What was the first number one song on the Billboard Hot 100?
Tracking popular songs has been a proud tradition ever since popular music became commercially available. With the advent of the radio, there was an increasing push to quantify what audiences were listening to: the days of tallying sheet music sales were over. A new age called for a tallying system that was reflective of modern listening habits, and that’s where Billboard saw an opportunity.
Originally formed as a bill-posting publication, Billboard began to shift its focus to music in the early 1930s. 20 years later, the rock and roll era had officially begun. 7-inch singles were skyrocketing in terms of popularity. Three-minute singles were how most people were hearing their new music. The magazine had previously experimented with compiling lists of the most popular songs, with the magazine’s ‘Honor Roll Of Hits’ serving as a direct precedent for what would eventually become the Billboard Hot 100.
By 1955, Billboard had three main charts that were keeping track of popular songs: ‘Best Sellers in Stores’, ‘Most Played By Jockeys’, and ‘Most Played in Jukeboxes’. On November 12th of that year, the magazine published its first aggregate of all its sales data, then titled ‘The Top 100’. With a tallying system that favoured sales over radio play, Billboard put The Four Aces’ ‘Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing’ as their first chart-topper.
Throughout 1957 and 1958, Billboard began gradually combining their three charts into a single list. The ‘Most Played in Jukeboxes’ list was the first to go in the summer of 1957, followed by the ‘Most Played by Jockeys’ list in the summer of 1958. It was then decided that the remaining list, ‘Best Sellers in Stores’, was to be combined with ‘The Top 100’ and rebranded as the ‘Hot 100’.
Seymour Stein, the future founder of Sire Records, was a teenage assistant to Tom Noonan, who was in charge of assembling charts for Billboard. Along with music editor Paul Ackerman, the three came up with the idea of the ‘Hot 100’ to replace their previous charts. Stein, who would later sign artists like the Ramones, Madonna, Talking Heads, and The Cure, didn’t remember who specifically came up with the name for the chart.
Nevertheless, the ‘Hot 100’ was christened on August 4th, 1958. The first artist to land a number one single on the chart was Ricky Nelson with ‘Poor Little Fool’. The track was written by Sharon Sheeley, whose supporters included Elvis Presley and The Everly Brothers. Sheeley wrote the song when she was 15, and by the time Nelson took it to number one, Sheeley was only 18 years old.
Check out ‘Poor Little Fool’ down below.
