Judy Garland singing Over the
Rainbow and Bing Crosby dreaming of a White Christmas top the 365
“Songs of the Century” announced by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording
Industry Association of America.

The list is
designed as a way for schools to teach the appreciation of how music is
developed, they said in a joint statement. An NEA official said the songs could
also open a window on social and economic conditions of the times when they
appeared. They are almost all American popular songs.

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.

This
Land Is Your Land was written as Guthrie’s retort to Irving Berlin’s God
Bless America, ranked 19th.

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.

The top 20 also cover a
wide variety of copositions. Among them are Mack the Knife from Kurt
Weill’s Threepenny Opera, Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer, the
entire score of Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein’s musical West Side
Story and John Philip Sousa’s march The Stars and Stripes Forever,
played by his band.

Sousa did not conduct his band for recordings, by the
way, disdaining recordings as “canned music” — a phrase he
coined.

The list was compiled from “about 200″ ballots filled out
by musicians, critics, industry professionals, elected officials, and amateur
music fans, RIAA spokeswoman Amy Weiss said. Voters chose from a list of 1,100
songs selected for popularity and historical significance.

“We wanted
a broad cross-section of people who cared about music,” Weiss
said.

Weiss said the RIAA sent out about 1,300 ballots and around 200
were returned.

“American music has touched everyone’s lives throughout
its short history,” said Hilary Rosen, president of the recording group.
“It’s the perfect educational tool.”

“This project demonstrates that the
recording industry takes seriously its role as a caretaker of our nation’s
cultural heritage,” said NEA Chairman Bill Ivey.

Not everyone was
impressed by the selections.

Bob George, director of the Archive of
Contemporary Music, a nonprofit popular-music library in New York, said 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. “It’s a great
list for people who go to baseball games.”

An informal survey of
CBSNews.com producers, not all of whom are “white, middle-class and
old,” also found surprise and dismay at the choices on the list!

The
past year has seen a spate of best-of music lists. Yesterday by the
Beatles topped two separate best-song lists: one by Rolling Stone
magazine and MTV, another by England’s BBC Radio 2. Music-video channel
VH1 picked (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones as
its No. 1 song. MTV and VHI are owned by Viacom, the parent
company of CBSNews.com.

The RIAA list ranked Yesterday 56th
and Satisfaction 16th.
(from CBS NEWS http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/03/08/entertainment/main277218.shtml)