolutely right. ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay)’ was a smash hit all over the world, becoming the first posthumous number one single on the Billboard Hot 100.
Which album was the first posthumous number one?
The album they released alongside it, The Dock Of The Bay, became the first posthumous number one album on the UK Album charts, too. In the US Charts, that melancholic honour went to Janis Joplin, whose second solo album, Pearl, was released three months after her death in October 1970. After a few weeks of release, it peaked at number one, and it stayed there for the next nine weeks.
However, to this day, there has only been one artist whose passing rocked the music world so much that their next album debuted at the number one spot afterwards. For those based in the UK, this may not seem like much of a big deal, but the US is a very different beast. The vast majority of the time, records need time to build the momentum needed to drive them to number one.
Even the likes of John Lennon and Jim Croce needed that swell of momentum to reach the top of the Billboard 200 with their posthumous albums. Croce’s You Don’t Mess Around With Jim took 47 weeks to reach the summit in January 1974. Lennon’s Double Fantasy reached number one in December 1980, after four weeks on sale.
This is because debuting at the top of the charts is the territory of megastars—a fitting place for an artist as deeply missed as Selena to find herself after her passing. Her fifth studio album, Dreaming Of You, debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 upon its release in July 1995, barely four months after its creators’ genuinely tragic death at the age of 23.
