The oldest song in history to become a number one single
Folk songs were built to last. They emerged in an age of illiteracy where the only way to make things memorable was to render them catchy enough that they could be passed on through memorised word of mouth. That, in essence, is the providence of modern pop music—a mode unchanged for centuries. The people’s music is about the beauty of the basic and passing something meaningful on within that spartan framework. The charts have always upheld at least one half of that bargain.
Moreover, the charts have been no stranger to ancient songs, never mind the method that kept them catchy. “A folk singer is someone with a good memory, basically,” Pete Townshend once explained. “[Bob Dylan] had a wealth of American folk songs and Irish, Scottish folk songs. If you’re an expert folkologist, it is infuriating to be a Dylan fan. You know, someone like Roy Harper is always banging his head against the wall saying that ‘Masters Of War’ was written in Scotland in 1706’”.
Most people, however, are not expert folkologists, not to mention the fact that with each new hand-me-down, the track generally mutates a little, so the presence of the past in the future of pop is often obfuscated. But it is definitely there all the same.
Irving Berlin was having hits as a credited songwriter in the 1980s with tracks that were penned way back in the ’20s, even Elvis Presley charted decades after his debut, and who knows changes the advent of AI might bring on this front. After all, The Beatles scored their 21st number one last year with a demo that John Lennon wrote shortly before his death.
But what is the oldest number one song in history?
Naturally, it isn’t easy to be definitive with anything as mystic as old ‘traditional’ tracks. However, there are a few songs with very worthy cases to stake. Aside from typical old folk tracks like ‘House of the Rising Sun’ and ‘On Top of Old Smokey’ might have hit the top of the charts while remaining pretty faithful to the 1800s traditional tracks on which they are based, there are number ones that go back even further than that.
One of the most prominent is ‘Amazing Grace’. This classic gospel song has been covered by everyone from Aretha Franklin to Judy Collins. It was written in 1772 and published in 1779 by the English Anglican clergyman John Newton. While it didn’t quite fly in the stuffier sector of England, it became a staple song in both religious settings and outside of the church over in America.
While snazzy reinventions by the likes of Sam Cooke and even The Lemonheads might’ve revived the track in modernity and flirted with the top of the charts, it was The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards that brought it to number one in 1972 with a rather stately instrumental version. This offering lent heavily on an incarnation of the melody that was affirmed in 1835 when William Walker twisted it in a ‘shape note’ format to something close to the tune of ‘New Britain’, a fact that hints at its political deployment over the years.
However, there is a chart-topper that dates back further than that, and thankfully, it is a fair bit hipper, too. ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’ by The Byrds not only hit the top of the US charts on December 4th, 1965, after climbing up from an October entry point of 80th, but it also went on to somewhat define the sound and sentiment of Laurel Canyon, arguably the epicentre of the counterculture revolution.
Nevertheless, the lyrics and natural meter of them were anything but hip and happening. This element of the song is taken pretty much verbatim from the book of Ecclesiastes, which was written in the 10th century BC by King Solomon. However, this date is disputed by some Catholic scholars who claim it was more likely written in the third century BC.
Yet somehow, despite being anywhere between 2,225 and 3,024 years old, it remained a fixture of folk circles throughout history, long before the Byrds basically invented ‘jangly’ guitar with their version of it. That’s no mean feat—imagine if Brat summer is still booming in the year 6,000.
