what is popular song

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American Popular Song is Irving Berlin, Carole King, and The Lion King. It is not rock, but thousands of rock songs are popular song. It is not country, but the biggest country hits usually become popular song. These are the standards, the songs you know, the songs you've forgotten but remember immediately when you hear the chorus.

Virtually anything written by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, or Richard Rodgers...and the majority of songs written by Neil Diamond, Brian Wilson or Carole King. It's the songs sung by Perry Como, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, The Carpenters, Dinah Shore, Barbra Streisand. It's a lot of the Beatles music, and most of Dolly Parton's catalog.

From Patti Page to Billy Joel, popular song is that which is hummed and enjoyed by kids in kindergarten as well as their grandparents. It's the Great American Songbook, where Anything goes...

July 2011 features

Click on the bold below...



Year-By-Year Index of the Hits

(click on the year)

1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1968 1969 1970 1971

purpose of this website...

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Think of PopularSong.org as a "monthly magazine" focusing on American Popular Song past and present.

Each month we bring you a feature article on one of the great performers, and another on one of the great songwriters from the past 100 years of popular song. We revisit some of the anecdotes you remember, and provide some facts and tidbits that you probably never heard before. We zero in on some of the key songs and performances for these writers and artists.

Join us for some terrific tunes in our "Forgotten Gems" feature. These are the songs you haven't heard for years, and experience a quiet joy when you re-discover them. These are the songs that make you say, "how could I have forgotten that one...that's a great song!"

Sprinkle in some instrumentals, a look back at the charts from years ago, and other oddments and trivia to enrich your musical enjoyment.

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Here's The Part Where We Refuse to Accept Donations...

We sincerely hope that you enjoy reading these articles as much as our editorial board enjoys researching and preparing them. When the PopularSong.org Society was formed, it was intended to be a free source of information, preserving the history of America's best music. And although this website has expenses, we do not solicit donations. We ask instead that, if you do shop online, please consider using the links we provide to Amazon.com. When you click on these links, Amazon recognizes that it came from this website. And if you order something, Amazon gives PopularSong.org a few cents from each purchase -- at no additional cost to you. If enough people use these links for online shopping, the "commissions" will continue to fund our preservation efforts.

To help, simply "bookmark" this page and please click here for your Amazon.com shopping.

With our sincere thanks,
The Editorial Board
PopularSong.org Society