It took 17 years for another posthumous single to reach #1 after John Lennon in 1980, and then it happened twice to the same artist.
Rapper The Notorious B.I.G. was shot to death in his car in March of 1997 following a Soul Train Awards after-party. Two weeks later, his sophomore studio album — eerily titled Life After Death — was released and became an instant smash.
As mentioned earlier this week, Jim Croce’s ‘Time in a Bottle’ was the third posthumous #1 hit, released in late 1973 a couple of months after the singer-songwriter’s plane crash death.
The fourth posthumous #1 belongs to John Lennon. ‘(Just Like) Starting Over,’ the lead single of his Double Fantasy album, made it to #3 the week before his shooting death on December 8, 1980. By the end of December it was in the top spot, where it remained for five weeks, giving Lennon his top-performing solo single.
The second posthumous #1 single on Billboard’s Hot 100 came three years after the first. In 1971, Janis Joplin’s cover of Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Me and Bobby BcGee’ reached the top spot a few months after her drug overdose death at 27.
Joplin recorded the song for her second album, Pearl. Kristofferson was out of the country at the time and didn’t know about the cover. He heard the track for the first time the day Joplin was found dead in her hotel room.
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.
Meet Me In Montauk 