Pres. Play: U.S. Presidents in Billboard’s Back Pages, From the 1900s to Now

When Billboard started publishing in 1894, Grover Cleveland was president of the United States of America — all 44 of them. Parsing politics has never been this publication’s primary purpose, but over the decades since, every POTUS has popped up in our pages. So, ahead of Election Day (Nov. 5), Billboard tips its reporter’s hat to the commanders in chief whose policies and cultural cachet helped shape the music business.

No. 1 With a ‘Bullet’

The Sept. 21, 1901, issue of Billboard covered “an almost prophetic incident” that occurred at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y., the day an assassin shot President William McKinley at the Temple of Music (Sept. 6). (He died from the injury a week later.) “Only a moment or two before the shot rang out,” a friend of McKinley’s told Billboard, the “orchestra had played a German piece of music entitled ‘The Cursed Bullet.’ ”

Not ‘Ike’ Us

“Election year brought tangible results in revenue to Madison Square Garden,” reported the Feb. 16, 1952, Billboard, “as an Eisenhower-for-President rally, backed by entertainment names, drew 15,000.” Luminaries included songwriting great Irving Berlin, whose 1950 Broadway tune “They Like Ike” became the campaign slogan “I Like Ike.” The same issue included a story about an “overzealous Eisenhower supporter” in Dallas who interrupted a concert by “RCA Victor songbird” Mindy Carson and “insisted on pinning an ‘I Like Ike’ button on her shoulder.

Family Values

The Nov. 24, 1962, Billboard buzzed about John F. Kennedy impersonator Vaughn Meader’s album The First Family, calling it a “comedy smash” that “electrified the industry.” The title’s success helped warm the market chill that followed the Cuban missile crisis, one of the defining moments of Kennedy’s presidency. The Dec. 8, 1962, issue said the album boosted “a gradually improving sales situation following the partial solution of the Cuban scare.” “I had someone come in for a copy of The First Family the other day and they left the store with $32 worth of records,” a Miami retailer explained. “That’s what one of these smashes can do.”

Get Carter

Soon after the 1976 election, the Nov. 13 issue described Jimmy Carter as “a friend in the White House who’s sympathetic… to the music industry.” The Allman Brothers Band had played a fundraising role in his primary campaign, and the music business “got a lot of early support for him both through contributions and performances when cash was critical,” Capricorn Records president Phil Walden said. It wasn’t just Southern rock that carried Carter: The Sept. 18, 1976, issue reported on “a mobile disco operation in Atlanta” that was “discoing around the country” to raise support for Carter.

Bills, Bills, Bills

The Nov. 14, 1992, Billboard covered a CMJ Music Marathon panel in New York titled “Are We Really Voting Tipper Gore Into the White House?” — a then-controversial idea, considering she had taken a stand against music with explicit lyrics marketed to children. Panelists had “an ‘anti-Tipper-but-voting-for-Clinton-anyway’ theme.’ ” More than two decades later, Bill Clinton posed with Jon Bon Jovi for the cover of the Nov. 5, 2016, issue, to spotlight their philanthropy. “This is Bon Jovi’s Be Kind to a Senior Night,” the former president joked during the photo shoot.

This article appears in the Oct. 26, 2024, issue of Billboard.

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