Four miles away from the Madison airport where Redding’s plane was supposed to land, the plane crashed into Wisconsin’s Lake Monona. It was a rainy, foggy night, and Redding shouldn’t have flown, but he wanted to make it to that next show. On a December night in 1967, Otis Redding was flying in his own small private plane from Cleveland, where he’d just performed, to Madison, where he was slated to appear next. And in every last one of the cases, the songs have taken on whole new meanings after their creators died. In all but two of those cases, those posthumous #1 singles have been the first times that the artists in question topped the charts. The oldest of those posthumously chart-topping artists, John Lennon, was 40 when he died. Just one, Janis Joplin’s heroin overdose, was a result of some long-festering disease. It’s a peculiar form of public mourning, honoring a departed artist by buying and playing a song from that artist as often as possible. And we, as a public, have mourned by taking a song from that artist and pushing it to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
A popular recording artist has died young in some shocking, out-of-nowhere way. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.Īs of right now, it’s happened six times.
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