The 1960s saw the rise of the Beatles, the ascension of the Beach Boys and their California dreams, and many cultural sea changes. The biggest songs from each year of this decade include some iconic tracks that remain beloved today, but others might surprise you. From pro-war hits to songs by fictional rock bands, the biggest songs in the U.S. in the 1960s according to Billboard magazine’s year-end Hot 100 rankings are as varied as the decade itself.
- 1960 - “Theme from A Summer Place” // Percy Faith and His Orchestra
- 1961 - “Tossin’ and Turnin’” // Bobby Lewis
- 1962 - “Stranger on the Shore” // Acker Bilk
- 1963 - “Surfin U.S.A.” // The Beach Boys
- 1964 - “I Want to Hold Your Hand” // The Beatles
- 1965 - “Wooly Bully” // Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs
- 1966 - “The Ballad of the Green Berets” by SSgt. Barry Sadler
- 1967 - “To Sir With Love” // Lulu
- 1968 - “Hey Jude” // The Beatles
- 1969 - “Sugar, Sugar” // The Archies
1960 - “Theme from A Summer Place” // Percy Faith and His Orchestra
The biggest song of 1960 was “Theme from A Summer Place,” a track from the 1959 film A Summer Place starring Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue. Interestingly, the song is not actually the film's theme; instead, it soundtracks numerous romantic scenes between the two protagonists. A staple of the “easy listening” genre with music by Max Steiner, the tune spent nine weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 charts during the first year of the 1960s.
1961 - “Tossin’ and Turnin’” // Bobby Lewis
Indianapolis-born R&B singer Bobby Lewis recorded the original version of this 1961 megahit, which spent seven weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1961. The song sold three million copies and was later covered by the likes of the Supremes and the Marvelettes. It was also memorably featured in several films. “When it came out in Animal House, I took my tape recorder to the theater. I wished I had a video camera. I taped it off the screen. What a beautiful scene—John Belushi in a garage all by himself, just sittin’ and listenin’ to ‘Tossin’ and Turnin,’” the late Lewis recalled in a 2011 interview with NJ.com. “They never stopped playing it. They haven’t stopped yet. They’re still playing it.”
1962 - “Stranger on the Shore” // Acker Bilk
Two years before the Beatles had their first No. 1 hit in America, a UK-based clarinetist named Acker Bilk took that very same prize. Bilk, who spent most of his time working in the UK’s live jazz scene, came up with the melody of “Stranger on the Shore” while in a taxi and originally named the tune “Jenny” after his daughter.
When asked to compose the theme song for a BBC TV children’s show, Bilk offered “Jenny.” It was accepted, but the program asked him to change the song’s title to match the show’s name: Stranger on the Shore. The tune became a massive hit in both Britain and in America and spent a week as No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, and was covered by the likes of Santo & Johnny, Duke Ellington, and Herb Alpert. “Stranger on the Shore” has also been extensively sampled and remixed over the years, and certainly has kept cash flowing into Bilk’s pockets. But when asked about it in 2012, Bilk appeared to have tired of the song, telling the BBC, “It’s all right, but you do get fed up with it after 50 years.”
1963 - “Surfin U.S.A.” // The Beach Boys
Brian Wilson drew inspiration for this immortal, sun- and sand-soaked hit directly from rock-and-roll legend Chuck Berry. “I started humming the melody to [the 1958 Chuck Berry single] ‘Sweet Little Sixteen,’ and I got fascinated with the fact of doing it,” Wilson said in Keith Badman’s 2004 book, The Beach Boys. “I thought to myself, ‘God! What about trying to put surf lyrics to ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’s’ melody?’” Berry may have been in prison at the time and Wilson didn’t actually surf himself, but what emerged from their one-sided collaboration was “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” a song that cemented a vision of California as a sunny paradise in the minds of millions of listeners. The track became the Beach Boys’ first top-five hit, and while it never reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, it spent a total of 25 weeks on the chart in 1963.
1964 - “I Want to Hold Your Hand” // The Beatles
At 21, Paul McCartney was living with his girlfriend, Jane Asher, and her family. It was there that he and John Lennon crafted their first track to reach No. 1 in America. “In ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ I remember when we got the chord that made the song,” Lennon said in 1980. “We were in Jane Asher’s house, downstairs in the cellar playing on the piano at the same time. And we had, ‘Oh you-u-u…got that something…’ And Paul hits this chord and I turn to him and say, ‘That’s it!’ I said, ‘Do that again!’ In those days, we really used to absolutely write like that—both playing into each other’s nose.”
Asher was the first to hear the track, which became the band’s third British No. 1. “We were booked to go to America directly after the Paris trip, so it was handy to have a No. 1,” George Harrison recalled. “We’d already been hired by Ed Sullivan, so if it had been a No. 2 or No. 10, we’d have gone anyway, but it was nice to have a No. 1.” It stayed at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks before being replaced by another Beatles hit: “She Loves You.”
