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Number one hits for 1906

A song Johnny Cash covered

victrola According to the book, Joel Whitburn presents A Century of Pop Music: year-by-year Top 40 rankings of the songs and artists that shaped a Century, these are the number one hits for 1906.

As previously noted, these rankings were derived from various sources, including the Talking Machine World periodical, which published monthly lists of nearly all popular record releases from 1905 onward. Jim Walsh was a universally respected authority on the pioneer recording age in his forty years of columns for Hobbies magazine. Record labels’ publications, particularly those of Victor and Edison, contained valuable information about their own top sheet music sellers. David Ewan’s book All the Years of American Popular Music. Author Roger Kindle Kinko in his Complete Encyclopedia of Popular Music and Jazz 1900 to 1950. Joseph Murrell’s book Million-selling Records from the 1900s to the 1980s.

“Victor’s position was solidified in 1906 by the introduction of the Victrola, the first record player to remove the increasingly intrusive tin horn from atop the phonograph and fold it into the wooden cabinet beneath. It would take a few years – Concealed horn phonographs went from 3 percent of total sales in 1907 to 75 percent in 1911 – but the word “Victrola” would become synonymous in many households with the word “phonograph.” By 1908, the phonograph had firmly established its place in the typical American home.”

The songs

The Grand Old Rag (a/k/a You’re a Grand Old Flag) – Billy Murray (Victor), 10 weeks at #1, from George Washington Jr. A very familiar piece.

Wait Till The Sun Shines, Nellie – Byron Harlan (Columbia), 9 weeks at #1. I know this one too.

Nobody – Bert Williams (Columbia), 9 weeks at #1, music by Bert Williams and lyrics by Alex Rogers. “THE DOYEN OF AFRO-AMERICAN ENTERTAINERS.” Ha! Johnny Cash covered this song on his 2000 American III: Solitary Man album!

Love Me and the World is Mine – Henry Burr (Columbia), 7 weeks at #1.

The Good Old U.S.A.The Good Old U.S.A. – Byron Harlan(Columbia), 4 weeks at #1

Love Me And The World Is Mine — Albert Campbell (Victor), 3 weeks at #1. Words by David Ball Jr. Music by Ernest R. Ball.

Everybody Works But Father – Billy Murray (Victor), a comedy record, 3 weeks at #1

So Long, Mary – Corinne Morgan (Victor), 3 weeks at #1, from Forty-Five Minutes From Broadway. A George M. Cohan song

How Would You Like To Spoon With Me – Corrine Morgan, and the Haydn Quartet (Victor) 2 weeks at #1.

Call me little tootsy wootsy baby. How’d you like to hug and squeeze?

Indeed, I would. Dangle me upon your knees.

Oh, if I could. How’d you like to be my lovey dovey? How’d you like to spoon with me?

Let It Alone – Bert Williams (Columbia), 2 weeks at #1, a comedy record

Wait Till The Sun Shines, Nellie – Harry Talley (Victor), 1 week at #1

December rambling: hiatus

an “alcoholic’s personality”

The Daily Show is on hiatus until Monday, January 5, 2026. But here are its hosts (minus Jon Stewart) discussing the year gone by…

Silence, as if by Sharp Little Pencil

Happy Public Domain Day 2026!

Democracy’s Library and 1 Trillion Web Pages Archived

The Oscars Will Be Streamed on YouTube Starting in 2029

Kars4Kids and Oorah Face New Class-Action Lawsuit Alleging Donor Deception

What brought Sears down? 10 mistakes from giant companies

Dear Santa: A Genealogist’s Christmas Wish List (Including That One Elusive Death Certificate We’ve Been Hunting for Three Years)

Best Television and Books of 2025 (J. Eric Smith)

A small fraction of U.S. history (old paper money)

‘Jeopardy!’: Four-Time Champion Eric Berman Dies at 60

Is this the Gumby & Pokey / Davey & Goliath crossover episode?

