A Chart Oddity?

Do you mean 1972? That would be a real oddity if you really meant 1992. I don't think Cashbox was even around in the '90s.

Oh, yeah, I've seen that before. It's well known that, in its latter days at least, Cash Box was under the influence of organized crime. The Letter didn't even Bubble Under in Billboard -- it came out of nowhere in Cash Box, quickly rose to the top, displacing Whitney's "I Will Always Love You" for one week, then quickly dropped off and disappeared.

But much worse things happened at Cash Box: the 1989 murder of their chart director Kevin Hughes. He may have only been their country chart director, I'm not sure. Last year a jury convicted former Cash Box chart director Richard D'Antonio of his murder, and he received a life sentence.

http://www.nashvillecitypaper.com/index.cfm?section=9&screen =news&news_id=26840

Metzgar testified Tuesday that Cashbox was, in fact, fixing its charts in the late 1980s. He said the magazine would add artists to its charts in exchange for payment from both promoters and the artists themselves. "The minimum amount for six to seven weeks on the chart was $2,500," Metzgar said. D'Antonio, who had been the Cash Box chart director prior to Hughes, was partnered in a record promotion business with a man named Chuck Dixon. The prosecution claimed Dixon regularly accepted large sums of money from clients eager to see their names on the independent country charts. D'Antonio, they said, then manipulated the data he was receiving from radio stations, sometimes paying stations to report records that were never played. The connection between Chuck Dixon (who died of cancer in 2001), and the Cash Box charts was supposedly so widely known that some Nashville insiders took to calling the trade magazine "Chuck Box." Prosecutors alleged that when Kevin Hughes signed on as chart director, he attempted to legitimize the charts. That, argued the prosecution, threatened the defendant's gravy train.

Other sources claim Hughes was actually planning to go public with the fact that the charts were fixed. I'm unclear if this refers to all Cash Box charts or just their country charts. But obviously somebody paid someone to get Wayne Newton's "The Letter" single on the Cash Box Top 100.

Edited by Brian W.

As terrible as this song is, I thought it would be a nice addition to my collection, given the history. Here are the details:

CURBD-1008
1. non-described version (listed & actual 4:29)

Hey Pat, I should've clarified in my post that it's a promotional CD single.