Happy new year folks! We missed a week of the newsletter last week due to the holiday break and spending some time on pulling together future playlists for 4x Life. A little longer intro this time to explain…
It was a happy coincidence that we had playlists prepared right through to December, 1959 that ended the end of 2022. I had spent a couple of days last Xmas break generating the playlists for the whole year so I didn’t have so much admin to do every week.
But when I say “playlist prepared” what I mean is the first part of this – a chart that combines all 4/5 weeks of a month into a single list of top songs. I’ve previously described the arduous process just to get there – I have all the individual weekly Billboard charts as a PDF that I extract tabular info from and then run a script over the month’s worth to turn them into a de-duplicated song list.
I still then had to actually go to Youtube and manually search for each song and add it to a playlist. Then I had to go through and compare this week’s playlist to the previous one to identify the new songs.
I’ve managed to automate a lot more of this. Unfortunately the very first bit I couldn’t – I had to spend a day cutting and pasting from a 4000 page PDF (40 years of charts) into individual 10 page PDFs (monthly) and then select the tables in each of these to save off the songs. I decide just to go for it and did 40 years worth of charts (1960-1999) – which will last me the next 10 years of real-time at 4x Life.
But from this point on I was able to start automating more. In the past I had a script that I had to run for each monthly PDF. Faced with 480 PDFs this time I automated it so it churned them all out in 5 seconds. Then I scripted something to compare each monthly list to the previous one and write [new] next to each new song. Again…5 seconds total, for what took me several minutes manually each week.
Next I wrote a script that searched on Youtube Music for each song in a monthly playlist and added it to an appropriately named new playlist. This took me a good 15-20 minutes each week in the past. Now, I’m not going to go through and create all the Youtube playlists for the next decade in advance as there is a good chance that the songs files I find now might disappear before I’m meant to listen to them in 2030 say. But I can just press the button each week. (This does now make me think i could consider scripting something to create the playlist on Spotify for people who prefer that – I’ll have a look at that at some point maybe.)
A caveat – when I say “I scripted” – I was ably assisted this year by the AI known as GPT3. It has a remarkable ability to write code when presented with a good description of the task. It isn’t necessarily great code – but it gets the job done, and does it faster than myself who tends to only code a few times a year so is always out-of-practice.
Anyway, I now have a lot of the admin of the next decade sorted for 4xLife – so even more time to enjoy listening to the music itself with the family. Go listen to January 1960 here, and then enjoy the sounds of February, 1960 below!
Songs of the month
“Among My Souvenirs” – Connie Francis
[new] “Baby You’ve Got What It Takes” – Dinah Washington & Brook Benton
[new] “Beyond The Sea” – Bobby Darin
[new] “Bulldog” – Fireballs
[new] “Country Boy” – Fats Domino
“Down By The Station” – Four Preps
“El Paso” – Marty Robbins
“First Name Initial” – Annette & The Afterbeats
[new] “Forever” – Little Dippers
“Go Jimmy Go” – Jimmy Clanton
“Handy Man” – Jimmy Jones
[new] “Harbour Lights” – Platters
“He’ll Have To Go” – Jim Reeves
“Heartaches By The Number” – Guy Mitchell
“Hound Dog Man” – Fabian
“It’s Time To Cry” – Paul Anka
[new] “Lady Luck” – Lloyd Price
“Let It Be Me” – Everly Brothers
[new] “Little Bitty Girl” – Bobby Rydell
“Lonely Blue Boy” – Conway Twitty
“Lucky Devil” – Carl Dobkins Jr.
[new] “Midnight Special” – Paul Evans
“Not One Minute More” – Della Reese
“Pretty Blue Eyes” – Steve Lawrence
[new] “Rockin’ Little Angel” – Ray Smith
“Running Bear” – Johnny Preston
“Sandy” – Larry Hall
[new] “Shimmy Shimmy Ko-Ko-Bop” – Little Anthony & The Imperials
“Smokie (Part 2)” – Bill Black’s Combo
[new] “Sweet Nothin’s” – Brenda Lee
[new] “T.L.C. Tender Love And Care” – Jimmie Rodgers
“Teen Angel” – Mark Dinning
“The Big Hurt” – Miss Toni Fisher
“The Village Of St. Bernadette” – Andy Williams
“Theme From A Summer Place” – Percy Faith Orchestra
[new] “Time And A River” – Nat King Cole
“Tracy’s Theme” – Spencer Ross
“Way Down Yonder In New Orleans” – Freddy Cannon
“What In The World’s Come Over You” – Jack Scott
“Where Or When” – Dion & The Belmonts
“Why” – Frankie Avalon
[new] “Wild One” – Bobby Rydell
“You Got What It Takes” – Marv Johnson
* = New to the chart this week.
You can listen to the full playlist on Youtube via this link.
This month in history
On February 1 in Greensboro, North Carolina, four black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University began a sit-in at the Woolworth’s department store, at a lunch counter that, like many in the South, would not serve African-American customers except for take-out orders. After their classes, the four young men entered Woolworth’s, made some purchases, and at 4:30, took seats at the counter and politely placed orders for desserts and coffee. When the waitress told them they could not be served, they stayed until closing time. The next morning, at least 20 students came to Woolworth’s and began taking up seats as they became available. By Wednesday, the sit-ins were national news, and the next week, spread to other cities. By summer, most chain stores ended their whites-only policy.
Before a session of the Parliament of South Africa in Cape Town on February 3rd, Britain’s Prime Minister Harold Macmillan made the “Wind of Change” speech, telling the all-white assembly that “The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it” – indicating the Conservative government was coming to accept the growing voices for independence from the colonies.
On the 16th the nuclear submarine USS Triton submerged upon departure from New London, Connecticut, and, with 184 people on board, began “Operation Sandblast”, an underwater voyage around the world that would end 83 days later on May 10. Though forced to broach its sail above the surface on March 5 in order to transfer a seriously ill sailor to another ship, USS Triton would spend the rest of the circumnavigation entirely undersea.
What’d Sadie think?
One more week at the top for Johnny Preston’s “Running Bear” before two at the top for “Teen Angel” by Mark Dinning. Then a week for “Theme From A Summer Place” by Percy Faith Orchestra.
Loved ’em
- “Baby You’ve Got What It Takes” – Dinah Washington & Brook Benton
- “Beyond The Sea” – Bobby Darin
- “Little Bitty Girl” – Bobby Rydell
- “Midnight Special” – Paul Evans
- “Shimmy Shimmy Ko-Ko-Bop” – Little Anthony & The Imperials
Liked ’em
- “Bulldog” – Fireballs
- “Forever” – Little Dippers
- “Harbour Lights” – Platters
- “Lady Luck” – Lloyd Price
- “Rockin’ Little Angel” – Ray Smith
- “Sweet Nothin’s” – Brenda Lee
- “Wild One” – Bobby Rydell
- “Country Boy” – Fats Domino
- “Time And A River” – Nat King Cole
Leave ’em
- “T.L.C. Tender Love And Care” – Jimmie Rodgers
Now go listen to the full playlist on Youtube via this link.