1965 - “Wooly Bully” // Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs
“Wooly Bully” was musically inspired by the 1952 track “Hully Gully Now” by Big Bo and Little Smitty, but Domingo Samudio—also known as Sam the Sham—put his own Tex-Mex spin on it. Recorded in Memphis’s Sun Studios, the track became a smash.
Urban legend holds that the song was named after Samudio’s cat, but the famously hearse-driving, turban-wearing musician has denied this. “People make up all kinds of stories when they don't have the right answers,” Samudio said, according to the Memphis Music Hall of Fame. Regardless, the song became the first American tune to sell a million copies during the British Invasion, and while it never hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, it spent 18 weeks on the chart that year, the longest of any song in 1965. Per Samudio, “We kicked The Beatles' butt!”
1966 - “The Ballad of the Green Berets” by SSgt. Barry Sadler
The ‘60s and the ‘70s might be best remembered for the legendary anti-war music that emerged during this time, but the biggest song of 1966 was actually a rare pro-war hit. “The Ballad of the Green Berets” was written and performed by Barry Sadler, who was an active-duty Green Beret medic when he debuted it on the Ed Sullivan Show. The song was deeply controversial at the time due to rising anti-Vietnam War sentiment, but also managed to spend five weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100.
Sadler would go on to have one other hit song before leaving music to write fiction. The remainder of his life was marred by violence; he shot and killed the country singer Lee Emerson Bellamy in 1978 and spent 30 days in prison for that, then moved to Guatemala, was shot in the head, came back to America, and spent the rest of his life in a hospital bed until his death in 1989.
1967 - “To Sir With Love” // Lulu
Glasgow-born musician Lulu played a student in Sidney Poitier’s character’s class in the film To Sir, With Love, and was also slated to sing the title track. Dissatisfied with the songs the producers were considering, Lulu suggested that her friend Mark London try writing one. London initially declined, thinking he had no shot, but came up with a composition in five minutes at Lulu’s behest. That became the basis of “To Sir With Love,” the biggest hit of 1967. Lyricist Don Black penned the words the next day. “I was over the moon,” Lulu said. “I just knew it was going to be a great song.” The tune was never released as a single, but it still soared to the top of the charts and stayed there for five weeks.
1968 - “Hey Jude” // The Beatles
In June 1968, Paul McCartney was driving to meet with John Lennon’s wife, Cynthia, and her son, Julian. John and Cynthia were in the middle of a divorce, and McCartney wanted to find a way to comfort the child he had become close to.
“I thought, as a friend of the family, I would motor out to Weybridge and tell them that everything was all right: to try and cheer them up, basically, and see how they were. I had about an hour’s drive,” he said in the documentary Anthology. “I would always turn the radio off and try and make up songs, just in case…I started singing: ‘Hey Jules—don’t make it bad, take a sad song, and make it better…’ It was optimistic, a hopeful message for Julian: ‘Come on, man, your parents got divorced. I know you’re not happy, but you’ll be OK.’”
What emerged was the resounding, expansive classic “Hey Jude.” “I eventually changed ‘Jules’ to ‘Jude,’” McCartney added. “One of the characters in Oklahoma! is called Jud, and I like the name.”
When McCartney played the song for Lennon and Yoko Ono, he shared that he was thinking of changing the line, “The movement you need is on your shoulder,” but Lennon forbade him from doing so. “John said, ‘You won’t, you know. That’s the best line in it!’ That’s collaboration. When someone’s that firm about a line that you’re going to junk, and he said, ‘No, keep it in,’” McCartney continued. “So of course you love that line twice as much because it’s a little stray, it’s a little mutt that you were about to put down and it was reprieved and so it’s more beautiful than ever. I love those words now…”
Lennon, for his part, felt that the song had been written for him. “The words ‘go out and get her’—subconsciously he was saying, Go ahead, leave me. On a conscious level, he didn’t want me to go ahead,” he said to David Sheff in 1980. “The angel in him was saying, ‘Bless you.’ The devil in him didn’t like it at all because he didn’t want to lose his partner.”
“Hey Jude” has remained widely beloved ever since it was released and frequently tops rankings of best songs of all time. It also spent nine consecutive weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100.
1969 - “Sugar, Sugar” // The Archies
Closing out this list of the biggest songs of the ‘60s is a song by a fictional pop band. “Sugar, Sugar” was written by Jeff Barry and Andy Kim. It was performed by The Archies, a band from The Archie Show, a cartoon based on the Archie comics. Ron Dante sang the lead vocals, and Toni Wine provided the female backing vocals. The song was the group’s third single and remains one of the biggest bubblegum pop songs of all time.
“We went into the studio. Jeff and Andy Kim, who had hits on his own as a writer and singer, Jeff and Andy wrote 'Sugar, Sugar,' Ronnie was Archie, and I was Betty and Veronica,” Wine later said of the process of creating the song. “We went in, we did the record. It was a fun session, it was a blast, and at the session we just knew that this was something, and something huge was going to happen. We didn't really know how huge, but it was huge.” It spent four weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart.