The 10 best-selling songs from every year in the 1960s
We can sit here and debate what the best decade for music was for hours, but there is no escaping the fact that the 1960s were easily one of the most influential, especially in terms of the charts.
No one knew that music could be such a cultural phenomenon before the ‘60s came around, with bands like The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Who, and The Rolling Stones not just make songs but introducing a brand new way of life. They created and championed styles which are still celebrated to this day, as even in modern music, no matter how new something is, the fingerprints of the ‘60s are still all over it.
With such an influential decade, it won’t surprise you to hear that a lot of the songs which were bestsellers for different years are still considered huge tunes today; however, that doesn’t apply to all of them. Some of these popular tracks have since fallen under the radar, to the extent that a lot of listeners may not even be aware they exist.
It’s truly a fascinating decade for music and one that you should take a trip through, so, without further ado, here are the ten bestselling songs from every year in the ‘60s.
The 10 best-selling songs annually from the ‘60s:
Elvis Presley – ‘It’s Now or Never’ (1960)
The ‘50s were very much the decade for Elvis Presley, as the Mississippi man and his thrusting hips caused plenty of controversy but also won over the hearts of everybody listening. As we headed into the ‘60s, Elvis saw in this new era with one of the best-selling songs of the year in the form of ‘It’s Now or Never’.
This was a different kind of song for Elvis as it moved away from his more upbeat numbers and allowed him to actually sing with soul. This song seemed to cement him as ‘The King’ as people realised just how good a voice he had, such that Frank Sinatra had always been wary of him, saying, “When he goes into something serious, a bigger kind of singing, we’ll find out if he’s a singer”, and that’s exactly what he did.
Bobby Lewis – ‘Tossin’ and Turnin’ (1961)
You just never know when an artist is going to capture the hearts of the public, wherein Bobby Lewis had written a number of R&B albums by 1960, but none of them had managed to take off. He wasn’t planning on recording anything when he stopped by Belton Records in Manhattan, but then he did, and it changed everything.
In Manhattan, he bumped into Ritchie Adams, the lead singer of the Fireflies; the two had gigged together previously, and Adams suggested that Lewis record his newest composition, ‘Tossin and Turnin’. Lewis obliged, and they wound up creating this great song, which would become widely covered and was the biggest-selling tune of 1961, turning the tides for him.
Acker Bilk – ‘Stranger on the Shore’ (1962)
As a number of innovative musicians started to make a name for themselves throughout the ‘60s, a lot of the names that went to number one throughout the decade are now well-known individuals in the world of rock and pop; however, Acker Bilk’s music sits in a slightly different realm, as he teeters further on the side of jazz.
‘Stranger on the Shore’ was an instrumental song that Bilk said he wrote in the back of a taxi, and which climbed to the top of the charts in the UK, then six months after its release, did exactly the same thing in the US. It was clear the track had something appealing embedded within, and both of those ascensions of the charts meant that it became the best-selling song of ‘62.
Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs – ‘Sugar Shack’ (1963)
When you look back at some of the songs which were successful in the ‘60s, some of the tracks have characteristics which continue to appeal to people in the modern age. ‘Sugar Shack’ is one of these songs, as the storytelling throughout appealed to people so much in 1963 and is something that listeners still enjoy in modern music.
It’s a simple concept, one that sees a man in a cafe try to win over a woman drinking there, but that story hooked people and led to sales around the world, not to mention the whistling riff that plays throughout also grabbed listeners from the moment the track started.
The Beatles – ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ (1964)
1964 may well be the biggest year in music history, as this was the year that The Beatles first went over to America, and the subsequent Beatlemania ensued, so how could such a prolific year generate anything other than their song landing at number one. Plenty of songs by the Fab Four captured the hearts of the world, but it was ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ which proved the most successful.
“There was no real future for a British band before The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964,” said Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham when discussing the band’s rise to fame, adding, “That was the turning point, after which there was an avalanche. It totally transformed the possibilities, and as usual, The Beatles were the frontrunners. In music, there is The Beatles, and then there is everybody else.”
Sam the Sham – ‘Wooly Bully’ (1965)
What would a list about popular songs from a decade be without a little bit of controversy, and while ‘Wooly Bully’ isn’t really a song which has gone down in history as a classic, the nonsensical nature of it appealed to audiences at large for some time. There aren’t many lyrics that aren’t ‘Wooly’ or ‘Bully’ in this chaotic composition, but that simplicity and strangeness seemed to draw people in.
On the other hand, the controversy was that while most people just accepted the song as nonsense, some radio stations banned it because they worried that the secret meaning behind the song was somewhat suggestive. It’s never been cleared up what the lyrics mean (if anything), but the track remains one for the history books.
The Mamas & the Papas – ‘California Dreamin’ (1966)
If ever there was a song that sounded like the ‘60s, it would be ‘California Dreamin’, which captures the pop and hippy movement that was captivating the world incredibly well, and it was this style that the public flocked to in 1966, with enough people listening to and buying the record in the ‘60s that it climbed to the top of the charts and stayed there.
“The ‘California Dreamin’ session was magical,” recalled songwriter PF Sloan, “John [Phillips] was very nervous. Nobody particularly liked the song, and to be honest with you, ‘California Dreamin’ was maybe three or four chords. I added the ‘Walk – Don’t Run’ Ventures guitar riffs for that ‘da da da da da da’. That was all creative work inside the studio when I heard them singing on mic.”
Lulu – ‘To Sir, with Love’ (1967)
What made this song such a cultural success could well have been the excellent performance by Lulu, the fact that it came out alongside a film of the same name, or both. Lulu was only supposed to have a small part in To Sir, with Love, but on set, she impressed the director so much that he bumped her role up, and that impressive performance resonated with the public as well, who couldn’t get enough of this track.
The success could also have been the result of the fact that the writer of the song changed his process when putting it together, which could well have given it a fresher feeling. “It’s one of the very, very few songs that I’ve worked on where I’ve written the words first,” said the songwriter Don Black, “Normally, I may give the composer a title or suggest a couple of lines, but I don’t like to write the whole lyric first.”
The Beatles – ‘Hey Jude’ (1968)
Sometimes, when we look back on the most popular songs from years gone by, the tracks are a fun jolt to our memory, a nod towards a piece of music that we might not have thought about for a while. Then you have years like 1968, when you see the song that became number one and can only have a reaction akin to, ‘Oh yeah, that makes sense’.
I mean, what song is going to climb the top of the charts in a year like ‘68 other than one like ‘Hey Jude’, the Beatles track that captured the hearts of everybody who heard, and delivered on giving listeners something equally beautiful and energetic. With a powerful finish that people still sing en masse today, the Fab Four really tapped into something special when they put this one together.
The Archies – ‘Sugar, Sugar’ (1969)
While all of the songs listed above were written and released by real people, the same can’t be said for ‘Sugar, Sugar’. The Archies were a fictional band put together in the Archie comics, and this song became such a hit that it jumped from the pages to the charts and remains in the hearts of listeners to this day.
There have been a few occasions when a song from a fictional band has climbed the count to become a number one hit, but very few of those songs have had the same cultural impact that The Archies did, such that you will still hear it frequently in your everyday life, despite it being released decades ago, and unsurprisingly, it was the best-selling track of 1969.
