The Billboard Hot 100 All-Time Top Songs (#1)

So here's the lowdown. It isn't Madonna, not Michael Jackson, not even Elvis Presley whose music is Billboard's most successful single of all time.  The artist was not even the original singer of the big hit, and these days, he endorses a brand of steaks and beef jerky.

Ernest Evans would entertain his friends in the various jobs he took.  His boss at the Produce Market fondly nicknamed him "Chubbycheckar," and the store owner of the Fresh Farm Poultry, so impressed with his singing and performance style, arranged for Chubby to have a private recording session for American Bandstand host Dick Clark. 

During that meeting, Clark's wife asked Ernest what his friends called him and he replied, "Chubby."  

"As in in Checker?" she asked. And after that, the monicker stuck for good.

In 1959, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters recorded a minor hit as a B-side to their TEARDROPS ON YOUR LETTER.  It was in the year after when 19 year-old Chubby Checker covered that flipside song to create a monster hit and a dance craze that were both named, THE TWIST.

Checker's smash single reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in September of 1960, and then set a record as the only song to reach No. 1 in two different chart runs when it resurfaced and topped the chart again in January of 1962, following Checker's appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show.  All in all, the song was in the Hot 100 for a whopping 39 weeks.

Since then, Checker has covered his own cover several times.  In 1982, he rerecorded THE TWIST but renamed it T-82.  He then went to the studio in 1988 with The Fat Boys to make an updated rendition of The Twist.  And in 1990, Checker even did a country version of his most popular tune. 

Checker is known to have compared THE TWIST to the creation of the telephone as a groundbreaking moment because he says the song allowed people for the first time to dance "apart to the beat" as opposed to say, in ballroom dancing.

So there you have it.  Let's give it up again for the big 10 in Billboard's Hot 100 Top Songs of All-Time:

#10 UN-BREAK MY HEART (Toni Braxton)

#9 WE BELONG TOGETHER (Mariah Carey)

#8 HEY JUDE (The Beatles)

#7 YOU LIGHT UP MY LIFE (Debbie Boone)

#6 PHYSICAL (Olivia Newton-John)

#5 MACARENA (Los Del Rio)

#4 HOW DO I LIVE (LeAnn Rimes)

#3 MACK THE KNIFE (Bobby Darin)

#2 SMOOTH (Carlos Santana)

#1 THE TWIST (Chubby Checker)

And here's a video of that top charter, THE TWIST:

Geoff Mayfield, director of charts at Billboard magazine, acknowledges that the list may not jibe with fans' personal choices for the most popular songs in the last 50 years.  He says, "This is simply a chronicle of how each of these songs performed in their era on the Hot 100.  We're not saying these are the most memorable songs of your life."

Meanwhile, there is another chart, Billboard's All-Time Hot 100 Artists. You might resonate with that list more.  But you guys will have to wait for my next posts to find out....

The Billboard Hot 100 All-Time Top Songs (#2)

It was after his band's reunion show in 1997 at New York's Radio City Music Hall when the artist realized that his younger children were growing up without ever having heard his music over the radio; after all, his last big hit was in 1982.  And so he got together with mega record executive Clive Davis (the same man who signed him up with the Columbia label in the late 60s) and then-Arista senior director Pete Ganbarg to produce an album designed to reach junior high schools, high schools, and universities. The man is Carlos Santana, and the album was to be SUPERNATURAL.

For the project, Davis and Ganbarg gathered the current who's who in the music industry to collaborate with Santana, among them songwriter Itaal Shur, who submitted the song ROOM 17 for SUPERNATURAL.  The lyrics went: Room 17, on the 17th floor, meet me at the elevator and I'll take you to the door.

Producers were not very happy the lyrics, and so they convinced Shur to allow another songwriter to play with the words that would accompany Shur's already engaging music. The man they hired, Matchbox 20's Rob Thomas.  After numerous revisions, Davis and Ganbarg (who let Santana hear the demo) were extremely happy with Thomas's work.  The hitch? Santana was not.

Santana's manager approached Ganbarg and advised him that maybe Davis could assure the guitarist that the song would be a hit.  The manager said, "With all due respect, he's known you for around 2 or 3 years now. He's known Clive Davis for 30."  And so Davis immediately sent Santana a fax that read: "Dear Carlos, I really believe in the song.  We're gonna hire Matt Serletic to produce it.  I think with Matt's vision, with Rob Thomas on vocal and with your guitar, I think it would be very special."

An hour later, Santana's manager called saying that Carlos would record the song, SMOOTH.

The song broke the airwaves in July 1999, eventually hitting No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and staying there for an incredible 12 weeks.  In February 2000, SMOOTH won the Grammy Awards for record of the year and best pop collaboration with vocals.

Santana later called Ganbarg saying, "Pete, It's Carlos.  I'm calling to apologize. You were right.  I was wrong.  And thank you for giving me a song I'll be playing for the rest of my life."

Let's see the official SMOOTH video featuring the reluctant Rob Thomas on vocals. Thomas had wanted George Michael to record his lyrics, but was outvoted by record producers.

We're just one step away to revealing Billboard's biggest hit of all time!  The artist? A happy and chubby one today at age 66....

The Billboard Hot 100 All-Time Top Songs (#3)

In 1928, the music drama DIE DREIGROSCHENOPER written by Bertolt Brecht with music by Kurt Weill premiered in Berlin, and from it emerged a song that would become a popular standard: DIE MORITAT VON MACKIE MESSER. 

The play was eventually translated into English and was called, THE THREE PENNY OPERA.  And like its original, its main character was the deadly MACKIE MESSER, a persona based on the dashing but cruel and sinister highwayman MACHEATH in John Gay's THE BEGGAR OPERA.  In the English version, MACKIE was aptly nicknamed, MACK THE KNIFE--which also became the title of the play's most memorable song.

In 1956, MACK THE KNIFE was introduced to the U.S. through a recording by Louis Armstrong. But it was the 1959 version of a young 22 year-old that hit America by storm. The singer was  Robert "Bobby" Cassotto, an Italian-American big band performer who changed his stage name after seeing a malfunctioning electrical sign in a Chinese restaurant that read, DARIN DUCK instead of MANDARIN DUCK.

Despite Dick Clark's precaution to Bobby Darin that a song from an opera would not click with a rock and roll audience, the singer's track hit #1 on Billboard's Hot 100, and #6 on the Black Singles chart, and won for Darin a Grammy Award for Record of the Year as well as a nod for Best New Artist.

Many in music history have recorded the tune--Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Robbie Williams, Sting, Lyle Lovett, Michael Buble, and Westlife, are just some.  But it was Frank Sinatra, after having recorded MACK THE KNIFE with Jimmy Buffet, who declared Darin's rendition to be the most definitive of all.

Here's a 1959 video of Darin with the song that made him a huge star, MACK THE KNIFE:

We're revealing soon Billboard's most successful tune of all time.  But before that, the #2 spot belongs to a guitarist whose biggest hit came 30 years after he debuted on the Billboard charts.  The songwriter was hoping to get George Michael to sing the material, but he eventually sang it himself....

The Billboard Hot 100 All-Time Top Songs (#4)

The song was the written for the movie CON AIR, but the version that wound up in the soundtrack was not the one that landed the #4 spot in Billboard's Hot 100 of all time.

At a restaurant in Santa Monica, California, songwriter Dianne Warren approached then 14 year-old Leann Rimes to do a demo of a song that Warren had written for an upcoming movie.  It was uncertain still if the tune would be picked up for the film, but because Rimes fell so in love with HOW DO I LIVE, she asked Warren if she could record the song for her own album should it not make it to the movie's audio track.  Warren agreed and soon after, recording ensued.

However, Rimes found out that the day following her vocal dubbing, the same musicians were contacted to do a second version of the song, this time with Trisha Yearwood.  Why Yearwood's version was the one picked up by Con Air, no one knows for sure, though Warren suggests that movie producers felt Yearwood's version seemed more appropriate for their project.  It was this version, too, that was sent to country radio by record executives at MCA.

Later, during a chance meeting between Rimes and Mike Curb, producer of Leann's version, Curb asked Rimes if it was all right for him to ship her track to pop radio rather than to country.  Not really knowing what this meant, Rimes agreed instantly, and the rest is history.

Rimes sold 3.5 million physical singles of HOW DO I LIVE while Yearwood sold slightly more than 300,000.  And while Yearwood's cut reached No. 23 in Billboard's Hot 100, Rimes hit No. 2 and spent an amazing 69 weeks on the chart, the most for any song before or since.

See below a more recent live performance of HOW DO I LIVE by LeAnn Rimes with her friend, English R&B/Soul songstress, Joss Stone.

No. 3 in our countdown was recorded 49 years ago by an Italian-American who picked his stage name after seeing a broken neon sign at a Chinese restaurant....