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Songs of the century
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THE ballots are in, and the top song of the 20th century is "Over the Rainbow," according to a poll released on Wednesday by a music-industry trade group.
The 1939 ballad, first sung by Judy Garland in the movie "The Wizard of Oz" topped a list of 365 Songs of the Century compiled by the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Rounding out the top five: "White Christmas" by Bing Crosby; "This Land Is Your Land" by Woody Guthrie; "Respect" by Aretha Franklin; and "American Pie" by Don McLean.
The list includes a wide selection of pop, rock, jazz, country and patriotic songs from all decades, with the 1950s and 1960s especially well-represented. "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugar Hill Gang is the highest-ranked rap song, at No 162.
Bob George, director of the Archive of Contemporary Music, a nonprofit popular-music library in New York, said all best-of lists were inherently subjective but more recent pop-music genres such as electronic dance music, punk rock and rap were given short shrift.
"These are songs a lot of people would recognize if they were white, middle-class and old," George said.
The two organizations released the list to highlight a new music-history-education project that will be introduced to 10,000 fifth-grade teachers next fall. The curriculum will be developed by Scholastic Inc, and songs will be streamed digitally to school computers by the AOL+School service of AOL Time Warner Inc.
(SD-Agencies)
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