What is the only song from a movie to reach number one in three different years?
The Hollywood songbook may well boast popular music’s pop litany as the 20th century’s most enduring musical legacy.
The fact is, rock and roll and the cataclysmic birth of the charts, 45s, and the ever-essential disc jockey are only around 70 years old, whereas cinema had a solid thirty years to transport, move, and entertain the public, pulling from the ragtime tradition and emerging Broadway standards at film’s silent infancy. Long before Chuck Berry plugged in his guitar and Elvis Presley swivelled his hips, the silver screen was producing the day’s populist and far-reaching soundtrack.
Alongside The Beatles’ oeuvre and Bob Dylan’s lyrical canon, it’s a surefire bet that in centuries to come, a warm wistfulness will still cast its spell the moment Dorothy Gale sings longingly of glittering vistas ‘Over the Rainbow’, Walt Disney’s immortal beacon of beckoning magic ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’, or the down and out dive bar rumination of ‘As Time Goes By’. Such gems sit in the popular consciousness in a way that Jimi Hendrix or The Rolling Stones can never quite touch—nor should they.
While the enduring film song continues to evolve and adapt to new relevancy and life into the 21st century, to glean the single that hit the top spot three times, we have to reach into Hollywood’s golden age when such a movie theme could stir the masses to such record-breaking sales.
So what movie song’s hit number one in three different years?
Curiously enough, the world’s most famous Christmas song outside the carols was written by a Jewish man, debuted in a non-festive film, and was released in the middle of July.
Conceiving the piece as a satire on sentimental balladry, once Irving Berlin had nailed the chorus of a little work-in-progress called ‘White Christmas’, he knew he’d struck gold. Once in the hands of crooner Bing Crosby, ‘White Christmas’ was featured in his 1942 musical feature Holiday Inn, a comedy starring Crosby and Fred Astaire, basing each all-singing, all-dancing segment on a US holiday, Berlin’s whimsical number naturally scoring the film’s festive episode.
Released in the summer of 1942, ‘White Christmas’ proved so massively popular at a time when the nation was rocked by the Second World War that Crosby’s yuletide hit would top the US charts for 11 straight weeks. Winning the Oscar for Best Original Song at the 15th Annual Academy Awards the following year, ‘White Christmas’ once again shot to number one in December 1943, then scored a festive chart topper again in 1944 during America’s final Christmas of the war.
The festive cut just wouldn’t die. Over ten years after Holiday Inn, Crosby would star in 1954’s White Christmas vehicle, boasting a re-recording of its enduring anthem, and his stirring number would go on to stand as the biggest-selling single of all time, flogging over 50 million physical copies since its first release. To this day, Crosby also counts single sales bronze with 1935’s ‘Silent Night’, just behind Elton John’s ‘Candle in the Wind 1997’ memorial monster.
