2022-03-21 – Ecce Signum

So I had this idea a while back, that every now and then I would do a survey of the #1 songs in the weekly top 40 of bygone years. I thought it would be fun to make weekly posts, tracing the ebb and flow of music styles and tastes.

But when looking through lists of past hits, I noticed that songs which hit #1 tend to stay there for a while. They are well known, and while interesting as a source of nostalgia, such posts could quickly become repetitive, as the same songs stay in the #1 position for weeks at a time.

So rather than picking the top of the top, I decided to go with the bottom of the top. The songs at #40 on the weekly top 40 change wildly from week to week, and many were mere blips in pop culture, surfacing for a week then disappearing, never to be heard again.

These were the songs I often heard while milking cows on Sunday mornings for most of the 1980s. Casey Kasem or Rick Dees usually hit the top 10 well after morning milking was done, and I would be back at the house taking care of things which kept me out of range of a radio.

Now I am going to go back in time, and select song #40 of the weekly top 40, for the historical week which corresponds to the present week in the year 1977, 1982, 1987, 1992, and 1997. Five years, five years apart, from 45 years ago to 25 years ago. That means I will be able to make 259 weekly posts like this before I repeat a week. And at that point, assuming the continued existence of me, the internet, blogging, etc., I will look at shifting things around. It will be a good problem to have.

This post series will mostly simply be links to music videos, but if a song comes up which brings a sense of nostalgia or deja vu, I might write something about that.

And with that, here are the songs, ordered by year, with links to artist information.

1977: The Andrea True Connection, “N.Y., You Got Me Dancing”