Who was the best-selling female musician of the 1950s?
It says a lot that it’s difficult for most people to come up with female names who were prominent in the 1950s. We know all about Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Ray Charles, and Louis Armstrong. Even a quick Google search shows these names before getting to the women who also shaped the scene during the same era, like Patsy Cline, Peggy Lee, Billie Holiday, the list goes on.
In 1956, a journalist asked Holiday how her hair became so iconic. Obviously, the gardenia is one of the most familiar parts of her image today, but the framing of the question seemed somewhat snide to even consider at that moment in time. We can go on and on about how this filtered into her artistry and became a symbol of power today, but there seemed to be so many other avenues to get her to open up about her brilliance, least of which came from her appearance.
According to Joni Mitchell, the ’50s were the era of the greatest muses, before everything faded out into black. “No one I know could express hurt and loss with such a good-hearted tone, not a trace of self-pity or melodrama in it,” she once said about Holiday, describing how female singers in the ’50s embellished the scene with a different sort of flourish, the kind that made everything seem a little more “pristine”, as Mitchell put it, with renewed focus that transformed music into a real art form of expression.
As well as Holiday, voices like Etta James, Ella Fitzgerald and countless others established standards not just in jazz and other spaces but by breaking down barriers, proving that music was more for unity than it was for segregation, all while knowing there would be a long way to go before the world looked anything like how it did in their dreams. Perhaps even more glaring, though, is that, as influential as those names remain, the biggest-selling female artist of the 1950s is one most people have likely never heard of: Patti Page.
Who is the best-selling female artist of the 1950s?
The country rock boom of the 1960s and 1970s is usually tied to names like the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt, but much of this trend can be traced further back to the groundwork laid by Page. Rather than taking advantage of the traditional country tropes, however, Page took it and made it entirely her own, reinventing what it meant to be an innovator during a time when most musicians were simply going along with the changing trends in an effort to guarantee their place in history.
‘Tennessee Waltz’, for instance, has a gorgeous country twang to it, the kind you might find later in some of Dolly Parton’s best tunes, bringing together a seamless concoction of sentimentality and nostalgia that feels firmly rooted in its place and somewhere far less fixed in any sort of space or time. That said, perhaps one of the most interesting things about Page wasn’t how obviously brilliant she was but how casual she seemed when it came to discussing her own legacy.
Page always loved to sing, and that’s what she built her world around. It was never about being anybody or “making it”, as we say today, but enjoying herself without thinking too much about what success really means. As she once said: “I was a kid from Oklahoma who never wanted to be a singer, but was told I could sing. And things snowballed.”
