Number of weeks? 2
What else was going on? Cambodia obtains independence,
Download Answer Me
from amazon.com
from amazon.com
With due apologies for the delay in posting, we jump right back in to one of the more surreal number 1 battles of the chart's history. For 9 weeks, David Whitfield and Frankie Laine battled it out for the top spot with two versions of the same song. That song, Answer Me started out life as a German song entitled Mutterlein. After complaints about the song's protagonist invoking the name of God to pine after a lost lover, Laine and Whitfield rerecorded the track and romanticised the lyrics, turning it into a more palatable pop song.
I say more palatable. I'm deliberately refraining from listening to Frankie Laine's version until I review that so as not to have my perception unduly coloured. But Whitfield's version is... well it's pretty terrible. It's very standard pop-operatics which asks for the return of a lost lover. Whitfield's voice isn't particularly strong and the whole thing comes off as unbearably whiny. I'm almost glad that she left him. But then he might not have recorded this song, so perhaps that's unfair. To these ears, at any rate, I'm amazed the song reached number 1, so I'm hoping Laine's version can rescue it for me.
The song will unfortunately go down in history as the first occasion when an artist was knocked off the number one spot with the same song. Whitfield's place in chart lore is also secure by virtue of the fact that in its second sojourn at the top, Answer Me was tied for the number one spot with Frankie's version. That means that the song tied itself for the number one spot. As the sample sizes that that the charts drew their statistics from increased, these kinds of ties became more and more infrequent (although we'll see three more tied number 1s in the fifties alone).
What happened next? We will meet Whitfield again in the summer of the following year where he returned to the top spot. His chart career lasted until 1958 by which point he had racked up 12 top 20 hits.
