♫ Remembering the 60s ♫: THEME FROM A SUMMER PLACE by Percy Faith (Easy Listening/Instrumental Pop)

Remember this one - THEME FROM A SUMMER PLACE by Percy Faith?
The song was actually released in 1959.

It's the longest-running #1 instrumental in the history of the Billboard Hot 100's chart.

"Theme from A Summer Place" is a song with lyrics by Mack Discant and music by Max Steiner, written for the 1959 film A Summer Place, which starred Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue. It was recorded for the film by Hugo Winterhalter. Originally known as the "Molly and Johnny Theme", the piece is not the main title theme of the film, but a love theme for the characters played by Dee and Donahue.


Percy Faith recorded the most popular version of the tune in the Columbia 30th Street Studio in New York City, which spent an at-the-time record of nine consecutive weeks at #1 on the still-young Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in early 1960. It remains the longest-running #1 instrumental in the history of the chart. It reached #2 in the UK. It hit #1 in Italy under the title "Scandalo Al Sole".

Faith won a Grammy Award for Record of the Year in 1961 for his recording. This was the first movie theme and the first instrumental to win a Record of the Year Grammy. Faith re-recorded the song twice – first, in 1969, as a female choral version, then, in 1976, as a disco version titled "Summer Place '76". In 2008, Faith's original version was ranked at #18 on Billboard's top 100 songs during the first 50 years of the Hot 100 chart.

 

The year is 1959...

The world population was 2,970,395,814.

• Cultivars of plants named after this date must be named in a modern language, not in Latin. (Jan. 1)
• Cuba: Fulgencio Batista flees Havana when the forces of Fidel Castro advance. (Jan. 1)
• CBS Radio discontinues four soap operas: Backstage Wife, Our Gal Sunday, The Road of Life, and This is Nora Drake. (Jan. 2)
• Castro's troops approach Havana. (Jan. 2)
• The Soviet Union successfully launches the Luna 1 spacecraft from Baikonur Cosmodrome. (Jan. 2)
• The island of Addu in the Maldives declares independence. (Jan. 3)
• Alaska is admitted as the 49th U.S. state. (Jan. 3)
• In Cuba, rebel troops led by Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos enter the city of Havana. (Jan. 4)
• In Léopoldville, at least 49 people are killed during clashes between the police and participants of a meeting of the Abako Party. (Jan. 4)

And these are just a few of the things that happened that year. Some of the movies released in 1959:

• 4D Man, starring Robert Lansing and Lee Meriwether
• The 30 Foot Bride of Candy Rock, starring Lou Costello and Dorothy Provine
• The 39 Steps, starring Kenneth More - (Britain)
• The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups), directed by François Truffaut, starring Jean-Pierre Léaud - (France)
• The Adventures of Buratino (Priklyucheniya Buratino) - (USSR)
• Al Capone, starring Rod Steiger
• Alias Jesse James, starring Bob Hope