Every Top 40 Hit Of The 1960s?

It's a pipe dream of mine to start an online radio station that has every single song to hit the BillBoard Top 40 between 1960-1969 on a constant random rotation. Has anything like this ever been done? How many songs would that be - around 2500-3000?

Even if this was just as an iTunes playlist, it would still be very cool, to hear all the different styles of the decade randomized.

 

The charts moved so quickly during the 60's, that could be thousands upon thousands of songs.

You'll be playing a lot of the Beatles and Supremes

 

60s radio was simply the best! You could hear Hendrix, The Cowsills, Dylan and Tony Bennett all in the same hour on the same station. The DJs were fun, too.

 

All you have to do is go to this excellent site and count them:

https://weeklytop40.wordpress.com/

 

Yes miss those DJs introducing me all the night to new stuff on Radio Caroline..

 

For me it was American Top 40 that introduced me to current music. I got to hear many songs that I would not have discovered any other way (such as songs that only reached the bottom ten of the chart).

 

I have been building a collection of songs in the rock era, using Joel Whitburns books: Top 40 hits and Top 100 singles.
This is a lot of work, it involves buying many comps, box sets, albums, doing needle drops, finding albums from the local library, other resources which shall be unnamed. It's been quick to find most of the top 40 songs, what is not quick is finding all the original mixes. What is tough is finding songs you may not necessarily like, but have to include in order to be complete. I only wish the Complete Instrumentals of the 60s did not stop, as that is a great source of obscure songs, but only up to 1962.

I have broken down the songs based upon the date they entered the top 40 by month, then arranged each month so they at least flow well when played in order. I have also played them in shuffle mode. The entire collection, which goes from 1900-1999 takes up about 45GB of space. I have them as MP3 files, ranging from 128k to 320k in quality. My Joel Whitburn books are all falling apart from this project.

Because of this project, I have so many comps, such as the Dick Bartley series, or the Hard-To-Find series. The 60s is the most complete of all the decades I have because that is where my focus is mainly.

I have another thread in which I did something similar to create an Elevator Music (or Muzak, or easy listening) Library to play in random mode. That one has about 2,000 songs.

 

Wow!!

 

I got a few related books, such as ones featuring:

• The 50 worst singles and albums of the rock & roll era.
• The 52 most depressing songs.
• One-hit wonders (acts that only hit the charts exactly one time).
• All number one hits from the beginning of the rock & roll era until 1988 (when my copy of the book cuts off).

 

Double Wow!!! Very impressive. I have a soft spot for the chart hits of the 1970's, since that's when I started listening to Casey. Back in the Napster days I was collecting those songs, supplementing what I had picked up over the years on vinyl, cassettes, CDs. The Time Life collections were a big help. I took Whitburn's Billboard charts of the 1970's book and entered everything into a spreadsheet. My OCD can be a bitch when it kicks in! I haven't worked very diligently on completing my collection in awhile, but I think I have about 50%.

To the OP, not sure about the 1960's, but for the 1970's my spreadsheet lists ALL songs that hit the Hot 100. The info is on my laptop at home so I don't have exact numbers in front of me, but I believe it's around 3500 total songs. I would expect the 1960's wouldn't be that different. Figure there were 520 weeks in the decade. If they average 5 new songs on the top 40 (since that's what you're looking to compile) each week that's ~2600 songs.

And to Flaneur - thanks for the link, I hadn't seen that before and I really like how it's set up!

 

Yeah, getting the original single versions of all those songs would be a challenge. Oldies radio stations rarely play the original singles mixes, and most listeners wouldn't know the difference if they did. By the way, I like what the Real Gone label has been up to with their releases of singles packages.

One thing is for sure, it's great fun listening to those great old tunes. There was so much going on in the 60s, and I'm constantly discovering amazing things I'd not heard before. Jeffrey Glenn's "Lost jukebox" series, for example, blows me away with its thousands of thousands of rips of 45 RPMs that didn't even crack the HOT-100.

Keep up the good work, and happy listening!

 

I'll occasionally be in the car with my wife when she listens to classic AT 40 shows from the 70s. We're constantly amazed by the stuff we have absolutely no recollection of.
I started in radio in 1971 and played a lot of stiffs (non-hits). But still, there is stuff I'm pretty sure I've never heard before. Most of it isn't especially interesting (to me.)

 

Good luck on getting your collection together. This has been something I have wanted to do before the age of CD ripping, and technology has finally made it possible. I know I do not have every top 40 hit, but I do believe I have about 85% of all the top 40 hits, and my collection also includes top 100 hits, too. The collection is so big, that it does not matter to me if I do not have an original 45 mix on everything, just having all the songs to play like an enormous jukebox is such a delight. If I find a better mix, I'll swap it out, which I am still doing after 10 years of making this collection. This has been such a long ongoing project, I went from using SoundJam back around 1997 until it morphed into iTunes.

