Ramblin' with Roger

#1 C&W hits for 1956

country was “folk”

These are the #1 C&W hits for 1956.

Actually, that’s a bit misleading. In 1944, Billboard published Juke Box Folk Records (JB). On May 15, 1948, it introduced Best Selling Retail Folk Records (BS). Most Played by Folk Disc Jockeys (JY) debuted on December 10, 1949. It wasn’t until October 20, 1958, that a single chart, Hot C&W Sides, was introduced.

This is why there were 92 #1 country hits in 1956. If a song was #1 on ANY of the charts, it was considered a #1 track.

Crazy Arms – Ray Price (Columbia), 20 weeks at #1. JY-20, BS-11, JB-1 (#27 pop)

Heartbreak Hotel -Elvis Presley, 17 weeks at #1. BS-17, JB-13, JY-12 (also #1 pop)

Singing The Blues – Marty Robbins, 13 weeks at #1. BS-13, JB-13, JY-11 (#17 pop)

Don’t Be Cruel – Elvis Presley, 10 weeks at #1. JB-10, BS-5, JY 2/ (also #1 pop)

Hound Dog – Elvis Presley, 10 weeks at #1. JB-10, BS-5 (also #1 pop)

I Walk The Line – Johnny Cash (Sun), 6 weeks at #1. JB-6, JY-1 (#17 pop)

I Forgot To Remember To Forget – Elvis Presley, 5 weeks at #1. JB-5, BS-2 (did not chart pop)

Why Baby Why – Red Sovine & Webb Pierce, 4 weeks at # 1. JY-4, BS-1, JB-1 (did not chart pop)

Blue Suede Shoes – Carl Perkins (Sun), 3 weeks at #1. JB-3 (#2 pop for four weeks)

I Want You, I Need You, I Love You – Elvis Presley, 2 weeks at #1. BS-2, JB-1 (also #1 pop)

I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Baby – The Louvin Brothers (Capitol), 2 weeks at #1. JY-2 (did not chart pop)

Other charts

There were other charts besides Billboard in the day, most notably Cash Box and Music Vendor, which became Record World. These are the songs that did NOT reach #1 on the Billboard pop charts but topped the charts of CB or MV in 1956.

Just Walking In The Rain – Johnnie Ray, orchestra and chorus conducted by Ray Conniff (Columbia), which hit #1 on MV for four weeks. #2 on Billboard pop chart for four weeks.

The aforementioned Carl Perkins’ Blue Suede Shoes, which hit #1 on MV for one week.

Canadian Sunset (Heywood) by Hugo Winterhalter & his Orchestra, piano solo by Eddie Heywood (RCA Victor), which hit #1 on MV for one week. #2 for one week on Billboard pop chart.

I’ll never be a frequent flyer

ALB to CLT

The idea of me seeing more of the world is stymied by the fact that I’ll never be a frequent flyer. My last adventure is a good example of why.

I ordered round-trip tickets from Albany, NY, to Charlotte, NC, for mid-May 2026. Somehow, I didn’t get the flight I thought I got at c. noon and ended up with a 7:30 a.m. departure. This meant my wife had to take my daughter and me to the airport at about 5:30 a.m.

I went to the TSA machinery. Even though I got a Real ID, the machinery could not read it, despite repeated attempts. Fortunately, just before I left home, I had grabbed my passport, which did the job.

Then I went through the metal detector. The guy asked if I had a belt on; well, yeah. Then he got handsy around my waistband, which made me very uncomfortable. Later, someone told me they should EXPLAIN what they were going to do.

When my sister Leslie arrived in CLT, we had to go to the car rental place, which was visible from the baggage area but which involved an inadequate number of elevators up to the 5th floor, across the walkway, down to the Dollar/Hertz counter with a long line. It was substantial enough time that I returned to the baggage area to retrieve the sunglasses I had dropped, got back to the line, and found it still long.

The “deal” car they first offered was a pickup truck! We didn’t want our luggage out in the elements. Ultimately, with a price upgrade, we got a 2026 Buick Enclave, which was a tank. Also, shifting into reverse, for instance, involved pushing this button on the gear shift, which was non-intuitive.

CLT

Charlotte/Douglas Airport has changed a lot since I last flew into there in 2009, not all for the better. As we were heading towards the rental car return in the 2nd lane to the left, a large bus came out of somewhere into the far-left lane. Though both vehicles were in the correct places, the design made us feel as if the bus were going to crash into us.

We entered the parking garage that was the return vehicle location. But the turn to the Dollar area came up quickly, practically before one could read the sign. By that point, we had to drive out of the whole building – there was no turning around – and leave the airport entirely and come back to try again.

In this TSA line, I was in the midst of making my cane as small as I could, so it would lie flat in the bin, as it did in ALB. But someone said, “It’s good enough.” It went through the scanning machine and jammed it for everyone for about five minutes. While I was waiting near another passenger, we joked about who had broken the machine. If they had given me literally five more seconds, I could have fully retracted the cane.

Flying makes me cranky. It’s a necessary evil until they develop those Star Trek transporters.

