Past Archive

Most Successful Songwriters: 1890-2008 and 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s

By Dan Zambonini, June 5, 2010, 9:34 pm in History, Music, Past

Most successful Billboard songwriters from 1890-2008

The Whitburn Project is an informal group that collects data about all songs in the Billboard chart, and has amassed a huge amount of information from 1890 onwards. The data is a little inconsistent (due to the nature of mass collaboration) and isn’t 100% complete, but it still allows for some interesting analysis.

Here we present the most successful songwriters of all time and per decade (from the 60s onwards), according to this data. Note that inconsistencies may result in some songwriters having their data split across multiple spellings of their name, e.g. Timbaland may appear as both Tim Mosley and T.V. Mosley in the 2000s chart.

Most successful Billboard songwriters from the 1960s

Most successful Billboard songwriters from the 1970s

Most successful Billboard songwriters from the 1980s

Most successful Billboard songwriters from the 1990s

Most successful Billboard songwriters from the 2000s (to 2008)

Source Data

Song Writer Writing Credits
1890-2008
Babyface 94
Gerry Goffin 96
Eddie Holland Jr. 97
Carole King 99
Brian Holland 102
Lamont Dozier 105
Burt Bacharach 105
Hal David 111
John Lennon 127
Paul McCartney 141
1960s
William “Smokey” Robinson 61
Carole King 67
Eddie Holland Jr. 73
Lamont Dozier 74
Brian Holland 74
Burt Bacharach 76
Gerry Goffin 76
Hal David 79
John Lennon 86
Paul McCartney 86
1970s
Brian Holland 28
Neil Diamond 28
Robin Gibb 28
James Brown 31
Lamont Dozier 31
Carole King 32
Norman Whitfield 34
John Lennon 38
Barry Gibb 39
Kenny Gamble 47
Leon Huff 48
Paul McCartney 52
1980s
B.Springsteen 14
B.Taupin 15
H.Knight 15
J.Vallance 15
D.Child 17
Babyface 18
D.Warren 19
*Prince Symbol* 20
D.Foster 22
J.Harris III 26
T.Lewis 27
1990s
Madonna 21
L.A.Reid 21
R.Kelly 21
D.Simmons 25
T.Riley 26
*Prince Symbol* 26
J.Harris III 45
T.Lewis 45
D.Warren 47
Babyface 69
2000s
A.Thiam 17
Jermaine Dupri 17
Marshall Mathers 17
S.Smith 19
T.E.Hermansen 19
J.Dupri 20
T.V.Mosley 25
S.Garrett 26
Tim Mosley 28
Pharrell Williams 28
Chad Hugo 35
R. Kelly 37
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Do Full Moons Cause People to Become More Violent?

By Amy Thibodeau, June 1, 2010, 11:15 pm in Past, Psychology

The werewolf myth is one that has become iconic in popular culture. There are dozens (at least) of films about the full moon turning human beings into monsters from An American Werewolf in Paris to the classic from the 1950s, The Curse of the Werewolf. The legend of the werewolf can be traced back deep into literature and myth from around the world. In The Metamorphoses, Ovid writes of King Lycaon who is changed into a werewolf by the gods after eating tainted meat.

Although there is some evidence to suggest that full moons might cause changes in human behaviour, it is mostly anecdotal and too sporadic to be considered factual. For example, in 1978 a study called Human Aggression and the Lunar Synodic Cycle found that in “11,613 cases of aggravated assault in a 5-year period: assaults occurred more often around the full moon.” (source)

More recently, in 2007, Sussex police announced that they found a correlation between the incidence of violence among drinkers in the seaside town of Brighton.

“I compared a graph of full moons and a graph of last year’s violent crimes and there is a trend,” Inspector Andy Parr told the Brighton Argus newspaper. “People tend to be more aggressive generally. I would be interested in approaching the universities and seeing if any of their post-graduates would be interested in looking into it further. This could be helpful to us.” (source)

It should be noted that “in separate findings,  [the Brighton] police also found that violence in pubs and nightclubs increased on paydays.”

Image: Full Crow Moon by Dave

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The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: Another Look at Unethical Medicine

By Amy Thibodeau, May 31, 2010, 10:41 pm in Medicine, Past

Tuskegee is a small city in Alabama, which has played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement. It still houses Tuskegee University, which began as the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers founded in 1881 by Booker T. Washington; it is also where Rosa Parks was born. Sadly, it is also the location of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

According to Tuskegee University, it all began in the 1920s when a Chicago-based charity approached the government via the Public Health Service (PHS) with some ideas for improving the health of African Americans. The PHS had a special interest in addressing Syphilis as they’d recently completed a study that showed that upwards of 25% of a 2,000 person sample were afflicted with it.

