First of all I am not saying that these are the greatest songs of all time. I am sure that others will find many songs that are not on these lists that they like better or to supplement my limited choices. Here I will explain how I came to choose these songs.
For many years I have selected songs I like from cds and burned some on to cds for my own use so that I could play them on my bedroom stereo at night before or until I go to sleep and to listen to them while resting on my bed. I organized these songs into five groups. Because of my efforts to bring about world peace I chose first Peace Songs, then Spiritual Songs, followed by many Love Songs, a few Funny Songs, and finally all the Other Songs I like that I call Story Songs.
In my project to share them on my website I decided to expand my experience with more popular songs. In my search for good songs I had consulted “Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” For these lists I used The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits by Joel Whitburn which listed “America’s most popular songs & artists 1955-2009,” and I listened to more songs using Apple Music. The “B40#” column on my list gives the number representing the highest rating of each song that made the billboard list. I use that year on my list for those songs and a similar number for a few songs from before 1955. The year for all other songs on my lists is when the song was released.
My lists have the song title followed by the singers’ names so that people can easily copy them and put them into a search bar in Apple Music, YouTube, or other music services. My purpose is to help people find more songs they may like. The length of each song is listed, and this may assist disk jockeys (DJs) and those who are looking for songs of a certain duration.
I am not a professional musician. I began taking piano lessons when I was seven years old and wanted to quit when I was eleven. My mother regretted that she had quit as a child, and she persuaded me to take popular music lessons for one year before stopping. That enabled me to play a swing base and such songs as “Birth of the Blues” and “Dark Town Strutters’ Ball.” The first record I ever bought was “Love Me Tender” by Elvis Presley. My older brother Tom had some 45s. My parents purchased an expensive stereo system about this time, and that introduced me to many popular songs on LP 33s such as my father’s favorite Frank Sinatra and Mom’s Dean Martin. I also enjoyed ragtime and especially liked the Mills Brothers. I got a monaural record player for my room and began buying 33s. I soon had 8 albums by the Mills Brothers and several by Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte, and the Kingston Trio which I may have discovered because Tom got my parents to buy a Limeliters album. My parents also had records by Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, and soundtracks from Broadway shows that became movies. I got the soundtracks of many great musicals such as West Side Story, The Music Man, and several by Rogers and Hammerstein, My Fair Lady and Camelot by Lerner and Loewe, and also Oliver!. I would put on a stack of records with a show at the end and then turn them over to listen to side 2. On the radio I heard Joan Baez on KPFK in Los Angeles singing when she was only 16.
When I was in high school, my clock radio would come on in the morning, and I would sometimes hear the “battle of the bands” between The Beatles and The Beach Boys. At Berkeley while in college I heard on a weekend The Beatles’ “Rubber Soul” being blasted from a dorm-room window. Two friends from New York introduced me to a tape they had of Simon & Garfunkel. Around the time I was graduating in 1967 I lived in a house with four other guys and heard the Doors first album and Bob Dylan’s greatest hits quite often. I bought my first rock-and-roll album which was The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and then bought Help!, The Magical Mystery Tour, and each new album as they came out. In compiling these lists I discovered that Ella Fitzgerald recorded “Rock It for Me” in 1938 which included the lyric “So won't you satisfy my soul with the rock and roll?” In those days they usually called it “swing.”
In the 1970s I became very active in the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA) started by John-Roger, the Mystical Traveler. They released songs by Michael Sun and Edgar Veytia who had immigrated from Honduras. I find their songs very uplifting spiritually. In June 1973 my African-American friend Henry Conyers and I produced the one-act musical God Strikes Again! for the MSIA Conference of Creativity. I directed it, and Henry starred as Hu-Man Being. Other characters included his High Self, his Basic Self, and the Jive Five of J. P. Greed, Lust Larue, Angry Temper, Dr. Fear, and Holy Man Pride. That summer the show was also presented at the Aquarian Age Fair. In compiling my list I was amazed at how many great songs I found by black singers.
In September 1981 I was arrested for the first time for civil disobedience protesting the building of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. Hundreds of men were crowded into an old gym, and we had talent shows every night. Jackson Browne was allowed to have his guitar and sang for us until he got a sore throat. In the 1980s my friend, the jazz pianist Joanne Crandall, wrote Self-Transformation through Music on music therapy. In recent years I have been working on several projects with my friend Penny Little who is a talented musician, and I have included some songs from her last three albums that can be heard on Apple Music.
My hope is that these lists will enable more people to find music that they like. I admit that I have not explored much recent music since the 1980s because I generally don’t like most of it as well as the older songs. These lists of the older songs may be useful to younger singers who want to cover some of the classic pop hits. Even Bob Dylan has recently done this.
I also have compiled lists of my Favorite Instrumental Music which is usually called classical music. With the exception of the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess and Jesus Christ Superstar I have not included songs from operas, many of which are in languages other than English. As an historian I have observed that classical music was great from the time of Vivaldi, Handel, Bach, his sons, and continued to improve up to the Haydn brothers, Boccherini, Mozart, and Beethoven who called music “the language of God.” Classical music continued to be great in the 19th century with other composers such as Hummel, Rossini, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, Johann Strauss, Tchaikovsky, and Dvořák. Yet in the 20th century this instrumental music experimented with less harmonious efforts. With popular music the trend is somewhat similar. I found few great popular songs before 1900, but the great popular songs developed from the 1920s to reach a peak in the 50s, 60s, and 70s before a similar trend occurred to experiment with different influences that I generally find less pleasant. In selecting songs I listen for good melodies, harmonies, rhythm, orchestration, and meaningful and inspiring lyrics that can be understood. Bob Marley said, “Music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”