(Credits: Far Out)
Dear reader, finding out milestones of chart history is a pain in whatever nether regions you might have. You may think it’s a simple process of finding the correct chart and seeing what single was on top of it. That would be the most sensible option, but as you may have noticed, the world doesn’t operate sensibly, and the truth is a lot deeper and a lot more complicated than that. Especially the further back you go, and especially in the US.
While an important and deeply influential market in the history of pop music, the UK, as you may have noticed, is a bit smaller compared to our former colony. Thus, the market for pop music is small enough that when the first chart to keep track of the musical tastes of the day was conceptualised, there was a very practical way of getting the data. They just phoned up the 20 major record stores in the country and asked what their biggest sellers were.
They then combined all the data into one list, and thus, one of the most legendary hotbeds of talent in the history of pop music was born. It turns out that they couldn’t just do that across the pond. There were slightly more than 20 major record stores around, if you can count Adam and Eve. In fact, for the majority of the 1940s and 1950s, there wasn’t one chart compiling the hits of the day, but four.
There was one chart for radio play, one for in-store sales, one for plays on jukeboxes charmingly enough and then one composite chart compiling all the data together. This makes comparing the two something of a trial, especially when trying to find out when the tastes of the two most dominant voices of popular music of the time first matched each other.
What was the first single to top the singles chart in both the US and the UK?
Thus, we have two options. The first came in 1953 when Perry Como had a gargantuan hit in the form of his classic song ‘Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes’. It first hit number one on the US In-Store chart on January 10th and by January 24th, was the number one hit on all four charts. On February 6th, the song also hit number one on the UK charts, just in time for its final week at the summit of all four US charts. Thus, we have option number one for the first transatlantic number one hit.
The next option comes a few years later. Up until then, despite there being a fourth chart compiling all the data provided by the other three charts, it was only doing so for the top ten songs in the country. In November 1957, a fifth chart was introduced that applied the data collection for the “top 100” songs in the country. This would be known as the Billboard Top 100 and is the predecessor of the Hot 100 we know today.
From then on, there was a genuine hierarchy to those charts. Whatever song topped the Billboard Top 100 was unequivocally the biggest song in the country, much like how the biggest song in the UK was unequivocally the number one song on the singles chart. With that in mind, a slightly more convincing argument for the first genuine transatlantic chart topper is Guy Mitchell’s take on the Melvin Endsley number ‘Singing The Blues’.
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