#99

99. Hot Diggity (Dog Ziggity Boom) - Perry Como

  Stats:

• #2 for 5 Weeks in 1956 (April-May)
• #1 Hit That Prevented it from reaching #1: Heartbreak Hotel - Elvis Presley
• Should it have beaten the #1? No. (Which is to say, I'd have preferred that Hot Diggity gotten one week at #1 before Elvis' first, but I do not want to rewrite pop music history to take away Heartbreak Hotel from the top spot). 
• #1 Movie in the Country: The Swan, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, The Revolt of Mamie Stover, The Man Who Knew Too Much
• Top 100 #2 Hits 1955-2001 Rank: #48

Xylophone-powered pop is still a rarity and this Como track is almost entirely lost to history, even though it is a great hellzapoppin romp through falling in love.  Como's vocals are always so close to the surface of his emotion.  He smiles when he sings a love song because that's what love is.  You can hear it throughtout this song that he's excited to be singing and excited about love.  How this fits in with this list is always a little uneasy, but including it seems so right.

Coming up: #98 - "Can I play with yo panty line"

Comments

[Ken]

Really?

[nichole]

Yes! I love this song. It reminds me of a woman I cleaned for. It took me all of 45 minutes to tidy up her tiny apartment and get the laundry going, at which point she'd holler for me to sit down and drink percolator Folgers and we'd watch Martha Stewart's show together. (She was sure Martha hailed from Chippewa Falls.) Every commercial break had a K-Tel-style ad for Perry Como's Greatest Hits and my friend would cheer, "Perry!"

[Cliff Arroyo]

I'm blah about this, but his version of the Twelve Days of Christmas, modernized to 1950's standards, remains my favorite.

[grannie elbow]

I never quite got the Perry Como thing. His seemed like music for my parents, and I guess it was judging from the fact that I was 5 in 1956. Same thing with Pat Boone. When I consider what I listened to when my kids were 5 it's surprising that those same songs are all over the top 200 number 1's and I expect they'll be all over this list as well.