Although the study may have began with good intentions, it shifted from being about helping those afflicted with the disease to becoming a study about the effects of untreated Syphilis on live patients.

the time of the project, African Americans had almost no access to medical care. For many participants, the examination by the PHS physician was the first health examination they had ever received. Along with free health examinations, food and transportation were supplied to participants. Thus, it was not difficult to recruit African American men as participants in the study. Burial stipends were used to get permission from family members to perform autopsies on study participants. (source)

You can imagine where they went with this. With a captive audience of living subjects at their disposal, the PHS made the horrifying decision that in order to study the disease in living patients they would not disclose the illness and instead would watch as patients slowly deteriorated and eventually died from it. In some cases, they even prevented subjects from receiving treatment from other sources: “During World War II, about 50 of the study subjects were ordered by their draft boards to undergo treatment for syphilis. The PHS requested that the draft boards exclude study subjects from the requirement for treatment. The draft boards agreed.” (source)

Unbelievably, this study continued until the late 1970s. When the director of the PHS department responsible for the study between 1943 and 1948 was interviewed in 1981 he admitted, “The men’s status did not warrant ethical debate. They were subjects, not patients; clinical material, not sick people.” (source)

Further reading: Henrietta Lacks and the Tragic Story of Medical Ethics, Racial Politics and Health Care Reform in America.

Image: Disease by Erik Starck

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Why are the East of Cities usually Poorer?

By Dan Zambonini, May 31, 2010, 1:10 am in Architecture, Culture, History, Past

Smoke / Pollution

Many older cities rapidly expanded during the Industrial Revolution, as workers flocked to the urban centers. As the towns and cities expanded, the residential areas for the workers tended to be in the east, with the middle and upper-classes in the west.

The reason for this is that in much of the northern hemisphere, the prevailing winds are westerlies – blowing from west to east. The massive, unchecked pollution from these early industries would therefore drift eastward, making the air quality much lower in the east end of cities, lowering the desirability (and price) of the housing. Middle classes preferred the cleaner west ends.

The issue was probably even pre-Industrial Revolution, as smoke from personal chimneys would still have caused problems to the east.

In many cities, this will have been compounded – or confused – by the direction of the main river in the environment, which would have been relied on for many uses, including sewerage. London, as an example, displays a massive east/west divide, caused in large part by both early industry and the west-to-east flow of the River Thames.

Smoke image under Creative Commons license, by Flickr user Señor Codo

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Noah Webster – ‘Father’ of the American Copyright System

By Amy Thibodeau, May 14, 2010, 7:47 pm in Culture, Language, Past

Noah Webster is best known for his role in cementing a distinct American culture through his changes to English language conventions and spelling following the American Revolution. Webster believed in that in order to prosper as an independent nation, America needed to embrace a culture distinct from its British colonial roots. He set about contributing to this by adapting the spelling of common words and including around 12,000 new words into his dictionary, which is now the standard in use across the USA. Major grammar and spelling changes attributed to Webster include changing most words with an -our ending in British spelling (i.e. honour) to an -or spelling in America (i.e. honor); he also changed most -ise word endings (i.e. apologise) to have -ize endings (i.e. apologize).

Although Webster borrowed liberally from the popular British-convention dictionaries of his time, once he had created and published his own opus, he wanted to protect his intellectual property. Webster was mainly concerned with publishers who, at the time, were permitted to reprint entire books without seeking the permission of the author and without providing them with any compensation.

In the 1700s the Federal government of the United States did not hold a lot of oversight over laws in the various states and the area of copyright was no exception. As such, when he began campaigning for copyright protection for his books, he was told he would have to seek protection in each independent state. In large part, due to his campaigning, under the new American constitution passed in 1789, the Federal government was granted greater oversight over the states, which enabled it to pass the first Federal copyright act one year later.

Webster continued to work for better copyright legislation for the rest of his life. His efforts were rewarded in the 1830-1831 congressional session … [when] the new law granted protection of the author or his heirs for 28 years, with the right of renewal for another 14 years. (source)

This new law remained in effect until 1909, long after Webster’s death.

Unlike current copyright legislation, which tends to be driven by big industry and is often enacted against the individual, Webster’s vision of copyright was one that protected artists against the publishing industry, which sought to profit off their work without compensating them. Webster’s law does not address or consider punishing individuals who seek to share and use intellectual property for non-profit purposes. As one source notes, Webster “might with more justice be termed the “father of royalties,” as he was one of the first to exact payment from his publishers according to the number of books they printed or that he licensed to them.” (source)

I wonder how Webster would feel about the various copyright battles being fought around the world today?

Image Credit: Noah Webster engraving via Wikipedia Commons

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