I have always liked music. There have been times of my life when I liked it better than other times. But, I think it’s safe to say, I’m a 20th Century Person. I sat down, one day, about 40 years ago and decided to collect all of the number ones from the rock era. The rock era starts in 1955 and continues to this day. They are in the form, mostly, of 45 rpm records, although some are on 33 1/3 record albums. It took about 10 years to get them all and then I got bored because I had them all. (Up to the point in time that I was at, then) So, I had a choice to make. Either expand the project to more years or go after lesser known songs like the Top 40 or Top 100. I collected the Top 40 for awhile, but realized I really like the music of the 30’s and the 40’s. So I decided to expand my search for number ones to include all of the 20th Century.

Using Billboard magazine as my source and Joel Whitburn books, I figured out what the number one songs were for each year for the 100 years of the 20th Century. That’s what this blog is all about. I am about to take a journey down memory lane. I hope there are enough people left who remember these songs. Because of copyright constraints, I can’t include copies of the songs on the site, but I don’t think there’s any law against talking about them and perhaps playing little 30 second snippets from some of them. I’ll try that until someone tells me to stop.

I thought of writing about the music in order starting from 1900 and proceeding through to 1999, but that doesn’t sound like fun to me. I want this to be fun, so I will talk about what I’m thinking about on any particular day. I’ll talk about what people ask me about, assuming anyone is reading this and I’ll talk about what the Number One songs are doing in the news, when they hit the news.

Feel free to sign up for the newsletter (when it is available) which will be mainly the entries that I print in the blog. Or just read along with me and follow the adventure of the music of the 20th Century. I love it. I hope you do, too.

Jim Hoag