Song artist 597 - Dolly Parton

Previous Comments (newest first)

29 Jun 2018

I will always love you

Too bad you can't Print who WROTE the song cause it sure wasn't Whitney, Itwas Dolly Parton.... Sad that people think it was whitney. She couldn't write a post card if she wanted to.

27 Jul 2010

WHO HAD THE MOST NUMBER ONES?

It must be remembered that alot of Elvis' sales were lost through the years and probably lost forever. Also, Elvis' label failed to get much of Elvis' releases certified by paying the fee to do so. Also, by the time the Beatles and the British Invasion arrived many countries had more accurate sales charts. The Beatles obviously were the ones that benefitted the most from that. The facts are this, you don't see millions visiting John Lennon's or Paul McCartney's home every year.

Your main point is exactly right. The count of number 1s obviously depends on the number of charts that were active at the time (and place). When Elvis was at his peak there were fewer charts, so less chance to be number 1.

However the number of charts was increasing all the way up to the year 1970 so if that were the only factor then one would expect a group from the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s to lead the count. In addition Elvis was releasing music up to 1977, in our listing he was the second biggest act of the 1960s (after The Beatles) so he should have also benefited from the greater number of charts as well.

We have tried a number of approaches to allow acts from different decades to be compared, none of which is completely satisfactory. In terms of song success we feel that it is possible to argue for either Elvis or The Beatles to have been the most successful act of all time (or at a stretch Glenn Miller, Bing Crosby or possibly even Madonna). Whichever reasonable metric is used these acts consistently come out ahead of the rest of the pack (of course vocal fans of various other acts claim that they were "bigger than Elvis/The Beatles" but this is usually based on an astounding ignorance of history combined with a belief that making the same ridiculous claims enough times makes them true).

Finally we suspect that the number of visitors to Graceland (600k/year) as compared with say either 20 Forthlin Road or 251 Menlove Avenue (which are both run by the UK National Trust) probably has more to do with the sizes of the properties and the number of tourists in Liverpool. But even so the "number of visitors" metric doesn't seem like a good one to us, for example Dollywood gets at least four times as many visitors as Graceland, I don't think very many people would conclude that Dolly Parton was a bigger star than Elvis!