What was the last song to sell a million copies of sheet music?
If you’re in a conversation about a certain artist and the topic of sheet music comes up, it’s usually about whether they could read it or not. These are some of our all-time favourite questions to ask: could The Beatles read music? Could Jimi Hendrix? Does possessing the skill reflect capability or legacy as a musician? Most of the time, it’s used to try to figure out whether being a legend means having the skill to do the one thing that made you seem more qualified, whatever that means.
There was a time when reading sheet music was a sort of formality among musicians, or something that made them seem far more officially equipped to follow the artistic path. For classical musicians, it was the expected step to become more learned, or well-read, in a way that meant intellectual capability more than anything else. It was an integral part of the job, only shifting as attitudes towards music changed, and the initial rigidity made way for something far more rooted in the art of feeling.
Granted, many would argue that certain classical musicians were the Rick Rubins of their day – just ask Billy Joel, who once went on a scholarly (or not so scholarly) rant about the genius of Beethoven and his ability to feel his way through entire emotions and narratives like a pariah of the modern age (“I could tell that [he] was going through various emotional stages”). But there’s always been a sense about sheet music and its connections to certain pioneers, or what it means to go without, as with the case of Hendrix.
And alongside changing attitudes also came the shift over to digital formats, pushing towards a more open space where it wasn’t necessarily a crucial part of the role or a means to achieve success. It’s still widely used today, of course, but it’s no longer the guiding principle it once was, now just used as an add-on or nice to have for those who wish to use it.
What was the last song to sell one million copies of sheet music?
But this also means there was once a time when sales of sheet music were used as a metric of success, a little like streaming numbers today, or at the very least, physical copies sold in a certain space of time. For instance, it’s still pretty impressive to hear that Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is the best-selling sheet music rock song in music history, while Evanescence’s ‘My Immortal’ earned a different, albeit just as impressive feat, earning the top spot with digital downloads.
But the last song to sell one million copies of sheet music, signalling a broader shift, is Patti Page’s ‘Tennessee Waltz’. An icon who also ruled the entirety of the 1950s, Page changed the game with ‘Tennessee Waltz’, and also a few years earlier when she effectively invented the vocal overdub just because she couldn’t afford to have any backing singers at the time.
But it wasn’t just the popularity of the song that likely made it soar with sheet sales, it also became the song of Tennessee, a culturally significant part of state that probably made a surge of people go to their nearest music shop to buy the physical notation so they could learn it and be a part of it all too. Maybe, in a way, that’s what it still means, aside from the pragmatism of owning the physical copy. A means to get closer to the music, even if the intention is merely to learn it in a way that feels more quantifiable. To make sense of the emotions as if you could apply mathematics to it all.
