1960s & 1970s USA Hit Parade: Joel Whitburn 1939-2022

Joel Whitburn, tireless researcher of music charts, dies at 82

His numerous books delved deeply into the Billboard charts, developing what an admirer called “the de facto history of recorded music.”

By Richard Sandomir & Jim Higgins at jim.higgins@jrn.com

17 June 2022

Joel Whitburn, who relentlessly mined Billboard’s music charts to fill reference books that tell the statistical stories of pop, rock, country, R&B, hip-hop and dance hits since 1940, died on Tuesday, 14 June 2022, at his home in Menomonee Falls, Wis. He was 82.

His death was confirmed by Paul Haney, a friend, researcher and editor at Record Research, Mr. Whitburn’s publishing company. He "passed away peacefully overnight" on 14 June 2022, following serious recent health issues.

Mr. Whitburn was a music lover whose personal collection — meticulously curated in his basement and, later, in a vault — totals more than 200,000 records, including every single ever to make a Billboard chart.

“I go in that library alone — all these records — and it’s like they’re all my old friends,” he said in an interview with The Minneapolis Star Tribune in 1986.

Mr. Whitburn published nearly 300 books (counting updated editions), most of them highly detailed chart histories of hit records and albums. He started cataloging records on index cards and turned that project into his first volume, “Top Pop Singles,” published in 1970. Computers came much later.

Disc jockeys and record collectors were among his first customers. But his books also became important additions to other music fans’ libraries. Nearly all used Billboard charts, but Mr. Whitburn also dug into those that were published by the trade magazines Cash Box, Record World and Radio & Records.

“I’m just a huge music fan, and I love the charts,” Mr. Whitburn once said. “I enjoy following artists’ success. There’s just a joy in that.”Credit...Adam Ryan Morris, for Milwaukee Magazine.

“He had a profound impact on the music industry as a whole,” Silvio Pietroluongo, Billboard’s senior vice president of charts and data development, said in a phone interview. “He was the first person to catalog the history of charted music, and by doing so it became the de facto history of recorded music.”

He added, “Joel’s chronicling of the Hot 100 gave it a significant stamp of approval nationally.”

His books, with generic titles and alphabetical listings by artist or group, covered vast musical territory: “Top R&B Singles, 1942-2016,” “Hit Country Records, 1954-1982,” “Across the Charts: The Sixties.”

The ninth edition of “The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits” (2010) listed 52 Beatles songs, with the dates each song entered the Top 40, from the first (“I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “I Saw Her Standing There” on Jan. 25, 1964) to the last (“Real Love,” made by the surviving Beatles from demos cut by John Lennon, on March 23, 1996); their peak chart positions; how long the songs stayed on the chart; how long they remained in the No. 1, No. 2 or No. 3 spot; informational nuggets (like the fact that “Please Please Me,” the band’s fourth Top 40 hit, was recorded in 1962); and the record label (usually Capitol, later Apple, but also a few others in the early days).

Here's an example of the clout of pop music chart historian Joel Whitburn. When he met Elton John, Whitburn told a Billboard podcast interviewer in 2016, he tried to give the famous singer one of his books.

“Oh, I got all your stuff, Joel,” Sir Elton replied.

He also published books containing a given decade’s worth of charts.

In his review of “Top Pop Singles, 1955-2006” (2007), the Los Angeles Times pop music critic Robert Hilburn noted that Mr. Whitburn augmented his updates to the book with new elements. “This time,” he wrote, “he borrows a page from baseball batting averages and assigns a ‘hit average’ to recording artists.”

Mr. Whitburn explained his fascination with Billboard’s charts — and the reason for his venture’s success — in an interview with that magazine in 2014.

“I’m just a huge music fan, and I love the charts,” he said. “I enjoy following artists’ success. There’s just a joy in that. It’s a weekly thrill. And there are millions more like me all over the world.”

Joel Carver Whitburn was born on 29 November 1939, in Wauwatosa, Wis. His father, Russell, worked for a local electrical company. His mother, Ruth (Bird) Whitburn, was a homemaker.

Joel was already a music lover when, at age 12, he saw copies of Billboard for sale at a bus station in Milwaukee. His mother gave him a quarter to buy it, and while reading it at home he was gobsmacked by the information it offered.

“All of a sudden, I knew what the No. 1 song in the nation was,” he said in an interview in 2009 with the music journalist Larry LeBlanc for the entertainment website CelebrityAccess. “I had no idea that there was a chart that told you that information.”

He later became a subscriber, and he held on to every issue.

Mr. Whitburn attended Elmhurst College (now University) in Illinois and the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, but did not graduate. He worked at several jobs before he was hired to represent RCA Records, having told a company distributor in Milwaukee how much he loved music. He was told of a new venture featuring eight-track tapes and got a job setting up eight-track departments at stores in Wisconsin and Illinois. While working for RCA, he met artists like Chet Atkins and Charley Pride.

Whitburn grew up in Menomonee Falls, turned his passion for music and fascination with the Billboard charts into a research and publishing behemoth that served music industry professionals and fans alike with books of organized data and trivia. If you wanted to know how many hits Elton John, Elvis Presley, or The Beatlesi ever had, Whitburn was your guy.

"I was at the perfect age, 14 or 15, when rock and roll broke," he told interviewer Larry LeBlanc in a 2009 interview, describing his youthful passion for music. "I was able to go down once a week and buy a record. I had to make that awful decision of what record do I buy this week, and what records do I leave out until next week."

