Rant #1,380: Bubbling Under Has Bubbled Over

My pursuit for music is over ... at least for now.

The project that I have been working on for months has finally concluded.

I finally have every Bubbling Under tune from 1964 to 1971 in MP3 format.

Or at least I think I do.

Due to the generosity of a lot of people, I seem to have everything, more than 2,000 songs that graced Billboard's Bubbling Under chart during those great musical years of 1964-1971, when the music really meant something.

Anyway, listening to some of the music I now have in my possession, a few of the tunes are kind of suspect.

That does not mean that the sender sent me such tunes on purpose, but the songs may have been mislabeled or simply weren't the songs they were supposed to be.

One of the tunes appears to be a live version of a song that wasn't done live on the original disk.

However, I am not complaining one bit.

I can live with these little nuisances, and for all intents and purposes, I am done and finished with this little personal project that has had me going for nearly a year.

It has allowed me to experience some music that I knew about, but a lot that I didn't.

In those years, rock was the dominant musical genre on the Hot 100 charts, and a lot of stuff in other genres kind of got lost in the fog because they couldn't crack that main chart.

So, in this collection I have amassed, there are a multitude of rhythm and blues and country hits that I might have never heard if it wasn't for this project.

Tunes by Eddy Arnold and the Sweet Inspirations, for instance--artists that had some success on the Hot 100 chart--appear frequently in this collection.

I am not saying all of the music is good--some of it is downright dreadful, and I am amazed that it even made the Bubbling Under chart--but some of the music is really, really good. You have to wonder how some of these tunes weren't legitimate hits.

But they weren't, for whatever reason, but they managed to have enough gusto to at least make this chart.

So I am done. What next?

I was thinking about simply taking a year from 1964-1971, and chronicling it with every song that charted that year, whether it is a Hot 100 song or a Bubbling Under song.

I already have the Bubbling Under material, and I know I have a lot of the Hot 100 material.

But you can bet that there are some songs, songs that charted lower down on the Hot 100 chart, that I probably don't have and will have to search for.

But right now, I am sitting tight, and not going to put myself through that type of project, at least not yet.

So thanks to all who helped me get this thing all wrapped up.

It has been a lot of fun, a real ear opener if you will, forcing me to listen to some music that I didn't even know existed.

And it has been a nice way to while away the time, too, whether finding these things or listening to them.

Fun, fun, fun!