The Opposite of the Drive-Thru Window? You’re in your car. You get your burger without leaving your car. So maybe it’s the same, but… not? and The Accidental Igloo That Saved a Life and A Planely Bad Way to Quit

Orange

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles: he has an “alcoholic’s personality,” drawing a comparison to her father, legendary NFL broadcaster Pat Summerall, who struggled with alcoholism before getting sober.

Three days in the life of a pathetic man.

Wait, some of the redacted Epstein files can be UNREDACTED??

He’s still obsessed with Greenland.

In March 2023, reporter Hugo Lowell revealed exclusively in the Guardian that a federal criminal investigation was examining TMedia – the company that owns the his social media platform, Truth Social – in connection with its acceptance of $8m in loans with suspected Russian ties. Those loans helped keep the company afloat long enough for him to take it public last year, when he netted an additional paper fortune of about $4.6bn. TM sued the Guardian for defamation and $250m in damages. In late November, the judge threw out the case, pointing out that the plaintiff was required to show that “the [Guardian] either knew the statement was false or acted with reckless disregard for its truth” – but he found no such evidence. This was a victory not only for the Guardian but for journalists everywhere.

Reflections of a Census Bureau Employee: MAGA Callers Share a Common Delusion.

3600 Seconds

CBS News’ new editor in chief, Bari Weiss, abruptly postponed a segment of “60 Minutes” about Venezuelan men who the regime deported to the notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo prison, known as CECOT, in El Salvador.

Several veteran correspondents questioned Weiss’ decision. In an email to her colleagues, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi said the team “requested responses to questions and/or interviews with DHS, the White House, and the State Department. Government silence is a statement, not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story,” she said.

Was Weiss’ decision by design? Or was she merely derelict in her job? CBS News’ censorship spectacularly backfires. Terry Moran: She skipped five different screenings of the 60 Minutes story as it was being written and cut…. Finally, on Thursday, Weiss watched a video of the segment and offered a few suggestions, which were integrated into the script.

Postponing the segment did not prevent it from trickling into public view. Internet sleuths discovered that a Canadian network had briefly published the segment, and a bootleg version of the video began circulating on social media.

Someone thought that, for cBS, the c is now silent.

MUSIC

Randy Rainbow’s new parody: It’s beginning to look a lot like f**k this

Obituaries: Remembering The Mavericks Frontman Raul Malo; O What A Thrill; Dance The Night Away

Singer Chris Rea Dies at 74; Steel River; Let’s Dance

Jerry Kasenetz, a King of Bubblegum Pop Music, Dies at 82. With his producing partner, Jeffry Katz, he made lightweight ditties that soared up the charts in the late 1960s by the 1910 Fruitgum Company, the Ohio Express, and others. (Music links within.)

Go Gentle: Max Eider, R.I.P.

The Musicians We Lost in 2025

Message of Love – Pretenders

Arthur’s Weekend Diversion: 1985, Part 27 – The Finale

Coverville 1562 and 1563: The 2025 Coverville Countdown, Parts 1 and 2

Best Albums of 2025 (J. Eric Smith)

10 Songs That Explain My Year from the NYT Amplifier

Time In A Bottle – MonaLisa Twins

Air New Zealand commercial featuring the traditional song “Pōkarekare Ana.”

The Girl With The Flaxen Hair by Claude Debussy

Say You, Say Me – Lionel Richie

Rick Beato’s Top 10 of 2025

Primrose Hill – James McCartney

Mr. Tambourine Man – The Byrds

Sir Duke – Stevie Wonder

Extended interview: Sean Ono Lennon on CBS Sunday Morning. Film: WAR IS OVER! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko – The Academy Award® winning Animated Short

“Quote a song lyric that sums up your year”

You know that end-of-the-year quiz I do? This one question is taking up too much space.

Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

It would be easy to stick previous years’ songs on the list.

Logical Song by Supertramp

I said, Now, watch what you say, they’ll be calling you a radicalA liberal, oh, fanatical, criminalOh, won’t you sign up your name? We’d like to feel you’re acceptableRespectable, oh, presentable, a vegetable

Monster by Steppenwolf

America, where are you now
Don’t you care about your sons and daughters
Don’t you know we need you now
We can’t fight alone against the monster

Virtually all of Elephant Talk by King Crimson

And especially The Trouble With Normal by Bruce Coburn

The trouble with normal is that it always gets worse

Resistance?

Then I saw a HeatherCox Richardson video from August 7 titled Forms of Resistance and Reasons to Believe It’s Working. From about three minutes in, she said:

Those sorts of ways of recognizing quietly, of making a statement quietly, matter because people hear them and recognize that they are not alone.

Do you hear the people sing?Singing a song of angry men?It is the music of a peopleWho will not be slaves again

When the beating of your heartEchoes the beating of the drumsThere is a life about to startWhen tomorrow comes

Will you join in our crusade?

Who will be strong and stand with me?Beyond the barricadeIs there a world you long to see?Then join in the fightThat will give you the right to be free

That was set in France in the first third of the 19th century. Here’s a song set in France, slightly earlier. Marat-Sade as sung by Judy Collins:

Marat, we’re poor and the poor stay poor

Marat, don’t make us wait any more

We want our rights, and we don’t care how
We want a revolution
Now

That brought to mind another tune sung by Judy Collins, Democracy, written by Leonard Cohen. The penultimate verse:

It’s coming to America first
The cradle of the best and of the worst
It’s here they got the range
And the machinery for change
And it’s here they got the spiritual thirst
It’s here – the family’s broken
And it’s here the lonely say
That the heart has got to open
In a fundamental way
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A

Another song I thought of was (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thing by Heaven 17. As I recall, someone with the band or the label thought it was a bit overboard to say about Ronald Reagan. I’m not litigating that, but in a 2025 performance, the band said the song was more relevant now than then. And it has a great beat.

Have you heard it on the news about this fascist groove thang

Evil men with racist views spreading all across the land

Don’t just sit there on your ass, unlock that funky chain dance

Brothers, sisters, shoot your best. We don’t need this fascist groove thang

NYT

On July 1, Jon Pareles put together a list for the New York Times

Tracy Chapman, Talkin’ ‘Bout A Revolution
The Isley Brothers, Fight the Power, Pts. 1 and 2
Public Enemy, Fight the Power
Michael Franti & Spearhead, Yell Fire!
Bob Marley & the Wailers, Get Up, Stand Up
Mavis Staples, Eyes On The Prize
Patti Smith, People Have the Power
Björk, Declare Independence
Rage Against the Machine, Know Your Enemy
Antibalas, Uprising

I know I own the ones I linked to. That Isley Brothers couplet has been running through my head even before the list was published:

When I rolled with the punches

I got knocked on the groundWith all this bullsh#t going down

I can’t forget American Idiot by Green Day, which came out in 2004 in response to the knee-jerk reaction to the stupidity of that time.

Don’t wanna be an American idiotOne nation controlled by the mediaInformation age of hysteriaIt’s calling out to idiot America

Welcome to a new kind of tensionAll across the alienationWhere everything isn’t meant to be okayIn television dreams of tomorrowWe’re not the ones who’re meant to followFor that’s enough to argue

The chorus of Tubthumping by Chumbawamba runs through my head a LOT, over and over:

I get knocked down

But I get up againYou’re never gonna keep me down

But the winner

I just saw the 2025 video for the Dropkick Murphys’ Who Will Stand For Us? I’m not a “you must watch” guy, but please watch. Lyrics

Who’ll stand with us?Don’t tell us everything is fineWho’ll stand with us?Because this treatment is a crimeThe working people fuel the engineWhile you yank the chainWe fight the wars and build the buildingsFor someone else’s gain

So, tell me, who will stand with us?

And as time rolls on, not a single thing has changedAnd the wealth gap’s only grown as we all point to blameWe’re at the throats of one another, though we share a single fateAnd the golden few laugh on and on as we all take the bait

Seven Carols For Christmas

Alice Parker for Robert Shaw

Here are Seven Carols For Christmas, arranged by Alice Parker. My church choir, along with the Festival Celebration choir, performed these on December 14.

