Throwing back to the week of July 10, 1954, we find Kitty Kallen still dominating the charts with ‘Little Things Mean a Lot,’ at #1 for the seventh of nine straight weeks.
In the #2 spot that week was Archie Bleyer’s recording of ‘Hernando’s Hideaway,’ a song from the musical The Pajama Game, written by Jerry Ross and Richard Adler. The song was recorded by several artists, but Bleyer’s was the most successful.
Throwing back to the week of June 19, 1954, we find Kitty Kallen still topping the charts with ‘Little Things Mean a Lot,’ in the middle of its nine-week run at #1.
In the second spot was pop quartet The Four Aces with ‘Three Coins in the Fountain.’ This was the group’s first #1 hit. Their second would come a year later with ‘Love is a Many Splendored Thing.’ Interestingly, both tunes won the Best Song Academy Award for movies that share their titles.
Throwing back to the week of May 29, 1954, we find Kitty Kallen atop the Billboard charts with ‘Little Things Mean a Lot,’ a song written by Edith Lindeman and Carl Stutz. Kallen’s version was the most popular of several recordings of this song.
It was so popular, in fact, that it claimed the title as the #1 song for all of 1954. This week was the first of nine straight it would spend atop the chart.
Throwing back to the week of May 1, 1954, we find two repeats topping Billboard’s singles chart: Perry Como’s ‘Wanted’ and Jo Stafford’s ‘Make Love to Me.’ This was the fifth straight week that those songs occupied the top two spots, with Como in #1 for four of them.
At #3 is ‘Cross Over the Bridge,’ a song originally written in 1945 by Bennie Benjamin and George David Weiss. The recording that received the most success was this one, by singer Patti Page. Page was the top-selling female performer of the 50s, having already scored four #1 hits before this one made it to #2.
Throwing back to the week of April 10, 1954, we find Perry Como atop the Billboard singles chart with ‘Wanted,’ a song that would spend two months in the #1 spot and become the best-selling track of that year.
‘Wanted’ was the eighth of 11 #1 hits for Como between 1945 and 1958, and he had 36 other top ten releases during that span. I guess he was his era’s Drake.
Meet Me In Montauk 