a nutshell guide to the billboard record charts of the ’50s

Es­ti­mated reading time is 1 minute.

I SWEAR I DID NOT COME CLOSE to the Pub­lish button while working on this piece! Still, somehow man­aged to “pub­lish” this in­com­plete ar­ticle and have to deal with the fallout. And I wasn’t even plan­ning on pub­lishing this ar­ticle on this blog—I was going to move it on over to my Rather Rare Records blog. 

I cer­tainly know enough at this stage not to post an ar­ticle to the in­ternet with an un­gainly URL like this: https://www.elvis-atouchofgold.com/a-nutshell-guide-to-the-billboard-record-charts-of-the-50s! Nonethe­less, that URL is now out there and a few readers—such as you—might stumble over it.

So, in­stead of an ar­ticle about the over-hallowed Bill­board charts, you are reading this, an apology/explanation. I will finish the ar­ticle as quickly as pos­sible. It should clarify some is­sues about the mis­in­for­ma­tion about those charts that per­me­ates the in­ternet, mag­a­zines, and books.

PS: The photo of the turntable at the top of this page is the fea­tured image on the home page of Rather Rare Records.

 


 

4 thoughts on “a nutshell guide to the billboard record charts of the ’50s”

    • LEIGH

      And I thank you for that comment!

      I pulled the text for the “Nut­shell” ar­ticle from a larger piece that I am writing in re­sponse to an ear­lier com­ment from Colin Bratkovich (the one that opens with “I ap­pre­ciate you get­ting back to me” which can be found below. The “Nut­shell” piece works as a stand­alone piece ad­dressing some of the con­fu­sion about the var­ious Bill­board charts that ex­isted prior to the “Hot 100” chart that began in the last third of 1958.

      I hope to have the “Nut­shell” ar­ticle fin­ished and pub­lished in a few days.

      Until then, doncha think it’s time you grab the first one in your reach and do the clam?

      NEAL

      Reply
    • AN­THONY

      While it’s usual to say that an orig­inal ar­ticle has “blos­somed” into some­thing larger, in this case, the orig­inal ar­ticle has ex­ploded into a se­ries of five re­lated articles.

      The largest of these ar­ti­cles is cur­rently 7,000 words long!

      Need­less to say, it’s taking a wee bit longer to finish this project than I expected.

      Hang in there ...

      NEAL

      Reply

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