Which song was number one for the longest in the 1960s?
No other decade in living memory has witnessed such seismic, rapacious change as the 1960s.
Beginning the ten years still mired in the black-and-white residue of Leave It to Beaver and McCarthyite conservatism, by its end, the counterculture had thrown the entire American mythos into flux.
Scenes of burning draft cards, growing your hair long, LSD mind expansion, and “dropping out” in violation of social mores were unthinkable only a few years earlier. But with The Beatles at the helm, they soon became the indelible images of the era.
Of course, not everyone was a hippy – most weren’t – but it only takes a small cohort to pull society into a new age. Popular music underwent an earth-shattering shift in only a few short years and scored the era’s upheaval. Even visually, gone were the uniformed PR shots carefully curated by the band’s ambitious manager to be replaced by psychedelic visions of desert wanderers or even lysergic artwork doing the talking.
As Hunter S Thompson would put it shortly after the decade came to a close, “Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run…but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant…”
The unanswered mystery is all part of it, too. One look at the reality of the charts, for instance, can have you thinking it was at least partly myth. Or maybe it wasn’t.
The counterculture and middle America, alike all, certainly both wanted to go for gold. Having only been created in 1958 after consolidating rankings in in-store sales, DJ spins and jukebox plays, the Billboard Hot 100 saw everyone from The Doors to Staff Sgt Barry Sadler clamouring for the lucrative top spot.
For the 1960s’ longest number-one spot, we have to rewind right to the decade’s start – before moon landings, the British invasion, and JFK’s bloody assassination – to the early 1960s, when the pop climate was still dominated by soundtrack LPs, early R&B and the embers of rock ‘n’ roll.
So, which song held the number-one spot the longest in the 1960s?
Among contenders from Elvis Presley to The Everly Brothers, the one song that took the lion’s share of the year’s weeks at number one was a Canadian-American bandleader and composer, with his rendition of ‘Theme From a Summer Place’ peaking at number one in February and remaining there for a then-record of nine consecutive weeks.
Originally written by Max Steiner with lyrics by Mack Discant for the romantic drama A Summer Place, it was Percy Faith and his Orchestra’s instrumental version which would stand as the definitive take and an archetypal work in the emerging ‘easy-listening’ genre. It wasn’t an overnight success, however. Released in September 1959, it only took off once the movie was picking up at the box office.
“I was a little disappointed at first,” Faith told radio personality Wink Martindale in 1973. “We recorded it in New York, and it did nothing the first two or three, four, five, they waited five or six weeks… and apparently what happened was A Summer Place showed downtown for one week and it was a flop.”
Continuing, “And then it got into the suburbs, and it got to the young people, and this was their story, it was their picture and that music was theirs. And I started getting mail from these youngsters that every time they hear the song, they cry, and they’ve worn out their copy.”Faith’s record wouldn’t be broken til Debby Boone’s 1977 pop number ‘You Light Up My Life’ – another sign that the charts often favour odd breakthroughs as opposed to big names. Even with the Rolling Stone-lauded wave of 1960s acts to follow, none could knock little old Faith off the top spot. Which begs the question: have you even heard of the man who dominated the 1960s charts?
