693 Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) “Hello, Dolly” 1964

Armstrong’s recording “became the best-selling single in America, leaping past the Beatles’ ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret?’ to reach the top of Billboard’s pop chart. It would be the last jazz record, and the next-to-last show tune, to do so. When Armstrong’s ‘Hello, Dolly!’ was replaced by Mary Wells’s ‘My Guy’ a week later, an era—the one that has since come to be known as the ‘golden age’ of American popular music—ended. Rock and roll, the preferred music of the baby boomers, thereafter supplanted golden-age popular song as the linqua franca of pop music in the U.S. and Europe” (Commentary, 2016).

Louis Armstrong “Hello, Dolly”