Hit Parade: Singing Nuns and Green Tambourines Edition
The 1960s will always be associated with counterculture and the Summer of Love, but the decade’s pop charts were full of novelty, schlock, and bubblegum.
When you think of music in the 1960s, some groundbreaking artists probably come to mind: Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and the Jefferson Airplane, for example. But the pop charts paint a very different picture of that decade, which embraced easy listening, groovy bubblegum, novelty and instrumental records—even a guitar-strumming Belgian nun.
In other words, the soundtrack of the era was more like Mad Men and less like Forrest Gump.
Join Chris Molanphy as he unearths forgotten hits from Bobby Vinton, Kyu Sakamoto, Jeannie C. Riley, and other unlikely chart-toppers, on a still-strange trip through the ‘60s.
Podcast production by Kevin Bendis.
Content retrieved from: https://slate.com/podcasts/hit-parade/2025/03/kyu-sakamoto-the-singing-nun-and-forgotten-hits-of-the-1960s