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Number One Songs—I Want to Hold Your Hand
by Jack Hayford, Editor
It seems entirely appropriate to me that we start this section of Events-in-Music.com on #1 Songs with the first #1 in America by the Beatles, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" from the album Please Please Me.
I was eight years old in 1963 when the Beatles first came to American radio and record stores. Immediately I fell in love with the music of the Fab 4 -- as did all of my friends. (The boys were trying to figure out how to dance to it without embarrassment; the girls were debating which Beatle was "cuter.") Despite the fact that my parents didn't yet know what to make of this new music, they did buy me a Beatles wig...and probably any number of the other Beatles toys to immediately hit the market.
Unfortunately, I don't have any of those collectibles anymore. But I do have my first 45 record, the Beatle's American #1 triumph, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" (shown here), picture-sleeve and all.
No doubt it was the Beatles that ignited my love for and fascination with MUSIC. And they still rock my soul to this day, 43 years later.
In placing "I Want to Hold Your Hand" at #16 on their 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list, Rolling Stone Magazine quotes Paul McCartney issuing a prophetic ultimatum: "We said to [manager] Brian Epstein, 'We're not going to America till we've got a Number One record."
"During a marathon three-week season of nightly Beatles shows at the Paris Olympia which had begun on January 16, 1964, Brian received a stunning telegram from his London office. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" had jumped from 43 to #1 on the charts compiled by the American music magazine Cashbox. It sold a million copies...Coming only days before the Beatles' visit to New York to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, this was the breakthrough Epstein [and the band!] wanted." —The Man Who Made the Beatles: An Intimate Biography of Brian Epstein
See A Short History of the Beatles, here.
I Want to Hold Your Hand Lyrics Oh yeah, I'll tell you something Oh please, say to me And when I touch you I feel happy inside Yeah, you've got that something |
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