Welcome, one and all, to a project that I have been meaning to do for years. This is a blog series where I count down the top ten (or five, or 15, depending on the year) Worst and Best Hit Songs of every year from 1958, when the Billboard Hot 100 first debuted, up to the present day.
The point? I want to reflect on Popular Music from 70 years ago up to the present day, see how it evolves, wax lyrical about great music, and take aim at bad music, all while hoping that what I write about may resonate with readers. I’m not the first person to do this, nor am I the last, so I plan to distinguish this project by eventually turning these lists into YouTube videos, but that’s something to worry about later on.
The rules are simple: only songs which made the Year-End Hot 100 of any given year are eligible to make these lists. I will include a non-eligible Honorable Mention section on my Best Lists, however. Additionally, the eligible songs will be the versions which were likely the most widely available for the average person, meaning radio edits, single edits, etc will be the versions eligible for lists.
If the live performance version of a song is what is popular, then that version will also be the eligible version. Some songs were Double-A sides, meaning it’s essentially two songs per placement on the Billboard Hot 100, like “We Will Rock You / We Are The Champions” by Queen. 1958 actually has an unusually high amount of these Double-As, and it was a little difficult to decide how to handle their eligibility, in the end I settled on just using the A-side that was more popular.
I’ll also be including Honorable, or Dishonorable Mentions on these lists before the list proper begins, and, later on, Ineligible picks I want to shout out (I.E “Strawberry Fields Forever”), as I’m sure there will be songs others have stronger feelings on than I do, and want to make sure those songs are also enumerated.
Lastly, while I cannot control which songs are eligible for these lists, I can control where they appear on the list, and some artistic liberty will be implemented in choosing which songs appear at which spots on these lists, so ties aren’t out of the picture. All set? Let’s talk about… Pop Music!
1958, as the first year on this long journey to the present day, is so far removed from Popular Music sensibilities of today that it’s almost incomprehensible that the music of the time could have ever been popular. Of the 50 (technically 63 counting Double-A Sides) songs on the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 for 1958, most people nowadays could name, at most 2 or 3.
The biggest names of this pre-Beatles era that people do remember: Stevie Wonder, The Beach Boys, Roy Orbison, didn’t have hits in 1958. Elvis and Buddy Holly would have to make due, and the latter would die in February of 1959 anyway. The scene was by-and-large dominated by instrumentals, rudimentary Rock n Roll, Doo Wop, and Easy Listening schlock that largely hasn’t stood up to the test of time.
Let’s Get Into The Dishonorable Mentions!
DM (Dishonorable Mention) #1: Buddy Holly – Peggy Sue
Peak: #3 Year-End: #50
This is really repetitive and boring. RIP Buddy Holly…
DM #2: The Elegants – Little Star Peak: #1 Year-End: #15
This is literally “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”….
DM #3: Pat Boone – April Love Peak: #1 Year-End: #45
I’m going to be talking about Pat Boone over the next few worst lists, so I hope you don’t mind if I just move on to the actual list instead of talking about this nonexistent piece of hwite bread.
The Top Five Worst Hit Songs of 1958!!!
5. The Chordettes – Lollipop Peak: #2 Year-End: #37
The toughest part of reviewing and analyzing Popular Music from such a long time ago is that, for the most part, it’s non-descript and samey. The worst music on this list is largely just the music that had the fewest redeeming qualities to it. Case in point, “Lollipop” by The Chordettes.
I’m sure everybody has heard this one at some point, it’s the song where they sing the word “lollipop” a million times. You’ve probably heard a 10 second clip of it; I certainly have. It’s one of those pieces of music so established in the back of your mind that it being a 2-minute composition people actually bought and listened to is kind of astonishing.
Unfortunately, listening to the entire 2 minute long tune is a test of one’s mental fortitude. This song’s structure is just a simple verse, and that ungodly repetitive chorus repeated ad nauseam until ‘lollipop’ no longer registers as a real word. It’s so one-note and chipper that I feel like I’m being taunted. True to the candy it’s named after, this song is sugary sweet, without any of the flavor that makes a real lollipop enjoyable to suck on. Moving on…
4. Elvis Presley – Hard Headed Woman Peak: #1 Year-End: #49
One thing that was endemic in Popular Music all the way up to, I wanna say the early 2010s, was casual misogyny. I don’t use that word lightly, for the record, but I don’t downplay it when I see it in the music that was played widely back in the day. That being said, there is a lot of nuance in many songs from back then that aren’t from the Second or Third Waves of Feminism.
Take “Evil Woman” by ELO. a cursory listen might lead you to think that Jeff Lynne is being a prick by calling his ex an ‘e-e-evil wuh-man”, but the lyrics of that song go into detail about what she did to him that warrant that label. Whether you like the song or not (which I do), it does manage to give you a reason not to root for that woman.
