The #1 Albums: “Meet the Beatles”

The easy way to crop the cover image from "Meet the Beatles" is to leave Ringo out, but we decided to give him a break.

The rock era began in 1955, but for most of the next eight years, the only rock ‘n’ roll stars to top the Billboard album chart were Elvis Presley, who did it seven times, and Ricky Nelson, who did it once. The chart was dominated by film and Broadway soundtracks and instrumental albums. In 1962, the album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music by Ray Charles spent 14 weeks at the top. A year later, Billboard dropped its separate album charts for stereo and mono releases; Stevie Wonder‘s The 12 Year Old Genius became the first album to top the new combined chart.

As 1964 began, the #1 album in America was The Singing Nun, a collection of folk songs in French by Belgian singer Jeannine Dekkers, who was indeed a nun and billed only as the Singing Nun. The single “Dominique” was a #1 single late in 1963. It was the kind of thing the Beatles came to destroy, and they did.

On February 15, 1964, Meet the Beatles defrocked the nun to become the #1 album in America. Its opening twosome, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “I Saw Her Standing There” blew the doors off the music world. Meet the Beatles contains all John Lennon/Paul McCartney songs except for George Harrison‘s “Don’t Bother Me” and “Till There Was You,” a song from the Broadway musical and hit movie The Music Man. They had played it in Hamburg way back when as a way of demonstrating their versatility as entertainers, and it was one of the songs they did when they flunked their audition with Decca Records. It was also one of the songs they performed on their first Ed Sullivan appearance. The clip below comes from the Royal Command Performance of November 1963.

This post is the very first in a weekly series spotlighting each album to hit #1 on Billboard‘s main album chart, starting in 1964 and continuing until we decide to stop. Read them all.