103) Bobby Vinton – “There! I’ve Said It Again”

GEORGE: “Quite nice, but I don’t think the public will buy it.”
JOHN: “Get an old song and everybody does it again at the same time.”
PAUL: “Secretly, teenagers don’t want old songs brought back.”
RINGO: “Nice and smooth, ‘specially if you’re sitting in one night – and not alone.”
Unanimous miss.

-The Beatles rating Bobby Vinton’s “There! I’ve Said It Again” on BBC-TV’s Juke Box Jury, December 7, 1963.  (Via The Beatles Diary, Volume 1: The Beatles Years by Barry Miles.)

Plenty of number-one records become answers to pop music trivia questions for reasons that have nothing to do with the songs themselves.  What was the first song to hit number one on the Hot 100? Ricky Nelson’s “Poor Little Fool.” What song ruled the charts during President Kennedy’s assassination? Dale & Grace’s “I’m Leaving It Up to You.”  Who was the only Belgian artist to top the Hot 100? Why, that’s The Singing Nun, of course.  But alongside the firsts, whens and onlys is a factoid of somewhat sadder proportions: the last.  Lasts mean the ends of careers, whether from death, scandal, or just the inevitable slide into irrelevance.  Lasts mean failure to replicate past glories.  Lasts mean pop audiences have moved on.

“There! I’ve Said It Again” is a record that is best remembered for being the last number-one on the Hot 100 before The Beatles.  One could suspect the rock gods of selecting this record specifically to heighten the contrast between the English rockers and the sluggishness of early ’60s American pop.  Of all the early ’60s teen idols, Bobby Vinton was both among the oldest (then pushing 30) and the one who owed the least to rock and roll – his ambition had always been to lead a big band, as his father had done.  Vinton drew much of his material from his parents’ generation.  “There! I’ve Said It Again,” originally a 1945 hit for Vaughn Monroe, followed his take on the oldie “Blue Velvet.”  But unlike that mysterious, mournful ballad, “There! I’ve Said It Again” draws from the same saccharine-contaminated well as the “Roses Are Red (My Love).”  At least “There! I’ve Said It Again” has the benefit of lyrics that don’t sound like a child’s rejected valentine.

But while “There! I’ve Said It Again” may have been the last of the pre-Beatles number ones, it wouldn’t be the last time Bobby Vinton would see the top.  Vinton’s records had begun charting based more on sales than airplay, a typical sign that an artist’s target audience skewed older.  By appealing to adults alienated by the British Invasion and the harder rock that followed, Vinton continued to enter the Top 40 well into the ’70s, eventually starring in his own CBS variety show (1975-1978) and performing shows at his Blue Velvet Theater in Branson, Missouri (the town of Baby Boomers’ nightmares).  Nor did the triumph of The Beatles toll the death knell for chart pop aimed at adults. What “There! I Said It Again” does signify is the increasing rarity of number-one songs appealing across the generation gap.  Although niche genres like country and R&B would continue to be popular across a wide age range of listeners, pop as a whole was becoming even more striated.  The British Invasion made rock and roll viable again, while nostalgia artists profited from record buyers seeking a softer alternative.  Even middle-of-the-road pop split into two forks, with “bubblegum” on one side and “mature” pop on the other. Vinton managed to cling to success because he could read his audience.  When teenagers stopped buying his records, his material grew even more backward-looking, his arrangements more syrupy and overproduced.  Compared with The Beatles, “There! I Said It Again” is stodgy and sentimental.  But compared with Vinton’s post-Beatlemania singles, “There! I Said It Again” is positively rock and roll. 4

Hit #1 on January 4, 1964; total of 4 weeks at #1
103 of 979 #1′s reviewed; 10.52% through the Hot 100

102) The Singing Nun – “Dominique”

The common wisdom behind the American popularity of “Dominique” is that it satisfied the nation’s desire for gentle, comforting music in the days and weeks after President John F. Kennedy’s Nov. 22 assassination.  Yet the early 1960s, for the most part, had already been an era when softer music dominated.  Folk music and girl groups were in vogue, and easy listening still had a firm foothold atop the charts.  In fact, the Ur-garage record “Louie Louie” held the #2 spot behind “Dominique” for part of its run, so Americans were clearly also in the mood to rock.  So what was it that attracted American audiences to a French-language acoustic folk song about a Thirteenth-Century saint?

The United States has a long history of anti-Catholicism, stretching back to Puritan anti-toleration legislation and intensifying with the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century waves of Irish, Italian, Polish and Latin American immigrants.  Even as late as his 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy faced prejudice from some Protestants who feared he would serve as a puppet of the Pope.  But with his secular presidency, personal charisma and glamorous family, Kennedy modeled the new face of Roman Catholicism, one that appealed to mainstream America.

Roughly coincident with Kennedy’s presidency was the Second Vatican Council, which sought to update and revitalize the Catholic Church by bringing in modern influences.  Pope Pius XII had issued the encyclical Musicae Sacrae in 1955, which endorsed the non-sacred religious music that was beginning to become popular.  Young novice Sister Luc-Gabrielle, who entered the Belgian Fichermont Convent accompanied by the guitar she called Sister Adele, was emblematic of Vatican II’s friendlier, more accessible image.  With the permission of the convent and Philips Records, she recorded an album intended to be distributed solely to Fichermont’s visitors.  Philips recognized the quality of the recordings and released them publicly.  “Dominique,” a tribute to St. Dominic, founder of the Dominican order to which Sister Luc-Gabrielle belonged, became a huge hit internationally, even in predominantly-Protestant countries.

Despite its unusual origins, “Dominique” is no schmaltzy novelty single.  Sister Luc-Gabrielle’s pure soprano and genuine sense of joy in the material, complemented by the clean, simple production, makes for an engaging listen.  The melody is exceptionally sticky, and the hooky chorus (“Dominique, -inique, -inique”)  helps break the language barrier.  The song is a rare example of religious-pop that can be appreciated by a secular audience: there’s neither the explicit rectitude of traditional recordings, nor the limp pandering that would come to characterize Christian Rock.  Actually, “Dominique” has more in common with the old American folk songs then being revived by the likes of Joan Baez: the religious content is important, but it’s a given of the narrator’s life rather than a conscious choice of subject.

A record by a Belgian nun topping the American pop charts would have been a strange occurrence at any point in Hot 100 history.  But in the wake of the assassination of  the USA’s first and only Roman Catholic president, it seems oddly appropriate that the nation turned to a record by a nun about a saint.  It helped that the record’s gentle and pastoral sound fit in naturally with the folk records populating the charts.  At the same time, though, the folk revival’s insistence on looking backwards made it just as in danger of becoming calcified and esoteric as the Catholic Church had been pre-Vatican II.  With its clean production and upbeat spirit, “Dominique” was a clear alternative to the overly-reverent covers dominating the folk scene.  A nun may seem an unlikely exponent of modernity. Yet through both her religion and her music, The Singing Nun helped participate in the ’60s break from the past and push toward the future. 7

Hit #1 on December 7, 1963; total of 4 weeks at #1
102 of 979 #1′s reviewed; 10.42% through the Hot 100