When is a #1 song not a #1 song? When it’s 1956.

Welcome to the murky world of the Hot 100! (a.k.a. What We’re Talking About When We Talk About The Charts)

Billboard, a music trade magazine, began keeping track of the most popular songs in the US about a hundred years ago — beginning with sheet music — and they’re still in charge now. [Another publication, Cash Box, has also published its own chart since the 1940’s, but they’ve always been the Hydrox to Billboard’s Oreo.] There are dozens of charts by genre (e.g. Country, Modern Rock, Dance, Jazz, etc.), and then there’s the big one, the Hot 100, which ranks the most popular singles in the nation regardless of genre.

How these rankings are determined has changed over the decades, but it’s usually some combination of sales, airplay, and nowadays, streaming — it’s also pure witchcraft, an arcane, complex, ever-changing formulation with a LOT of room for inaccuracy, especially prior to the 1990’s when computers mercifully took over from humans. Before that, Billboard surveyed DJs and retail sellers and trusted their word on the top singles. You also had the mafia exerting influence and record labels employing payola — paying DJs to play certain songs — even after the 1950’s crackdown on the practice.

All of these inaccuracies and outside forces probably didn’t make for drastic changes — like, say, a 30 place swing (although it’s impossible to know) — but it’s certainly likely that many songs should have finished higher or lower than their final standing. The best example of this arises with the advent of the SoundScan era in the 1990’s (i.e. the computers take over) when country and metal, always underrepresented on the charts, immediately shot to the top with accurate sales figures.

And what exactly does all of the above have to do with 1956 and this Schrödinger’s cat of a #1 song? I’m glad you asked.

Prior to the formation of the Hot 100 in 1958, Billboard used four different charts to determine the most popular songs: Best Sellers In Stores (i.e. retail sales), Most Played By Jockeys (i.e. radio play), Most Played On Jukeboxes (i.e. Most Played By Teens), and the Top 100 (an early version of the Hot 100). Today, Billboard itself considers the Best Sellers chart as definitive from this era, despite the fact that it skews slightly towards adult listening tastes in comparison to all the others.

Can you see where I’m going with this?

Jim Lowe maintained a dual career as a radio personality and singer during the 1950’s and 60’s, scoring a few decent-sized hits, mostly with novelty songs, but found his biggest success by far in 1956 with “The Green Door,” a single that went to #1 on the Jukebox chart and the Top 100, but not on the Best Sellers or Radio charts. As a result, some publications say he scored a #1; some publications say he did not. The Platters and Pat Boone also experienced this uncertainty in 1956. Number 1 in our hearts, though — right, gang?

In 1958, all this confusion cleared up when Billboard got its act together and “Poor Little Fool” by Ricky Nelson became the first song to top the Hot 100. But that’s another story.

So tell ’em Joe sent you, and listen to the laughs behind the green door . . . with Jim Lowe.

Wondering how they got that cool piano sound? Thumbtacks. You press them into the hammers and when they strike the strings it produces that shimmery, metallic, harpsichord sound. You then have what’s known as a tack piano. Seriously.

Bonus content: The UK charts are even more Byzantine so I won’t go in-depth. Four different publications maintained their own charts in the 1950’s and 60’s; however, NME’s is generally considered definitive nowadays (doesn’t make it completely accurate, of course) — those who grew up reading Melody Maker might beg to differ. A host of companies were subsequently charged with keeping track of the charts until the early 1990’s when the Official Charts Company took over and stabilized the situation.

Can’t talk about UK charts and “The Green Door” without Shakin’ Stevens — #1 (for sure) in 1981: