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Aug 17, 2006 · From James Brown to Etta James, Jimi Hendrix to Patsy Cline, here are the tracks that lit up the decade. By Pitchfork. August 17, 2006. Graphic by Martine Ehrhart. It was the decade of Dylan and...
- Pitchfork
- Roger Miller – King of The Road
- Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames – Yeh, Yeh
- Jackie Wilson –
- Roy Orbison – Crying
- Russell Morris – The Real Thing
- Leonard Cohen – Suzanne
- Louis Armstrong – What A Wonderful World
- Tom Jones – It’S Not Unusual
- The Monkees – Daydream Believer
- Del Shannon – Runaway
Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” shines a light on the traveling man. The track, a delightful country-pop crossover, tells the story of a nomadic hobo, untethered from all obligations and material goods. The song’s most famous line, “I’m a man of means, by no means, king of the road” was bitingly cynical, reveling in the freedom of refusing to con...
Georgie Fame and his band, The Blue Flames, found the perfect intersection of pop, jazz, and R&B. Audiences agreed. The group’s version of “Yeh Yeh,” topped the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” on the UK chart, ending a five-week run from the Liverpool chaps. Shortly after topping the UK charts, “Yeh, Yeh” reached #21 on the Billboard Pop charts, proving tha...
The instrumentation for Jackie Wilson’s “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher” is as crisp as it gets. The bass sounds like it was recorded in a hermetically sealed vacuum, while the iconic conga groove pops without a crinkle or crack. All Wilson had to do was show up. And show up he did. The instrumental for the 1967 hit was written by G...
Roy Orbison had plenty of 60s hits to choose from, including “Oh, Pretty Woman” But we opted for “Crying,” which begins with a seminal line, familiar to those even who have never heard the song: “I was alright for a while, I could smile for a while.” The song is Orbison at his most vulnerable, admitting that the feelings hidden from a former partne...
Written by Johnny Young and produced by Ian “Molly” Meldrum, “The Real Thing” was initially envisioned as a soft-rock ballad in a similar vein as The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever.” But the demo was superseded by Meldrum’s expansive vision, and “The Real Thing” became one of the first studio masterpieces of the modern era. Alongside engineer ...
Leonard Cohen drew a throughline straight from poetry to folk music. “Suzanne,” his stirring acoustic track from Songs of Leonard Cohen is one of the most powerful examples of this style, with Cohen’s lyrics first appearing as a poem in 1966. (Cohen ripped the poem for a second use because he was short of material for his forthcoming album.) The so...
“What a Wonderful World” is a lesson in perseverance. It’s also one of the best pop ballads ever recorded. Armstrongfirst started making records in 1923, but it was in February of 1968, when Amstrong was 66, that he released “What A Wonderful World,” which would become the biggest-selling song of his massively influential career. Armstrong made mus...
It’s hard to believe now, but Tom Jones was deemed far too sexy for the BBC when he first arrived in the 60s with this song. As such, it was the efforts of pirate radio station Radio Caroline that drove the initial success of Jones’s “It’s Not Unusual.” The upbeat tale of heartbreak was Jones’s second single for Decca Records and his first No.1. Ru...
John Stewart wrote “Daydream Believer” shortly before he left the Kingston Trio, the third track in a trilogy aimed at capturing the malaise and boredom of suburban life. In that respect, he was an innovator, bringing life to the lifeless suburbs in a cry for help – or, at least, a helicopter back to the city. The song was turned down by both We Fi...
“Runaway” almost never happened. Back in 1960, Charles Westover and keyboard player Max Crook earned a recording contract. The recording contract ended disastrously. Perhaps it was another tale of small-town kids intimidated by the Big Apple, but Crook and Westover (who had recently taken on the stage name Del Shannon) failed to impress the bosses ...
- 3 min
- Ain’t No Mountain High Enough – Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell (1967) “If you ever need a helping hand, I’ll be there on the double just as fast as I can.”
- Fortunate Son – Creedence Clearwater Revival (1969) “Some folks are born silver spoon in hand, Lord, don’t they help themselves!” Why it’s the 2nd Best song of the 60s.
- House of the Rising Sun – The Animals (1964) “My mother was a tailor, she sewed my new blue jeans. My father was a gamblin’ man, down in New Orleans.”
- Brown Eyed Girl – Van Morrison (1967) “Standing in the sunlight laughing, hiding ‘hind a rainbow’s wall, slipping and sliding all along the waterfall with you.”
- 100 Send Me A Postcard. Dutch psych rockers Shocking Blue would score a US Billboard Hot 100 No.1 with 1970’s ‘Venus’ (covered so memorably by Bananarama 16 years later), but ‘Send Me A Postcard’ is a darker proposition altogether, singer Mariska Veres evoking Julie Driscoll or Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick as she hollers over fuzzed guitar and the obligatory swirling organ.
- 99 Ring Of Fire. This paean to the grisly aftermath of an unforgiving curry – or tribute to love’s steamy embrace, whatever you fancy – was written by Johnny Cash’s future wife June Carter with Merle Kilgore, and originally recorded by June’s sister Anita.
- 98 I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night) The opening track on Lenny Kaye’s ‘Nuggets’, his essential compilation of late-60s garage and psych rock, ‘I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)’ was written by professional songwriting team Annette Tucker and Nancie Mantz but musses up its classic structure with needling, distorted guitar from Ken Williams – recorded backwards – and a growling lead vocal from James Lowe.
- 97 My Girl. They might have done the gritty thing with ‘Ball Of Confusion’ and ‘Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone’ or tried overwrought testifying on ‘Ain’t Too Proud To Beg’, but the Temptations song that gets reeled out most these days is this soppy, doo-wopping poem to a girl who makes everything all right.
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- 1960
- Hey Jude – The Beatles. The Beatles - Hey Jude. Paul McCartney wrote this song for John Lennon’s son. Julian Lennon was feeling alone after his father left his mother for Yoko Ono.
- Fortunate Son – Creedence Clearwater Revival. Creedence Clearwater Revival - Fortunate Son (Official Music Video) This counterculture anthem soon came to represent the anti-Vietnam war movement that had gained strong momentum by this time.
- Ring of Fire – Johnny Cash. Ring of Fire. Johnny Cash’s wife, June Carter Cash, actually wrote this song, which went on to become one of his biggest hits ever.
- Somebody to Love – Jefferson Airplane. Somebody to Love. Turning love into action was the perfect tone for the free-love era. “Somebody To Love,” in the psychedelic rock sounds of Jefferson Airplane, was an instant classic.
Dec 20, 2023 · Nick DeRiso Published: December 20, 2023. UCR. As this list of the biggest No. 1 rock songs of the decade shows, the '60s weren't always as revolutionary as you might think. Sure, there was the...
60s Hits - Sixties Greatest Music Hits (Best 60's Songs Playlist) · Playlist · 100 songs · 100.3K likes.
