(Credits: Far Out / NASA / Uwe Conrad)
Sun 11 January 2026 20:30, UK
When I hear the year 1973, I think about one album: Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon.
Not that the record needs it, but it is high praise given the sheer quality and quantity of great music that year. Iggy Pop and The Stooges’ Raw Power came out in February of that year, with David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane just two months after, in April. With Pink Floyd’s effort being released in the month between those two, the early stages of this year were already jam-packed with musical greatness.
Then came Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On, and Roberta Flack’s Killing Me Softly in August, before Paul McCartney and Wings rounded off the year with Band On The Run in December.
It was the 1970s at its diverse and creative best, celebrating a myriad of genres with equal measure. Those genres had developed in style over the late 1960s, before actualising into something truly defined and impactful in the ‘70s, which, as an idea, was platformed best through Pink Floyd’s seminal record.
It was a psychedelic and experimental masterpiece, fluctuating between ambient atmospheric melodies, heavy rock jams and free-form jazz. It was not only the album of the year, but of the decade, selling more than 50 million copies worldwide. But beneath the commercial success was the change it sparked in listening habits. As the definitive concept album, it helped confirm the idea that the LP is the premier way of recording, releasing and listening to music, and so it helped thrust music into a more album-centric culture.
So it’s unsurprising that none of the songs from Dark Side Of The Moon made it to become the best-selling song of 1973. It is, however, slightly more shocking that none of the songs from the aforementioned albums did. Pink Floyd’s record was deeply conceptual, and so none of the individual songs felt inherently single-like, but Iggy, Bowie, Wonder, Gaye, Flack and McCartney all boasted tracks that fit the bill of a chart-topping single.
So, what was the best-selling song in 1973?
On both sides of the pond, the chart-topping track was ‘Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree’ by Tony Orlando & Dawn. In both charts, it spent 11 weeks in the top ten (including four weeks at number one) and sold over six million copies in the US and over one million in the UK.
While it may seem somewhat surprising given the remaining music of the year, its place at the top makes a great deal of sense given its political meaning. The song title and its yellow ribbon are a consistent cultural reference in the American lexicon. All the way back to the American Civil War, where Orlando & Dawn’s song was set.
It was inspired by a love story in Reader’s Digest, set in the Civil War era. Songwriter L Russell Brown explained, “I read it from front to back.”
He continued, “There was an article, it was about a soldier coming home from Andersonville Prison in the Civil War, and he was going to Pennsylvania. He told his girl in a letter, ‘I’ll understand if I should stay on the stagecoach. But if I shouldn’t, tie a big yellow handkerchief on the big oak tree outside of town. And then I’ll know if it’s there, I should get off, but I’ll understand that you found someone else in the last three years.”
He finished, “The next morning I drove the 33 miles up to Irwin Levine’s house and went outside behind his home,” he continued. “I told him the story and he said, ‘I’ve got chills up my arms. Tell it again slower.’ So, I told it again, and he said, ‘Handkerchiefs? You blow your nose in them. That’s disgusting.’ I said, ‘What can we do?’ He said, ‘Let’s change it to a ribbon.’”
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