Brian Ler on WNYC and this membership drive, as many of you know, we've been doing a 10 question

quiz each day in the 11 o'clock hour to break up all the serious stuff a little bit and have a chance

to give you some WNYC merch as prizes. So get two in a row right. And today you'll be able to choose

between a Brian Laird Show baseball cap and the new WNYC mini tote, 212-433, WNYC. And as I said before the break, today's quiz is piggybacking off our 100

100 years of 100 things, centennial series, 100 years of the Billboard Music Charts segment that we

did back in January.

So we're going to do a decade by decade, name that tune, Ten question quiz. And we're going to start with Mary and White Stone. Hi, Mary. Ready to play?

Yes, I am. So the actual Billboard music charts debuted in 1940. So we'll start there. Here's the first song to top it, that year, year one, can you name this tune?

And since that was all instrumental, we'll give you some help with a few multiple choice answers

if you need a multiple choice. Or do you know it?

I do need a multiple choice. This one's before my time.

Okay. Round midnight by Thelonious Monk. I'll never smile again by Tommy Dorsey in his orchestra.

Cottontail by Duke Ellington or Grooven Hyde by Dizzy Gillespie.

It's one of those four.

Would it be the third one?

The third one is right, Cottontailed by Duke Ellington. And it was of historical

interest to us because in addition to being the first number one on the Billboard music charts,

according to All About Jazz, Cottontail is based on the rhythm changes from George Gershwin's

I Got Rhythm, the very first Ellington recording, notable for the

driving tenor saxophone solo by Ben Webster, among the reasons why it's historically important.

Moving on to the 1950s and for the hat or the mini-toat, we've got two songs in a row from that

decade because music changed so much during the 50s. Here's a song from the beginning of the decade.

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