The Top 20 Of The Top 20! 1955 No. 10-6

10. Sammy Davis Jnr – Something’s Gotta Give

 (Highest Chart Position:  No.3)

Swinging was all about swagger.  And few people had more swagger, had more self-confidence in his zillion talents than did Sammy.  Which is made ever more impressive by he being a midget with a glass eye.  When you are a midget with a glass eye and you are singing about being an “irresistible force”, well that’s just about as much swagger as the world can cope with!

9. Rosemary Clooney – Mambo Italiano

(Highest Chart Position:  No.2)


1955 saw the world in the grips of a mambo craze. Everyone loved the mambo, and they expressed this love in the only way that people in the 1950s knew how: by singing novelty tunes about it! In this case, about the way a girl could go back to her home town, away from the hustle and bustle of modern day trends… and find that the modern day trends have arrived before her.


Ah the wonders of globalization!


This is, let’s face it, a stupid song. Full of nonsense lyrics that I practically need to go to Google Translate to understand, such as “try an enchilada with da fish a bac a lab”… um… “try an enchilada with a fish from a laboratory?” That can’t be right.


So why am I proclaiming its awesomeness?


Well clearly it’s a classic. The song returned to near the toppish end of the charts in the year 2000 wtih a Latino-house-disco flavor, and Lady Gaga has paid homage/ripped-off depending on your point of view (I’m leaning more towards homage myself) for the intro for “Americano” from “Born This Way.” That’s a lot of mileage for a little bit of nonsense.

8. Joni James – How Important Can It Be?

(Highest Chart Position: No.5)

Boyfriends in the 1950s were stupid creatures.

They were really into the virgin thing.  And if you’d had a boyfriend previously… and your new boyfriend found out… things could get messy.

Here are some interesting statistics uncovered by market research of teenagers at the time: "20% of boys claimed that they would refuse to marry a girl who had petted another boy, and 37% of girls wouldn’t marry a boy who had petted before." 

“How Important Can It Be?” is an oh-so-pretty time capsule of the social norms of the time, and a warning to teenage girl not to “pet” before you’ve got a ring on it, because your boyfriend is probably going to call you a slut.

Stupid boyfriend.

*rolls eyes*

Stupid Joni for actually apologizing and not just kicking his sorry ass to the curb.

*shakes head in disappointment*

But it’s oh-so-pretty.

And so is Joni.

7.  The Four Aces – Love Is A Many Splendored Thing

(Highest Chart Position:  No.3)

What an amazing world The Four Aces lived in!  People were so in love with each other that they just had to shout it from the highest mountain top!  So excited about it that you’d almost think that it was a new discovery… a new invention like television and REALLY BIG CARS!

Lots of people lived in this world in the 1950s but no one else quite took the emotion – the love of being in love – to the levels that The Four Aces did.  It’s a wonder to watch them, a wonder to wonder just how much more gleeful these guys can become over the course of the tune.  By the time they reach the final crescendo, and the tom drums roll, the gates of heaven are opening up, and the angels are fluttering down to Earth with their little bow and arrows, and it feels as though the world has been saved from the cynical clutches of divorce and bad relationships.   

Such is the power of music.

6. Al Hibbler – Unchained Melody

(Highest Chart Position: Number ONE!)

Before there was Stevie Wonder, before there was Ray Charles, there was another awesome blind black dude with glasses.   And coming into his Number One hit version “Unchained Melody” after decades of Idol/karaoke/Righteous Brothers versions is something of a revelation.  This is not a song to be sung straight, it is not just a nice melody.  It is unchained after all (okay, because of it was also the title of the movie, but I’m going with this…) and Al sings it as such, with the mood of the song, the way he sings each word, changing on virtually every note.  Picking all the highlights would be exhausting.  There’s a “to meeeeeee” bit that is gold.   There’s this one time where he sings “love” and the Earth trembles with his bass.  There’s the very determined manner in which he states where the lonely rivers flow “to the sea, to the sea!”  There’s the slow motion “tooooooooo meeeeee” at the end, the “tooooooooo” of which is also quite bowl trembling.

There just aren’t enough awesome blind black dudes in pop music anymore.