Clarence Williams, WWI vet

maternal grandfather

**Top, 4th from the left is Clarence; seated on the right end is Charlie (1911)**

Clarence Williams and his brother Charles loved to play baseball. In fact, in the 1915 Census, Charlie lists his profession as a ballplayer.

But as I noted back in 2019, I didn’t know much about the Williamses, even though Clarence was my biological maternal grandfather. I’m fairly sure I attended Clarence’s funeral in 1958, though I have no recollection of it.

Their father was Charles Williams, who was married to Margaret Collins (1865-1931), whose parents almost certainly were born in County Cork, Ireland.

When I was in Charlotte, NC, recently, I went through a bunch of photos and came upon a few paper relics. I realize that they are exceedingly hard to read. The record below, even blown up, I can’t really make out.

But I was able to find this on Ancestry: Clarence was inducted in Owego, NY, on November 23, 1917. He was 31 1/2 years old and 5’10”. He got promoted twice and served overseas from May 27, 1918, to March 1919, when he was honorably discharged without wounds.

I have noted that his paternal grandfather, Daniel Williams, served in the Civil War.

Review: The Devil Wears Prada 2

didn’t see Michael

My wife, daughter, and I went to see the film The Devil Wears Prada 2 at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany on a Saturday afternoon in mid-May. It’s been a while since the three of us did that; I have no idea when, or what we saw.

It was fine. The initial “reunion” between Miranda (Meryl Streep) and Andy (Anne Hathaway) was on point. Andy and her frenemy Emily (Emily Blunt) were mostly entertaining. And we finally see Nigel (Stanley Tucci) come into his own.

What we see in the consolidation of media and how powerful manipulates the marketplace is definitely there. It was fun to see all of the cameos at one party. The fashion was interesting to see.

And yet, I found that the movie wasn’t always maintaining my attention, or my daughter’s; she rested her head on her mother’s shoulder for a time. I wouldn’t say the movie, at two hours, was too long.

David Nusair of Reel Film Reviews wrote that the “picture eventually segues into an almost impossibly sluggish midsection rife with needless subplots and digressions.” The Milan scenes, in particular, meandered, although it was Nigel’s shining moment.

Also, per IMDb, “Miranda hosts a large dinner directly beneath Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie. In reality, access to the room is strictly limited, and food, candles, and any form of smoke are prohibited to preserve the fragile artwork.” I didn’t need to be an art historian to know that was true.

Yet I did like the payoff. Rotten Tomatoes critics were 78% positive, while the fans were 84% positive.

DNS

The next day, my wife and daughter saw the biopic Michael at the same venue, with Jermaine’s son Jaafar playing his late uncle. I had seen the jukebox musical MJ at Proctors Theatre in December 2024 and didn’t feel the need to see the film, but my family liked it.

The movie’s Rotten Tomatoes scores were 39% among critics but 97% among fans. One critic wrote: “A banal, airbrushed portrait that plays like a jukebox musical and, except for a few snide winks, ignores the controversies that have long swirled around the singer.”

Feeling pain for blogger Kelly

ForgottenStars.net

I’ve been feeling severe emotional pain on behalf of my fellow upstate New Yorker, blogger Kelly Sedinger, the overalls guy. And I’ll admit that it’s not just empathy, but a profound understanding of what he’s been going through.

He’s been posting as Forgotten Stars for about five years, and at Byzantium Shores for nearly two decades before that.

Then, inexplicably, all of his posts after April 21, 2026 disappeared. Apparently, during an earlier outage, something else went wonky. As of Sunday evening, he can post, BUT the pieces he wrote in the past month and a half are still MIA. And the formatting has been stripped.

At least the individual post links now load. And the comments now work; I LOVE comments, making them and receiving them.

Kelly wrote: “I’m not going to lie, folks, all of this has really sucked out a lot of my enthusiasm for this notion of doing content creation…and it also has me questioning my whole strategy on that score, anyway.” It’s almost impossible for me to focus on writing when my site is down. I could technically write on a backup site, but it’s not the same.

Joy

There are those of us, like Kelly, who write for the joy of the sharing. And we spend some moolah keeping our junkie habit, I mean, our love of the written word alive. Friend Chuck Miller recently wrote, “I can tell you that, from personal experience, blog hosting does not operate for free. At least not GOOD blog hosting.”

I’ve been spending more than a few dinero on this enterprise, changing providers along the way.

Kelly has been spending his money too. “I still have some back-end functionality stuff that is still not right, and I will be contacting my hosting service in the next couple of days to politely request that they give me a refund or discount since a malfunction on their end resulted in loss of functionality and a loss of actual data, which is not acceptable to me. “

I have some alleged redundancy/backup to this blog, if I understand what the heck all of those plugins are supposed to do. (Nope, I really don’t fully comprehend, and people explaining in tech-speak does NOT help.) My last problem was one plugin that was screwing up another plugin with a very similar name!

My blog was down for 23 minutes on both Saturday and Sunday nights, my Jetpack informed me. But it came back up on its own, or by magic.

So keep a good thought for Kelly Sedinger, who, if he’s anything like me, is emotionally exhausted by all of this.