The week of May 22, 2004, found Usher in a familiar place on top of the Billboard Hot 100.
When Usher was named the headliner of this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, I was underwhelmed. But I guess that’s because I wasn’t paying much attention in the early 2000s when he was churning out hits faster than the charts could process them.
Consider that ‘Burn’ replaced Usher’s own ‘Yeah!’ at #1 and was later dislodged from the top spot by ‘Confessions Part II,’ another Usher track.
Throwing back to the week of May 21, 1994, we find the R&B band All-4-One atop the Billboard Hot 100 with their sole #1 hit, ‘I Swear.’
This song was first released five months earlier as the lead single of country singer John Michael Montgomery’s album Kickin’ It Up. That recording spent a month at #1 on the country chart, and made it to #42 on the Hot 100.
Throwing back to the week of May 19, 1984, we find Lionel Richie’s cheesy ballad ‘Hello,’ which topped the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks.
This was the second song from the hit album Can’t Slow Down to reach the top spot, following ‘All Night Long (All Night).’ The album’s three other singles all reached the top ten, on the way to making this one of the top-selling albums of the 80s.
After a Taylor Swift detour we’re back to Throwback Weekends, and this is a fun one. The week of May 18, 1974, saw country/pop artist Ray Stevens atop the Billboard Hot 100 with his novelty song ‘The Streak.’
Written in response to the rise in streaking at public events, the song finds Stevens portraying both a TV reporter and the main witness to streakers at a supermarket, a gas station, and a basketball game.
For almost the entirety of 1964 so far, in these Throwback Weekends, The Beatles have dominated the Hot 100. The band owned the top of the chart for 14 consecutive weeks with three different songs reaching #1.
So who finally dethroned the Fab Four? Would you believe it was 62-year-old jazz legend Louis Armstrong with a demo of the title track from the Broadway musical Hello, Dolly!?
