101 Years of Music

When my great-grandmother passed away in 2015, I wanted to do something to commemorate her extraordinary life. She was born during WWI and was 14 at the start of the Great Depression. She was 24-30 years old during WWII. She was 84 when I was born and on the 29th of January 2015, she turned 100. She saw it all.

This got me thinking about unique ways that I could tell her life story. I love words, but they didn’t seem to be enough to express my love for Great Grammy.

The idea slapped me in the face: What if I could find the #1 hit song from every year between 1915 and 2015, and put them all in a playlist together?

I spent hours finding and writing down the names and artists of those 100 songs. There were songs about love, about pain, about loss and about hope. There were deep songs and light ones. Songs I loved and songs I didn’t like at all.

Today, I finally put each of them in a playlist, including the #1 hit from 2016.

That’s 101 years of music.

I wasn’t able to find the original hit versions of some of the earlier songs, but some version of each one made it onto this list.

Merry Christmas– 11 days early.