In 2006, Alice Parker wrote this description of the process:

“In 1970, Robert Shaw asked me to write some arrangements of Christmas carols for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Choruses. We had not worked together since the last album for the Robert Shaw Chorale, the Irish Folk Songs in 1967, and his move to Atlanta.

“He was planning a series of Christmas concerts, and was not satisfied with the settings he could find: they were apt to be too elaborate, with overly simple choral parts. He asked that the chorus be allowed to shine in rather open orchestrations, and gave me freedom to choose whichever titles I wished in a mix of familiar and unfamiliar tunes. In Mr. Shaw’s acclaimed Christmas concert, the carols were scattered through the retelling of the story, in different patterns with the succeeding years.

“So they were not at the beginning intended to be a single concert piece, although I am frequently asked to share my preference for a sequence. One possibility, using all the numbers, is: O Come, Emmanuel; Away in a Manger; Fum, Fum, Fum!; Good Christian Men, Rejoice; So Blest a Sight; God Rest You Merry; Masters in This Hall. Another choice would be to split the above list into two parts, with the first three forming a little suite from varied sources, and the next four celebrating their British heritage. But you may order them as you wish, or use just one or two in a special program.

Rejoice!

“The enduring popularity of these arrangements has been a source of great satisfaction to me. It shows that these wonderful melodies, with their texts of love and hope, can unite different generations in the concert hall, as well as in the church and at home. Even in the cacophony of today’s musical world, their message shines clear and true. So now, good Christian folk, rejoice, and join your voices in tidings of comfort and joy! “

A live performance by The Michael O’Neal Singers, December 2016

The Pioneer Valley Symphony performance at Greenfield High School. Also, O Holy Night with Emily Jaworski. December 19, 2015

Huron Carol

fillyjonk linked to the Huron Carol. The singer “notes that the Nativity story has been ‘reset’ from the First Century Middle East to pre-colonial North America…. I am not bothered by it: the idea that Christ is for all times and all places can also sit along with the idea of ‘we know a little of the history, so we should try to be accurate.'”

Merry Christmas!

the Ballad of the Brown King

Langston Hughes

The cantata The Ballad of the Brown King (1954) is an important work, James Bennett II from New York Public Radio WQXR posits: “Margaret Bonds’ multi-part choral work, for which she collaborated with poet Langston Hughes, is an attempt to recapture the titular brownness that has art-historically been associated with one of the biggest holidays of one of the world’s biggest religions.

“Like the worlds in which the Nativity story exists, there is no singular style that dominates Bonds’s work; over the course of about 25 minutes, there’s the western orchestra’s pastoral serenity alongside gospel and black-and-bluesy American folk traditions.”

But it was not a straight line to success. From John Michael Cooper here: “Bonds and Hughes then shelved the cantata despite this impact, but as the Freedom movement gained headway in the early 1960s, they returned to it – revising it, adding two movements, and energetically promoting it in advance of the performance.

“The premiere of the reworked version took place, in a now-lost version employing piano-duet accompaniment, to a packed house in a concert produced by the Emergency Committee for the Southern Freedom Struggle on Sunday, 11 December 1960, at the Harlem YWCA at 50th St. and 8th Ave; the work was dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “

From Wikipedia: “A new orchestration of the piece by conductor Malcolm J. Merriweather was recorded in 2018 by the Dessoff Choirs and released on November 1, 2019. Margaret Bonds’s original orchestration is unpublished and has never been recorded.

Balthazar

“Ballad focuses on one of the Three Kings from the story of the birth of Jesus. Hughes chose the African king, Balthazar, as a way to ‘reinforce the image of African participation in the Nativity story.'”

Here is The Ballad of the Brown King:

The Dessoff Orchestra and The Dessoff Choirs

The Chapel Hill Chorus – ‘Wint’ry Light’ 12/15/24

UUCSR Choir and Soloists with The Orchestra at Shelter Rock, Manhasset, NY, with remarks

Tag: music