Shaft, baby! Can you dig it? 
Went with “Family Affair” as I just love me that 70’s funk groove. Had it reached #1, I probably would vote for Backstabbers in 1972, but I’m going to have to figure out how to get Gamble and Huff a vote some other way. Perhaps “Love Train” (not a big fan of “Me and Mrs. Jones”, though I like it more now than when I was 7.)
The song that came a VERY close #2 was “It’s Too Late” by Carole King, which is the earliest song I distinctly remember hearing - I was 4yo, in somebody’s apartment and the song came on the radio. I was struck with how plaintive it sounded (though my 4yo self would’ve thought it “sad”) It was the lyric “still I’m glad for what we had, and that I once loved you” that caught my attention.
I pestered somebody (my father?) to buy me the record, which he/they never did. Which was fine because had I been allowed to play it over and over and over again, I likely would have lost the memory.
Here are some other possibilities not mentioned in this thread (or I glossed over them - if so, sorry!)
- Billboard changed the way they tracked the top-40 constantly. For example, look at this list of songs which spent the longest time @ #1:
Anybody, uh, notice a trend? 
If you didn’t, note that every single song, except one, was released after 1991. This isn’t because “people stopped buying music” or whatever theory one wants to come up with, it’s because Billboard changed their “chartology” (to coin a word) in 1991, which resulted in longer-running #1 singles. Essentially, they started using Nielson ratings (technically SoundScan ratings, supplied by AC Nielson.)
This wasn’t the first time they did this, and their habit of changing the formula and means of tabulation meant that, over time, we’re not really comparing apples to apples. Now I can’t vouch one way or another that a similar change occurred sometime in the late 1960’s/early 1970’s, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.
Here is an article talking about changes made to the rankings in 2012. I also believe (could be wrong) that this year they are also including YouTube views in how they calculate their rankings. ETA: (Looking it up, it was actually last year.)
(Looking further at that Wiki entry, they have a category, “Most weeks in top-10 after debuting in top-10” that, frankly could not exist pre-1991. I think by that time there may have been 5 songs that had top-10 debuts… and I might be generous in that estimate.)
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As mentioned by Enter the Flagon, harder “rock” began moving to FM in the late 1960s… and these stations might not have been monitored by Billboard.
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And to tie the above together, prior to 1991 Billboard depended upon manual reports from radio stations themselves to compile these lists… and if the radio stations didn’t send BB a report, their songs didn’t get reported. And, really, it’s not hard imagining that a lot of early 1970’s AOR stations declining to send “the man” a report of what songs they were playing.
Another thing that occurred, which may or may not have anything to do with the change of music styles, is many stations stopped listing popular songs once the record companies stopped promoting it. So while a song might have still been popular, if the station wasn’t receiving kickbacks, er, promotional material from Capital Records for that group/album/song, they would not put it on their manually-submitted Billboard list as it would do them no good to do so.
“Me and Bobby McGee” gets my vote, with “Joy to the World” a very close second.
There were several I never heard of . . . or forgot.
Several songs I liked a lot, few I loved.
I cheated and voted for “Reason to Believe,” one of Rod Stewart’s best songs, but a B-side and not a real #1 hit.
I hate Rod Stewart…but I’m a sucker for good lyrics. Had to give it to Maggie.
“Me and Bobby McGee”, because Janis.
I tried not to give too much weight to her death, but failed. So it goes.
RIP, Janis.
Regards,
Shodan
They didn’t. There may have been some slight changes here and there during the 60s and 70s but nothing compared to the SoundScan innovation of 1991.
What happened was that the world changed. Simply put, there was less competition in the 1950s. Elvis could regularly top the charts for weeks on end, and so could others who grew popular. The number of big influential radio stations was also smaller and they would play popular hits to death. Can’t underestimate the power of payola, either, in ensuring that some songs would be favored over others.
Post-Beatles, every tiny record label in America started rushing out singles in the hopes of getting that big break. New stations sprang up and started competing for being the hot new place to hear the hottest newest songs. (No official payola, either, although let’s not be naive.) It became easier for local hits to move nationally. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of clubs started and bands started regular touring. Every week was like the introduction of a new iPhone. You had to keep up or not be with it.
That frenetic competition eased starting in the 1970s, not because there was less music but because there was so much that the music world split into factions. You had Top 40 and AOR (Album oriented rock). Then came easy listening or adult contemporary. Urban stations played varieties of black music and those split into segments as well. Country staged a huge comeback and artists who had been on the pop charts didn’t cross over as often. Billboard tracked radio plays as well as sales, but as artists appeared on a smaller percentage of stations, they found it harder to win the overall Hot 100.
By 1991, radio plays outweighed actual sales figures, which were widely seen as bad data at best and fraudulent at worst. Everything changed, and we really shouldn’t even try to compare the earlier charts to the later ones. But nothing like that immediate and obvious change happened in the era we’re discussing. It’s all a symptom of the music world fracturing.
Actually, Reason to Believe was the A-side at first - it wasn’t until Maggie May started getting more airplay that the label republished the single with it as the A-side instead. Since both songs were getting airplay, though, they became co-#1s by dint of Billboard’s policy at the time.
We’re probably way ahead of ourselves here, but I have to ask: did the charts ever account for MTV airplay? I ask because I recently got a subscription to Billboard and was surprised to see how many videos MTV would play to death that would peak at like #81 or not even chart at all during the 80s and 90s. Yet arguably, these songs ended up having a rather large effect on the popular culture and musical trends.
When he was the vocalist for Jeff Beck there were some great cuts. “Blues DeLuxe” is one of the better blues/rock songs I’ve heard. Nicky Hopkins piano work on this one is fabulous as well.
That was certainly my experience. Excepting the leftovers from 1970, I remember only hearing about three of these songs on the radio in 1971, because at 17 I’d pretty much stopped listening to the radio on my own. I can tell you when I bought Sweet Baby James, or when a friend played Aqualung for me, or when I borrowed Deja Vu off another friend, or the party I was at where we listened to Tea for the Tillerman, just to name a few. But with the exception of “Joy to the World” and “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” there’s not a song on this list that I identify with 1971. All the songs glued to my memory from that year - and there were a lot of them - were songs I heard off albums.
Ugh, Me & Bobby McGee. I can taste the loogie in Janis’ throat every time she says “McGee”.
The Singing Brillo Pad Strikes Again! was the title of my high school newspaper’s review of a Rod Stewart album.
I always imagined that if a cockroach could sing, it would sound like Rod.
I’m a huge rock fan, but Carole King’s Tapestry album is a masterpiece.
“I Feel the Earth Move” is wonderful, but there’s something personal and melancholy about “It’s Too Late.” I’ve loved that song before I even knew who wrote it or sang it.
This cuts to the bone for me.
AFAIK, no. Not in the 80s, at any rate. That was outside their box.
I just heard this song a few minutes ago on an oldies station (which I thought were extinct). It has more of a 70s feel than I remember–musically it’s basically a cheap knockoff of the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back.”
I picked Bobby McGee. I thought Brown Sugar would be the breakaway winner. I’m surprised it didn’t get more votes than it did, but there are a lot of other great tunes here.
tuff one i voted for uncle albert