The first-ever top ten songs in the UK Singles Chart
The 1950s remain perhaps the most crucial transition decade in the history of popular music. Starting around the halfway point of those ten years, a brand-new rock and roll genre was beginning to make waves in America. Soon, rock music would take over, radically transforming every other genre around it and kickstarting a major evolutionary arms race in pop. But that was in the late 1950s, and every decade needs a bit of time to get started.
In many ways, the first five years of the 1950s looked a lot like the 1940s. Traditional pop, jazz, orchestral music, and show tunes ruled the day. Slight blips of blues, gospel, R&B, and country music could be found around the edges, but for the most part, the 1950s still carried much of the same style and ideals of its prior decade. At the outset of the ten-year span, however, there was a breakthrough that would help define and codify popular music into a major cultural force: the singles chart.
It all started in America when Billboard magazine compiled the first “hit parade” in 1936. Soon, this generic list of popular songs was ranked in order of sales and popularity. Originally tallying sheet music sales, the Billboard chart soon created its own chart for jukebox singles, thus giving birth to what would eventually become the Billboard Hot 100. In 1952, New Musical Express co-founder Percy Dickins wanted to compete more thoroughly with Billboard and decided that his magazine needed a singles chart of its own.
Dickins’ approach was simple: he called 20 record shops around the UK, asked for a list of their best-selling singles, and compiled them onto a list for NME. In doing so, Dickins created the first version of what would become the Official UK Singles Chart. The first-ever chart, published on November 14th, 1952, contained only 15 songs but would later expand with the explosion of rock and popular music.
The first number one song to ever grace the top of the UK Singles Chart was from Al Martino, an American singer specialising in traditional pop. With his crooning vocal style and a full orchestra backing him up, Martino was the king of 1952, topping the charts for the final nine weeks of the year with ‘Here In My Heart’. Martino would go on to greater fame thanks to his role as Johnny Fontane, the star-chasing singer-actor in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather.
The rest of the top ten is similarly filled out with jazz-pop and vocal music, with Jo Stafford’s tropically-infused ‘You Belong To Me’ sitting at number two. The number three spot belongs to an actual rock and roll pioneer: Nat King Cole. Cole’s ability to blend jazz, blues and easy listening made him an early forefather of R&B, although it’s probably hard to tell from his rendition of ‘Somewhere Along the Way’.
Number four belongs to perhaps the biggest titan of pre-rock and roll popular music, Bing Crosby. The American singer/actor was one of the most recognisable entertainers in the world, so it’s no surprise that his version of the Irish ballad ‘The Isle of Innisfree’ was a major hit in the UK. The song was also the main theme of John Ford’s 1952 film The Quiet Man, starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara.
The top five is rounded out by Guy Mitchell’s ‘Feet Up (Pat Him on the Po-Po)’, a song that gives an early preview of the massive windfall of novelty songs that would begin to fill out the singles chart in later years. Just below Mitchell is Rosemary Clooney, the aunt of future A-list star George Clooney and one-time mother-in-law to singer Debby Boone, who would score her own number one hit in America in 1977 with ‘You Light Up My Life’. Clooney’s big hit at the time was ‘Half As Much’, a traditional country song best known for being recorded by Hank Williams.
The number seven spot is actually shared by two different singles: Frankie Laine’s ‘High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me)’ and Vera Lynn’s ‘Forget Me Not’. Dickins’ final tally found that the two songs sold approximately the same, so Dickins simply gave both songs the number seven slot. The same would happen with the number eight spot, with Ray Martin’s ‘Blue Tango’ sharing a spot with Doris Day and Frankie Laine’s duet, ‘Sugarbush’.
The final two spots of the top ten are rounded out by the same artist who shared a number seven spot, Dame Vera Lynn. Lynn was perhaps the most popular British singer of the pre-rock and roll era, having popularised some of the most famous UK-adjacent songs of all time, including ‘(There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover’, ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ and ‘There’ll Always Be an England’. With her two songs, ‘The Homing Waltz’ and ‘Auf Wiedersehen Sweetheart’, landing at numbers nine and ten, respectively, Lynn helped round out the first top ten in UK Singles Chart history.
Check out the full first-ever top ten down below.
UK Singles Chart (Week of November 14th, 1952):
- ‘Here in My Heart’ – Al Martino
- ‘You Belong To Me’ – Jo Stafford
- ‘Somewhere Along the Way’ – Nat King Cole
- ‘The Isle of Innisfree’ – Bing Crosby
- ‘Feet Up (Pat Him on the Po-Po)’ – Guy Mitchell
- ‘Half as Much’ – Rosemary Clooney
- ‘High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me)’ – Frankie Laine / ‘Forget Me Not’ – Vera Lynn
- ‘Sugarbush’ – Doris Day and Frankie Laine / ‘Blue Tango’ – Ray Martin
- ‘The Homing Waltz’ – Vera Lynn
- ‘Auf Wiedersehen Sweetheart’ – Vera Lynn