 

One of the great things about the 60s was the regional nature of a lot of radio...there were a lot of songs played on various local stations that weren't heard in other parts of the country. The last few days I've been checking out this site http://www.las-solanas.com/arsa/stations.php which lists hundreds of local radio station playlists, from the 60's, 70's etc. and the tunes listed are really incredible. As a kid I moved to Southern California from Ohio in 1966 and was exposed to the "golden era" of top 40 music back then. Tons of amzing music was played on ordinary top 40 stations...and to think I took it all for granted!

 

Oh my gosh I was totally off in my calculations. I'm looking at my spreadsheet for all the songs that hit Billboard's Hot 100 in the 1970's, the total is a whopping 5422! And that counts double A-sided hits as 1 track, for example Something/Come Together Billboard listed as a single entry so I only count it once.

FWIW, I have 2115 of these hits in my collection, but that's not even 40%.

For Top 40 hits only, for the 1970's the number is 2440. Pretty amazing to me that almost 3000 songs hit the Hot 100 that decade and never made it into the Top 40.

 

Joel Whitburn's Pop Annual is the perfect guide for year by year chart entries.
1966 alone had 750+ entries; 1967 falls just shy of that record number.

 

I immensely applaud the idea, have always dreamed of making mix tapes like this...

Just doing a quick check of Joel Whitburn's Pop Annual, and not checking to see what he did for double sided hits, you get these Top 40 numbers of records per year:

1960 = 271
1961 = 300
1962 = 293
1963 = 284
1964 = 302
1965 = 322
1966 = 334
1967 = 322
1968 = 277
1969 = 279
Total = 2984

 

The "top 100 hits" charts of the '60s are where the action is.
A treasure trove of great local soul, garage, girl groups etc.

 

Yes, the 60's charts were full of fantastic material, some of my farourite music without a doubt. Diversity contributed to this, but also contributed to some incredibly bad stuff on the charts. As in: think really bad, and double it. It was truly a decade of musical extremes.

 

Joel Whitburn's Billboard's Top Pop Singles lists every song that hit Billboard's Hot 100 (and even the Bubbling Under) charts from 1955 to 2013 by artist. It's extremely informative and yes, I've worn out 2 copies already. Almost as good are Fred Bronson's Billboard Book Of No.1 Hits and Billboard's Book Of No.2 Hits. There are thousands of songs and each one gets at least a full page filled with all manner of tidbits about the song, artist, etc. Highly recommended.

 

I've actually done this! Or should I say, it is a largely realized dream.

I've been a charts lover for over 20 years. I have an entire shelf devoted to Joel Whitburn's Billboard books. In addition to the top-selling staples "Top Pop Singles" and "Pop Annual", I even have his hefty "Week by Week" volumes that contain reproductions of every Hot 100 chart for the 60's. I also have the 70's volume and 80's volume, though I reference them a bit less frequently. Perhaps the perfect book, for this thread, is his "Billboard Across The 60's Charts" volume. It lists every single that charted during the decade, arranged by artist, and even includes notations of where the song peaked on other genre-specific charts - country, R&B, etc.

For the purposes of my goal in trying to collect every charted hit of the 60's, I set up YouTube playlists. Any song (or original 45 version) that I can't locate there, I fill in by either tracking down the original 45 on vinyl (if find-able) or via my CD collection. Between all three outlets, I'm pretty sure I can successfully complete the task. Someday...

The beautiful thing is that there is virtually no limit as to how one can play back the decade's hits. One can arrange a playlist by artist (selecting every charted hit they had during the decade and arranging them either by chart date or by lowest charting hits to highest charting). One of my favorite ways to re-live the variety of pop's greatest decade is to simply arrange them by peak position and let them play in countdown fashion. If one really wants to make a lot of work for themselves, you can even arrange every single of the decade in precise rank order based on specific weeks charted etc. I even have a list where I have gathered every "double-sided hit" of the decade, which can be played back with the A side first, then the B side right after it and you can arrange these by year, or by highest charting (the combined peak positions of both sides - the lower the average of the two figures, the higher it ranks).

It's an amazing time capsule to look back on the 60's. A time when you could see a Sinatra song next to Strawberry Alarm Clock, or a Rolling Stones hit alongside a Vic Dana song.

It was great to see this thread here and to see I'm not the only one ridiculous enough to do this sort of thing!

 

I like this thread and the idea of an online radio station playing all of these songs and as a former radio personality, I would be interested in participating, if it were ever fully realized.

I have a question to any of you who have actually attempted to get all of these songs in their collections, but what songs, if there are any, still elude you which you can't find?

 

I got curious to see how many songs I had in my permanent collection.
I started in 1960 (18), then 1961 (23)
Then I said what the heck start with the first year (1955).

Darryl

 

The station should also play some great '60s songs that should have charted but somehow didn't, like If You Ever Need Me by Margaret Mandolph:

 

I have the Billboard "Bubbling Under" charts book and it fits that role. It documents every single that just missed the Hot 100 (typically peaking between 120-101). Even some big artists landed a few of these outside the Hot 100.