Last year I did a deep dive into the very short career of Jim Croce, and one of the discoveries that stuck with me is that his ‘Time in a Bottle’ was the third posthumous single to reach #1 on the Hot 100.
Naturally, that had me wondering which other songs had done so before and after Croce’s. It turns out there are nine of them, and I’ll spend this week writing about the ones I haven’t already featured.
A trio of songs I mentioned a couple of weeks ago were still crowding the top of the Hot 100 the week of June 8, 1985: Tears For Fears’ ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World,’ Wham!’s ‘Everything She Wants,’ and Harold Faltermeyer’s ‘Axel F.’
At #4 that week was Billy Ocean’s ‘Suddenly,’ the title track of his fifth — and most successful — album.
Throwing back to the week of June 7, 1975, we find John Denver atop the Billboard Hot 100 with ‘Thank God I’m a Country Boy.’ The song hit #1 on the country chart the week before, making it one of six songs to top both charts that year (I covered another of them, Freddy Fender’s ‘Before the Next Teardrop Falls,’ just a couple of weeks ago).
This was Denver’s third #1 hit of four total in his career. All four came between 1973 and 1975. It also reached #1 in Canada and, go figure, Yugoslavia.
Meet Me In Montauk 