Songs from the Year 1941

This page lists the top songs of 1941 in the source charts. The way that the various charts are combined to reach this final list is described on the in the site generation page.

Between 1920 and 1940 there are few available charts (at least that we can find), hence these results should be treated with caution since, with few exceptions, they are based on fairly subjective charts.

During this era music was dominated by a number of "Big Bands" and songs could be attributed to the band leader, the band name, the lead singer or a combination of the them. It is common, for example, to see the same song listed with three different artists. And, just to stop us from getting bored, the success of a song was tied to the sales of sheet music, so a popular song would often be perfomed by many different combinations of singers and bands and the contemporary charts would list the song, without clarifying whose version was the major hit. Where we have found such issues we have attempted to consolidate the entries using the most widely accepted value for the artist in each case.

Previous Comments

2 Sep 2009

Number 39 title is incorrect.

I'm sure that the correct title is "It All Comes Back to Me Now."

I just discovered this website and will no doubt use it as a valuable resource often.

Thanks, Bill Rupp

You are correct, the mistake has been fixed. The issue was that some other charts had a similar title, but it turns out that the song is different.

31 Jan 2010

number one song

trying to find out the number one song on May 21,1941.

The first question is "where?", for example in Australia the number 1 song was "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" by Vera Lynn.

You didn't specify a location, so we suspect that you meant what was the number 1 song in the US.

So the next question would be "according to who?", there were no official charts published in the 1940s, the closest would be some occasional charts published by Billboard magazine. Billboard produced a variety of different charts starting in 1936 these were finally consolidated in 1958 into the "Hot 100" which has been published ever since (although the way they are calculated has changed of course).

In 1941 the "Best Sellers in Stores" chart is probably the most representative one. In that chart the number 1 record was:

"Amapola (Pretty Little Poppy)" by Jimmy Dorsey

in the entry for the song above it says "US 1 for 10 weeks - Mar 1941" that means it was the Billboard "Stores" number 1 for 10 weeks starting in March 1941.

© 2007-10, Steve Hawtin et al. Generated 7 Feb 2010 15:51 GMT. This data may be freely copied provided that the source is acknowledged, a link to the tsort.info site is prominently incorporated and the version number is attached (this data is version 1.9.0021).