David Weir: And Then It All Changed

Sunday, May 18, 2025

And Then It All Changed

If there is a better window into the popular culture of the 1960s than our music, I’m not aware of it, and this video nails it — a 45-minute reel of excerpts from every #1 Billboard hit from that decade.

It jumps song to song, and watching it I felt as though I was relieving my youth.

Given how much time I spent listening to the radio as a teenager, it didn’t really surprise me that I knew almost every song. The decade was rolling along just fine until 1964 when the Beatles arrived and changed everything.

And they kept changing everything for the rest of the time they stayed together. But the biggest surprise for me was just how many #1 hits the Supremes had.

Digging back ten years earlier, a 20-minute companion reel documents Billboard’s hits from the 1950s, a much more staid period starting with “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” at #1.

Staid that is until Elvis burst onto the scene.

I’m sure historians have other, better ways to recapture the history of bygone eras, but as a superficial cliff-notes version, these kinds of YouTube sessions seem to work just fine.

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