Whitburn began reading Billboard, the music and entertainment industry trade magazine. In particular, he was fascinated with Billboard's weekly charts of the most popular records.

Decades before the internet, spreadsheets and personal computers, Whitburn kept track of each week's top recordings. When Billboard launched its Hot 100 chart in 1958, he began logging detailed info about every listed song on 3-by-5-inch index cards.

Working in record distribution for RCA in the 1960s, Whitburn impressed radio staffers with the information he had. "They all said it would be a godsend to have that information at their fingertips, because there was nothing available,” he told Billboard in an interview.

Seeing the opportunity, he quit his RCA job, founded Record Research in Menomonee Falls, and published his first book "Top Pop Records," in 1970. That book evolved into "Top Pop Singles," the flagship publication of Record Research, Haney said.

By then he was deep into his Billboard research as a hobby, using stacks of the magazines that he had collected since 1954. He focused his work on the Hot 100 chart, which began in 1958, jotting down artists’ names and record information on index cards.

“The first card I wrote up,” he told Mr. LeBlanc, was ‘Nelson, Ricky, “Poor Little Fool.”’ That was the first No. 1 song on the first Hot 100.”

When the first edition of “Top Pop Singles” was completed in 1970, he took out a tiny advertisement in Billboard that promised buyers a history of the Hot 100. Hal Cook, the magazine’s publisher, spotted the ad and called Mr. Whitburn.

“You can’t be using the Hot 100 in an ad,” Mr. Whitburn, in the 2014 interview, recalled Mr. Cook telling him. “Not without our permission.” Rather than threaten Mr. Whitburn with a lawsuit, Mr. Cook asked to see the book.

Two weeks later, Mr. Whitburn said, Mr. Cook called. “He said: ‘Joel, we got the book. It’s amazing. We love it.’” And he conceded that Billboard’s attempts to develop a similar book had failed. He paid for Mr. Whitburn and his wife, Fran, to come to Los Angeles.

After three days, Mr. Whitburn returned home with a 26-page licensing agreement that gave him the exclusive right to use the Billboard charts in his books, in return for royalties he would pay Billboard.

With that permission, Mr. Whitburn built an empire of music research unlike any other.

Mr. Whitburn’s books “had a profound impact on the music industry as a whole,” an executive of Billboard magazine said. “Joel’s chronicling of the Hot 100 gave it a significant stamp of approval nationally.”Credit...Adam Ryan Morris, for Milwaukee Magazine.

He is survived by his wife, Frances (Mudgett) Whitburn; his daughter, Kim Bloxdorf, a vice president at Record Research; his sisters, Joyce Riehl and Julie Rae Niermeyer; his brothers, Charles and David; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

The veteran disc jockey Scott Shannon, currently heard on WCBS-FM in New York, said he bought his first copy of “Top Pop Singles” when he was working at a radio station in Mobile, Ala., in the early 1970s. He has bought some of the updated editions since, keeping one copy at the station and one at home.

“There was no other place to go for information about artists, and I wanted to be the authority on the music we were playing at the time,” Mr. Shannon said in a phone interview. “If you use it properly, you sound smarter than you are to the listener and sharper than the next jock.”

He was no one-hit wonder. Counting successive editions of works such as "Top Pop Singles," Whitburn and Record Research are believed to have published nearly 300 books. Whitburn also tapped his chart knowledge to produce some 150 "Billboard Top Hits" compilation CDs for Rhino Records.

His careful compilation of chart data made his work go-to references — and stymied charlatans.

"His accurate reporting also made it more difficult for publicists and labels to credibly fudge the chart achievements of their artists, a notoriously common practice in the early 1970s," Andrew Unterberger wrote in a Billboard obituary article.

Whitburn's personal music collection, stored at his home, added up to 200,000 singles, albums and CDs, Haney confirmed. That collection includes every record ever listed in the Billboard Hot 100, and every record listed in rival and defunct charts.

In a 2014 interview with the Journal Sentinel, he said that he used his collection as a primary source of accurate information on things like label names and B-sides.

At 6 feet 6 inches tall, Whitburn played basketball for Menomonee Falls High School as well as Elmhurt College in Illinois. Whitburn was inducted into the Menomonee Falls High School Fine Arts Hall of Fame in 2015. He was also a voting member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Whitburn's daughter Kim Bloxdorf, a vice president at Record Research, will continue running the company. Haney, an editor and researcher there for 30 years, and Brent Olynick, who's worked there for more than four decades, will assist her, Haney said.

Whitburn was an easy boss who trusted employees to get the job done, Haney said. But he was also passionate about detail and a stickler for accuracy. "If I didn't get something exactly correct, I would hear about it," Haney added.

Some of Haney's favorite memories are of sitting in Whitburn's office for half an hour or hour, talking about charts and music. "He was really like a father figure to me," he said.

Whitburn's survivors include his wife of 58 years, Frances; his daughter Kim; his sisters, Joyce Riehl and Julie Rae Niermeyer; his brothers, Charles and David; two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Visitation will begin at 1 p.m. June 24 at Northbrook Church, 4014 WI-167, Richfield, with service at 3 p.m. Contact Jim Higgins at jim.higgins@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @jhiggy.

Richard Sandomir is an obituaries writer. He previously wrote about sports media and sports business. He is also the author of several books, including “The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper and the Making of a Classic.” @RichSandomir; A version of this article appears in print on 19 June 2022, Section A, Page 23 of the New York Times.