10 Songs That Changed Music Forever

10. Tommy Dorsey And His Orchestra - I’ll Never Smile Again (1940)

Having just replaced singer Jack Leonard with a twenty-four-year-old Frank Sinatra, Tommy Dorsey’s fortunes began to soar. The bandleader immediately saw Sinatra’s potential, recording forty songs with him in their first year together.

One of them was this beautifully melancholy Ruth Lowe number, written following the tragic death of her beloved husband. Lowe had the sense to aim for a more universal experience by recasting her grief as the heartbreak caused by the end of an affair, and her song became the record that catapulted Sinatra to stardom.

But it’s not just the leg-up it gave to a legend’s career that earns the tune its place on this list. ‘I’ll Never Smile Again’ was the first ever number one single on Billboard’s first ever National List of Best Selling Retail Records (which was the world’s first official national music chart), hitting the top spot on July 27th 1940 and staying there the next twelve weeks.

As a result, Sinatra himself also became the world’s first genuine pop star, his live shows swamped with screaming, adoring adolescents. He wasn’t the first teen idol - Franz Liszt and Rudy Vallée had their day years before Frank - but his success coincided with the birth of what we recognise today as the record industry.

This nascent business soon twigged that the spending power and uncontrolled passion of these ‘bobbysoxers’ made them the perfect target audience... leading to the birth of pop music.