What was the first pop song to enter the US Library of Congress?
Popular music, as realised in the 1950s, along with 45 singles, the charts, and the emerging marketable demographic of the teenager, will cease to be a living memory sooner than you think. With the Baby Boomer generation, who grew up with rock ‘n’ roll and shaped the 1960s counterculture, entering their 80s, the 20th-century icons that still tower across our cultural landscape will shrink into the distance as the decades continue to roll on.
Anticipating the need to preserve the country’s audio relics, the US Congress passed the National Recording Preservation Act in 2000. The act is dedicated to compiling recordings that “are culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant, and inform or reflect life in the United States”. Forming one federal arm of the Library of Congress, the National Archives has protected 650 recordings as of 2024, with 25 added every year.
Founded in 1800, America’s National Library predates any other federal cultural institute. Situated across three buildings in Washington DC’s political centre on Capitol Hill, the LOC is one of the largest libraries in the world, housing around 173 million items and boasting research materials across over 470 languages. Forged during the tumultuous period of the British forces’ capture of the fledgling capital in 1814, much of the original library’s collection was lost during Washington’s seizure during the War of 1812.
‘Pop’ is a sensibility over a genre and thus has a broad definition which encompasses a myriad of categorisations that prove tricky for any kind of indexing project. The LOC sets out its pop criteria as songs that “can be broadly defined as songs that are at least intended to reach a broad audience via some form of commercial distribution, such as broadsides, sheet music, song collections, touring musicians or musical production and from the 1890s on, commercial recordings. Being made to travel, popular music is most likely to represent a broad range of influences, including ones from folk, church and other popular music sources.”
With that outline, the LOC and its National Recording Preservation Board split pop into various chronological eras around pre-1955, -1975, and 1975+ to mark the shift music took in establishing the contemporary music industry as we understand it to this day. Aside from entries by Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin under the folk and R&B categories in the first year of induction, Les Paul and Mary Ford’s ’51 cover of the jazz standard ‘How High the Moon’ and Bing Crosby’s festive classic ‘White Christmas’ were selected for the pre-1955 intake, but an incursion into pop’s contemporary didn’t take place to the ’03 induction picks.
So, what was the first pop song to enter the Library of Congress?
Under the ‘Rap/Hip Hop’ distinction, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s 1982 socially conscious ‘The Message’ was inducted straight away in 2002, an enduring cut that first realised hip hop’s potential for political commentary with its documentary of New York City’s urban malaise in a marked creative shift away from the party based rap of The Sugarhill Gang or Kurtis Blow.
In the 1955 to 75 grouping, the earliest pop song to enter the LOC was where it arguably all began. Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ was so consequential that it proved instrumental in shepherding the rock ‘n’ roll revolution, even covered by The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. A feverish cut which pleaded for the era’s rhythm and blues to be as lauded as classical music, it’s a safe bet that Berry and his peers will be poured over by kids in the 2100s more than Ludwig van could ever have predicted.
