Students of the mind in the twenty-first century would categorize phenomena such as the charts as social proof—testimony of popular opinion that acts to expand the popularity of that opinion. In 1940, the era of phenomenological road-travel metaphors such as the hit parade, the idea would have been referred to as jumping on the bandwagon, and the first Billboard record chart demonstrated it well. After the rendition of “I’ll Smile Again” by Dorsey and Sinatra became known as a No. 1 hit, more than a dozen other musical acts, popular or hoping to be, recorded the song. The rush to capitalize on the success of the record was such that less than two weeks after the publication date of the Billboard chart, the music writer Bill Gottlieb would report, in his nationally syndicated newspaper column, “Russ Morgan is the latest to supply an insatiable public with ‘I’ll Never Smile Again.’” Gottlieb, a good writer, generally, had momentarily forgotten that the public’s appetite for any song will inevitably be sated, only to be supplanted with a hunger for a new tune.

Donald Clarke, in his judicious study of Sinatra and his work, All or Nothing At All: A Life of Sinatra, quoted his mother on the omnipresence of “I’ll Never Smile Again” on the radio: “It was all you heard,” she said. I relay the quote in part to show how the song was perceived by the public of its day, and in part to show that I am not the only writer on music who quotes his mother in a book.

As “I’ll Never Smile Again” subsided in popularity, it became, as all major hits would become, an instrument for the measurement of the success of other songs. Gottlieb, by November 1940, described a new hit, the boogie-woogie tune “Beat Me, Daddy,” by Will Bradley and His Orchestra, as “the biggest thing since ‘I’ll Never Smile Again.’”

The pop charts elevated their own status, as well as the status they conferred upon songs and song-makers, and prompted the making of more charts—more accurate charts, more extensive charts, more specialized charts, and more, more, more charts. By the late 1950s, Billboard had devised a formula for factoring information about radio play into its song rankings, a refinement that only reinforced the circularity of the charts. The chart position of a song helped determine how much a song was played on the radio, and airplay helped determine the chart position. The system seemed inscrutably hermetic, while it was also highly susceptible to corruption. Record executives knew how to rig the charts and “buy position” by influencing deejays and retailers, as well as the magazine itself, through the weight of advertising dollars.

With the widespread adoption of bar codes and scanning during the 1980s came a way to document purchases accurately, at the retail level; and, in 1991, Billboard replaced its system of surveys, divining rods, and arm-twisting machinery with a less corruptible electronic system, SoundScan. This briefly rattled the record industry, by revealing that more people were buying country music than the old charts had suggested, and that fewer people were buying records by the big-hair guitar-rock acts that male record executives liked to be associated with, and that male store clerks liked to say that they were selling.

As evidence of the popularity of songs, sales statistics are inherently limited, of course. Commercial transactions tell only part of the story of a song’s popularity. All that occurs after the purchase (or, for that matter, what does not happen) may be as telling as the fact of the sale. I mean: A record has been sold—then, what? How often is the song played? When and why and where? Is it played for comfort, by one listener alone in a room, or for dancing at a Friday night party? What thoughts, if any, does the record provoke? What feelings does it stir—or relieve? How do other people in the record buyer’s house feel about the song? How long has the record remained in active use? Has it been traded for another record or passed down to a younger brother?

When I was a kid, one of my favorite records was “Cool Jerk,” a boogaloo single from 1966 by a one-hit group called The Capitols. (Years later, I heard that the indelible groove track might have been recorded clandestinely by the Motown house band, The Funk Brothers.) My late sister Barbara, who was six years older than me, had borrowed the record from one of our cousins, and I snatched it out of her room. A few years after that, when I was in high school, I dubbed the song onto an audio cassette mix by placing my shoebox Radio Shack cassette recorder next to my stereo speakers. That mix tape became the primary source of music in my car, a profoundly used 1968 Chevrolet that seated seven comfortably, 13 for short hauls. Without aggrandizing my teen years, which were eventful only by the standards of a teenager, I can say that “Cool Jerk” was part of the soundtrack of multiple occasions memorable to my high-school friends and me. How could I capture the place that the song held in our lives? Certainly not by recounting the fact of the sale of one copy of the record to the cousin of mine who loaned it to my sister before I stole it from her. When I think of the song, I hear the jiggy-jaggy opening piano figure, and my memory drifts. I don’t hear cha-ching.

“Cool Jerk” never made it to No. 1. It peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard R&B chart, and at No. 7 on the magazine’s “Hot 100,” in July 1966. By the ostensibly quantitative and plainly mercantile terms of the pop charts, “Cool Jerk” was never as successful as any No. 1 song, from “I’ll Never Smile Again” to “Blurred Lines,” the retro-’70s white-boy funk hit by Robin Thicke that was the biggest hit in America for twelve weeks in the summer of 2013. The numbers simply do not compare, in a realm where numbers have been established as the only terms of comparison. Once a song is ranked and assigned a numerical value, the number replaces every other value—aesthetic value, social value, personal value. Identified as No. 1, a song is one number superior to the song that’s No. 2, and 98 numbers better than the song that’s No. 99. This line of thinking has become a tautology in the age of digital aggregation and data-mining, an era that the early Billboard charts and “Your Hit Parade” foreshadowed and began to make possible.

However memorable “Cool Jerk” may be to me, the pop charts have established that it will never be as big a hit as “Blurred Lines.” Memorability and hit status are essentially different matters. A hit does not need lasting power to be a hit. Indeed, it cannot last long—not as a hit. There are only so many people available to buy a song, to share one in digital form, or to share one’s interest in one through the social media; hence, the life of any song on the pop charts is intrinsically limited, like that of one of those species of insects that exists only long enough to spawn and then die. Impermanence is a necessity of the pop-culture ecosystem. The charts mark and celebrate birth and growth—songs coming up or on the rise—as they require the decline and disappearance of others. To follow a song as it ascends the chart and inevitably falls, then, is a kind of deathwatch. It may be only fitting that the first No. 1 on the first Billboard record chart was a song inspired by a death.

