What was the first foreign song to win ‘Record of the Year’ at the Grammys?
The American charts are wide and varied, but for the most part, you can always rely on one strong majority: American artists. France, for instance, a proud nation that would confidently profess to be a leader in the arts, has only ever had two number-one hits in the US. Even Ireland, a nation that holds music dear and is majority English-speaking, has only topped the Billboard charts four times, half of which come from U2.
Of course, the UK has fared a little better, but would the British Invasion have even been quite so prominent if it wasn’t for ‘The Day the Music Died’? While that might seem like a futile hypothetical, the statistics certainly suggest a rare gap in the market helped to propel the movement along against the odds. On the one hand, as a proud and patriotic nation, this dominance is perhaps unsurprising. However, the US is also a nation of immigrants. In fact, about 97.91% of the population are either immigrants or descendants of non-Natives.
So, it’s also peculiar that the bulk of the music enjoyed in the States is cooked up on home soil. Furthermore, it’s not just domestically produced; it is also largely homogenised as English-language pop or one of its many subdivisions. Perhaps there is a reason for this, too.
Pop culture arose at a point when the Cold War and the battle against communism was at its most fierce. One of the battlegrounds was ideology. The emergence of pop was the perfect way for the US to extend its influence and beliefs around the world. And it was a wholly American creation. It typified the message that Hillary Clinton would later put into words: “America is not just a country. It’s an idea.”
However, the music heralded wasn’t always strictly from the States. A strange chapter in the Grammys’ history proves that much.
What was the first foreign song to win a Grammy?
The Grammy Awards began back in 1959 with the goal of recognising “Outstanding Achievement in the music industry”. It also offered the chance for the press and their pals to rub shoulders with the emerging pop culture stars of the day. This element seems even more apparent in the modern age.
If that sounds like slight cynicism aimed toward the ceremony of gilded gramophones, the origin story doesn’t do a great deal to bail it out. The ceremony was set up when industry executives realised that many esteemed people involved in music might miss out on a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Thus, they set up a ceremony to rival the Oscars and Emmys in the hope of rectifying music’s place on the Walk of Fame committee.
During the inaugural ceremony, the one star they all wanted to get a picture with was Domenico Modugno. The perpetually smoking Italian singer and actor was riding high on his hit ‘Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu (Volare)’, so high, in fact, that he would later go on to be an esteemed member of the Italian parliament in his later years, hailed as somewhat of a national hero.
One of the feats that raised him to this level was winning ‘Record of the Year‘ at the very first Grammys ceremony for the iconic track. So, it would be a bit of a misnomer to say that the victory marked him out as the first major foreign winner at the event, given that he was the first major winner, period. It even spent five weeks at the top of the US Billboard chart, too.
Notably, while the lyrics are in Italian, and the music has a dramatic chanson aura to it, there is an equal undercurrent of swing jazz. So, in a way, a decidedly un-American song still showed the proud nation’s cultural influence around the world—and was handsomely awarded with the best prize that they had to offer as a result.
