It’s beginning to feel a lot like…Xmas? Yes indeed because here we are at the very end of a second year in our 4x Life journey. 1951 is all but done and dusted just as the last dustings of snow fall on London back in 2021.
The songs of December, 1951
We’ve combined the top 20 pop hits of the month…
December, 1951 Top 20 Hits
“Any Time” – Eddie Fisher
“Because Of You” – Tony Bennett
“Charmaine” – Mantovani
“Cold Cold Heart” – Tony Bennett
“Cry” – Johnnie Ray
“Dance Me Loose” – Arthur Godfrey / Chordettes
“Domino” – Tony Martin
“Down Yonder” – Del Wood
“Down Yonder” – Joe Fingers Carr
“I Get Ideas” – Tony Martin
“It’s No Sin” – Eddy Howard
“It’s No Sin” – Four Aces
“It’s No Sin” – Savannah Churchill
“Jealousy” – Frankie Laine
“Jingle Bells” – Les Paul
“Mother At Your Feet Is Kneeling” – Bobby Wayne
“Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer” – Gene Autry
“Shrimp Boats” – Jo Stafford
“Slow Poke” – Helen O’Connell
“Slow Poke” – Pee Wee King / Redd Stewart
“Tell Me Why” – Four Aces
“The Little White Cloud That Cried” – Johnnie Ray
“Turn Back The Hands Of Time” – Eddie Fisher
“Undecided” – Ames Brothers / Les Brown
“Unforgettable” – Nat King Cole
“White Christmas” – Bing Crosby
…with a top 10 R&B chart for a playlist full of ’51s finest.
You can listen to the full playlist on Youtube via this link or embedded below:
This month in history
For very dull technical reasons I have to spend some time this week working on some of the code that keeps 4x Life purring. Without boring you (much further) the source I’m getting my charts from has changed slightly and to automate how 4-5 weeks of charts are combined into one de-duplicated chart for the month I need to make some tweaks under the hood.
So we’ll skip over the history of the month except to say…oh 1951, you don’t what a “trying” year is! Try 2020 on for size, eh!
What’d Sadie think?
And we’ll leave the song commentary for the week just as simple. Unlike last year, there was no big battle for the Xmas song of the season it seems. No new contenders and the old classics, White Xmas and Rudolph only made it as high as number 16 in consecutive weeks. One assumes most people still had a copy of them from the past couple of years!
The number one spot was shared across the month, twice by Tony Bennett’s “Cold, Cold Heart”, then twice by Eddy Howard’s “It’s No Sin”, with Johnnie Ray’s “Cry” rounding out the month.
Which was the best? We’ll go for Johnnie Ray’s “Cry” but you make up your own mind when you listen to the full playlist on Youtube via this link.