Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - Spirit of ’71, Part 1
Slate Culture Feed
Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 10 September 2021
⏱️ 68 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At any given time, the music world is celebrating some anniversary, but 1971 has received more than its share of commemorations this year. And with good reason: Carole King. Marvin Gaye. Joni Mitchell. Sly Stone. Janis Joplin. The Who. All released their best work a half-century ago.
For our 50th episode of Hit Parade, we go back 50 years, celebrating the semicentennial of the year when, critics claim, “music changed everything.” The Quiet Beatle became the Favorite Beatle, when Mick Jagger sang lyrics even he regrets, when Carole King graduated from songwriter to singer-songwriter, and commercial juggernaut, when blaxploitation took over the charts and the Oscars, and when the radio was somehow awash in Osmonds. It wasn’t a perfect year—but Hit Parade host Chris Molanphy is fond of ’71 for personal reasons.
Podcast production by Asha Saluja with help from Rosemary Belson.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening Ad-Free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:03.4 | Hey there, hit parade listeners. |
| 0:06.1 | What you're about to hear is part one of this episode. |
| 0:10.5 | Part two will arrive in your podcast feed by the end of the month. |
| 0:14.7 | Would you like to hear this episode all at once the day it drops? |
| 0:19.0 | Sign up for Slate Plus. |
| 0:21.1 | You can try it for a month for just $1, and it supports not only this show, but all of Slate's acclaimed journalism and podcasts. |
| 0:31.4 | Just go to slate.com slash hit parade plus. |
| 0:35.4 | You'll get to hear every hit parade episode in full the day it arrives, plus |
| 0:41.1 | hit parade the bridge, our bonus episodes, with guest interviews, deeper dives on our episode topics, |
| 0:48.8 | and pop chart trivia. Once again, to join, that's slate.com slash hitparade plus. Thanks. And now, |
| 0:58.2 | please enjoy part one of this hit parade episode. Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine about the hits from coast to coast. |
| 1:21.0 | I'm Chris Mulanphy, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series? On today's show, 50 years ago. |
| 1:31.5 | Today, literally, this was the number one song in America, a puppy-like cover of an old 60s song, |
| 1:40.7 | Go Away Little Girl, by the country's then reigning teen idol Donnie Osmond. |
| 1:47.9 | It's largely been forgotten in the half century since it topped Billboard's Hot 100 |
| 1:54.1 | in mid-September 1971. |
| 1:58.2 | Heck, it was probably forgotten by 1975. |
| 2:02.8 | So why are we playing this? Well, for one thing, it set a billboard chart |
| 2:20.2 | record, which I'll reveal later, along with at least one other significant milestone. |
| 2:27.1 | But I'm also playing Go Away Little Girl because it's exceptional, quite literally, in this way. |
| 2:35.5 | Go Away Little Girl by Donnie Osmond is one of the few chart-topping hits of 1971 that wasn't great. |
... |
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