The sound of the States: America’s 17 charting Billboard hits
‘A Horse With No Name’ and ‘Ventura Highway’ evolved to become perfect American songs, soundtracking the vast and mythical expanse of one of the world’s most powerful countries.
With that, it was only right that they were written by a band named America, a three-piece that embodied everything about the country sonically, despite not even growing up there.
The band have somewhat of a bizarre upbringing in terms of the country they were named after. While Gerry Beckley, Dewey Bunnell, and Dan Peek were all American, they in fact grew up in the UK, thanks to their fathers being stationed at a United States Air Force base near London.
Together in their self-made microcosm of home, the band began crafting a genre of soft-rock that tapped into something across the pond. “We got a little attention because we were Americans,” Dewey Bunnell explained, adding that’s exactly why they named their band after their homeland. A romantically charged, calculated move to win favour back home.
“In fact, that’s kind of why we picked the name America, because we were going around. London was a fairly concentrated music scene there,” he added. “You didn’t have to like over here, you got Nashville and LA and you know, New York. Everything was concentrated there in London.”
Ultimately, it worked; the sense of American longing dripped all over their finest music and mythologised a life that had been sold to us in books and movies. Take ‘Ventura Highway’ for example, a song that played into the country’s grand idea of opportunity, where the people met along the journey, encouraging you into reaching for the unreachable.
Then there was ‘A Horse With No Name’, written in a remote Dorset studio, where the three members of the band stared out the window and dreamt of the warm expanse of America’s west coast. They were a band based outside of America, called America, looking at it from an external window and mythologising it as the rest of the world did in the 1970s.
So, despite representing something of musical underdogs, it really comes as no surprise that they stormed the charts on countless occasions and became a beloved American rock band.
So, how many times did America chart on Billboard?
In total, the band charted on the prized American leaderboard 17 times. A record they were proud to boast on their 2001 compilation, The Complete Greatest Hits, which featured all of the tracks involved, along with four more personal choices.
Both ‘A Horse With No Name’ and ‘Ventura Highway’ made the list, but only the former hit number one while the latter peaked at 8. But ‘A Horse With No Name’ didn’t end up being their most successful Billboard track; that was ‘Sister Golden Hair’, which also hit number one and then stayed in the charts for a total of 16 weeks, two more than ‘A Horse With No Name’.
The remaining America tracks that reached the Billboard charts were‘Tin Man,’ ‘Lonely People,’ ‘You Can Do Magic,’ ‘Ventura Highway,’ ‘I Need You,’ ‘Daisy Jane,’ ‘Today’s The Day,’ ‘The Border,’ ‘Don’t Cross The River,’ ‘Woman Tonight,’ ‘Right Before Your Eyes,’ ‘California Dreamin’,’ ‘Only In Your Heart,’ ‘Muskrat Love’ and ‘Amber Cascades’.
