Plethora of Pop’s Rate-A-Record

The End of the World

Or so it seemed and felt in 1963

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

I was seven years old in 1963 and blissfully unaware of all that had happened just in Birmingham, AL, alone over the months leading to Thanksgiving of that year. Klan rallies, the despicable 16th Street Baptist Church bombing whose cowardly perpetrators remained at large for decades after. I must have sensed something in the air — fear and trepidation —and then my own mother’s miscarriage.

Awareness, though, crashed all around me when JFK’s motorcade was attacked and I learned a new word: assassination. I also learned that not everyone in my neighborhood mourned the murder of the country’s President.

Musically speaking, I didn’t know much in ’63, the year that saw The Beatles’ invasion, though on the year-end Pop charts, they’ve yet to mark themselves. I had to have been aware of Chubby Checker and The Beach Boys, though I can’t say where or when they would have rocked me except for some of my friends and even teachers wondering if we all couldn’t learn to twist or surf.

As I scan the three main charts of that year, I’m struck by the number of groups who crossed over these charts. Maybe we should feel gladdened and mysteriously happy that Jan and Dean’s “Surf City’ (#22 Pop) reached #36 on R&B, or…