What was the first female number one of the 1960s?
The 1960s were an impeccable year for innovation. After all, not only did it give us The Beatles, but it was also the golden era that boasted people like Billie Holiday and Cass Elliot. And yet, somehow, it was also the era when achievements for women existed in the shadows.
From the mid-1950s to the 1970s, only one album by a female artist reached the number one spot on the US Billboard chart. This is a disparity that crosses the ages – in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, there are only 80 women out of 949. The literal co-founder, Jann Wenner, once implied women weren’t cut out to be anywhere near the masters-of-music-level achieved by their male counterparts.
And yet, legacy and cultural impact speak for themselves. Women might be far behind men in terms of recognising and honouring their accreditations, but when it comes to real, deep-seated impact, they’ve always been ahead. And many who have been around to see several cultural and industry transformations time and time over are still making history. Stevie Nicks is the only woman to be inducted into the Hall of Fame twice.
Billie Holiday quite literally changed the shape of jazz and pop forever. Dolly Parton was one of the first to prove that artists could still be artists even after freeing themselves from the shackles of their roots. Nina Simone is more of a legend than most could ever dream of, and Joni Mitchell all but invented the art of intricate, nuanced, emotive storytelling. And that’s not to even mention Joan Baez, Kate Bush, Aretha Franklin, and the women who invented things by pure happenstance, like Patti Page.
Who was the first female number one of the 1960s?
The charts nowadays are almost entirely dominated by female pop artists, but even those impossible achievements are overshadowed by culture’s silent (and not so silent) sexism that peers at its female frontiers with harsher eyes than their male counterparts. In the 1960s, women dominated in a different way, but the charting position was also sparse.
The first number one to come from a female artist, Connie Francis, wasn’t even initially meant for her. ‘Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool’ was intended for Laverne Baker and was in no way supposed to have the country twang it ended up with. But Francis entered the game wanting to play it that way, turning it into a hit that ended up making history.
But the best part of the making of the song wasn’t the intricacies of putting it all together, nor was it their difficulty getting placed with the right singer. The best part is the fact that Francis had so much confidence going into it that she knew she was right. She knew it would be a hit if it were hers. All she needed was for others to believe it, too.
As she explained to DISCoveries Magazine, “With ‘Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool,’ I knew going in that it was a number one song. I knew that even before the recording session, I really did just because the lyrics were so great. It had to be a hit because everything like it was. The only music that doesn’t seem to change much is country music.”