“Hard Headed Woman” by Elvis Presley, on the other hand, is just pure shallow hatred. The extent of any conflict in this song is just references to Bible characters (Samson and Delilah, Jezebel, and Adam and Eve, which, I don’t really think it’s fair to call Eve Hard-Headed when she was clearly tempted, right?). It also explicitly frames these woman as being “a thorn in the side of man”.
And unlike “Evil Woman”, there’s no interesting musicianship to be found here. It’s just standard Rock n Roll Bullshit, down to having almost the exact cadence as “Every 1950’s Rock N’ Roll Song (For Some Reason)” by Kyle Gordon. At least that song’s bad on purpose, this is just depressing and sour. Moving on…
3. Pat Boone – A Wonderful Time Up There Peak: #4 Year-End: #24
Now we’re really getting into it. Those last 2 songs, while worthy of being on this list, were just lousy. These last 3 songs, on the other hand, are some of the worst music to come out of this time, genuinely awful pieces of music that I don’t want to spend more time on than I have to. The fact that a condescendingly pious Pat Boone tune is the least egregious of these 3 should be cause for alarm.
But onto the song itself. Pat Boone is a bit of an infamous name in the music reviewing world, as he’s responsible for many white-washed versions of acclaimed songs originally sung by Black artists. Like his cover of “Tutti Frutti”, yeah, that’s rough. Thankfully, “A Wonderful Time Up There” is a cover of a White artist, one Lee Roy Abernathy, and unlike every song of his I’ll be talking about in the future, Boone himself is far from the worst thing about this song.
This song is actually Religious Rock, an incredibly early iteration of such, and while I do personally dislike this song, I don’t think the genre itself is DOA. The issue is that this song is ungodly condescending and holier-than-thou in a way that sounds too jovial to be appropriately grim–given that it is about how The Rapture is about to come–and too patronizing at the same time. This is Helen Lovejoy in song form and it has absolutely zero appeal in the year of our Lord 2026.
2. Sheb Wooley – The Purple People Eater Peak: #1 Year-End: #12
As we continue going down the list of bad music trends from this era, we’ve reached the obligatory Novelty Song. While not the worst example of this frequently-awful type of Popular Music, “The Purple People Eater” is a lame, borderline-childish song. I guess if I had to give it praise for anything, it has like 13.4% more energy than pretty much everything else on the list.
Yeah… let’s get into it. The premise of this song is that the narrator meets a “one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater” who comes down to Earth. The main conceit being that it continually defies your expectations. First, it eats purple-people (as opposed to being purple, and eating people, although it’s pretty much always depicted as being purple which makes no sense), then it only comes down to Earth because it wants to play in a rock n roll band, then it’s revealed that its horn is like a saxophone or something?
I’m sure this was very engrossing in an era where mayonnaise Jello salad was still frequently eaten, but apart from the nonexistent composition (which Sheb Wooley later said was “undoubtedly the worst song he had ever written”), this song’s appeal relies on the voice-altering effect used for the People Eater’s voice (something which was directly inspired by a much better novelty song from this era, “Witch Doctor”), and out-of-place Pop Music references, like “Tutti Frutti”, “Tequila”, and “Short Shorts”.
Oh, and speaking of “Short Shorts”
1. The Royal Teens – Short Shorts Peak: #3 Year-End: #35
Another big trend around this time was teenage artists making music. It’s not unheard of nowadays, but this was a much bigger deal back in the day. The Royal Teens were the apotheosis of this trend, with the youngest members of the band being just 14(!) when this song came out. Initially, I wanted to be charitable, since this song was made by people younger than I am right now, and it was made in the 1950s, when music was much more simple.
That being said, this song sucks ass. It’s a call-and-response song with like two lyrics: “Who wears short shorts? / We wear short shorts!”. That’s it. It’s a practical nothingburger of a song that still manages to annoy me. It’s so simple that it makes literally everything else on this list sound like Jethro Tull in comparison, and what is there is…uncomfortable.
This song opens with a wolfwhistle, guitar plucks mimicking a wolfwhistle (a la “The Joker” by Steve Miller Band), and catcalling. The discomfort these 7 seconds provides to me, someone who has never been on the receiving end of such comments, pretty much ensured this one wouldn’t place anywhere but the bottom 3. It is an incredibly awful choice for a song intro.
But there’s more. For one, the singing is awful here, the boys don’t even try to sing on-key, and the production sounds like a bootleg version of itself. The thing I hate the most about this song, more than the catcalling, the repetition, or the tin-can-quality mixing, is that fucking ear-piercing note that punctuates every line in the middle-third of this song. I’m not really sure what it is or why it was included, but its inclusion in this specific section of the song is somehow more irritating than it should be.
It’s an amateur idea in an amateur song by amateur artists, and “Short Shorts” is, in my humble opinion, the Worst Hit Song of 1958.
Be sure to give your thoughts, opinions, questions, and complaints in the comment section if you have any, and I hope you enjoyed reading this :) until next time!
Oh, and here’s the Best List
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