Book overview
And the Hits Just Keep on Comin' spans twenty-two years of popular music history from 1955 through 1976. It is a fusion of definitive statistics and commentary from Pete Berry, a radio personality also known as "The Flying Dutchman." Complementing the text, a detailed discography of the leading artists and their greatest hits, their million sellers, and their gold and platinum albums makes this volume a musical "world book of records."
Berry opens with Bill Haley's famous "rimshot" that rocked the world in the mid-fifties, then works his way into the mid-seventies, an age whose idiosyncrasies have given birth to the widest variety of musical tastes in history. Each chapter is a graphic look at an individual year of American musical taste--each fifty-two-week interval unravels its own story. To simplify the statistics, Berry presents annual charts of the top fifty songs, the week-by-week number-one songs, the most significant artists, and the Grammy and Oscar winners. He supplies facts that the average record buyer or collector previously has been unable to obtain except at great expense or through extensive research.
Berry's sources include his own year-by-year records that, as a professional disc jockey, he has kept for the last twenty-two years, information supplied by such organizations as the Recording Industry Association of America and data gleaned from record companies. An illustration section includes many of the most famous performers and groups.
And the Hits Just Keep on Comin' will undoubtedly become an invaluable tool for the settlements of wagers as to the who, when, and where of popular music, and more than likely it will bring memories that are forever frozen in the lyrics and harmonies of the popular song.
