“Hit Parade of Love” is credited to Jimmy Martin and Wade Birchfield. Martin recorded it for Decca on the afternoon of 9 May 1956 at the studio at 804 16th Avenue South in Nashville, with Paul Cohen producing. Martin sang lead and played guitar, Earl Taylor played mandolin and sang tenor, Porky Hutchins played banjo and sang baritone, and the band was filled out by Tommy Vaden on fiddle and Howard “Cedric Rainwater” Watts on bass. It was one of four sides cut that day, along with “Before the Sun Goes Down,” “Skip, Hop and Wobble” and “You’ll Be a Lost Ball.”
Decca paired it with “You’ll Be a Lost Ball” on Decca 30118, released on 12 November 1956, with “Hit Parade of Love” on the B side. It reached an LP in 1962 on Country Music Time (Decca DL 4285). Martin kept it in his shows: it was recorded from the stage of the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport on 18 January and 15 February 1958 and at Sunset Park in Pennsylvania on 8 May 1960, and a 2001 CD of his 1958–1960 live recordings took its title from the song.
The whole lyric is built on the title phrase. The narrator has heard that the girl has “a lot of fellers on your lover’s hit parade” and sets out to climb to number one on it, admitting in the chorus that he has “a long long way to climb” before he reaches the top. He asks her to put her arms around him and be his “turtle dove,” and the last verse pictures the two of them working together “like all good lovers should.”
Charlie McVay and the Lone Pine Boys put it on an Arc album in 1962. The Seldom Scene sang it at the Cellar Door in Washington on 27 December 1974, and it appeared on their Live at the Cellar Door (Rebel, 1975). The Canadian band the Dixie Flyers recorded it in Hamilton, Ontario, in March 1977 for Light, Medium, Heavy, and Larry Rice cut it for Time Machine (Rebel, 1987) with Tony Rice on guitar. Rhonda Vincent included it on Good Thing Going (Rounder, 2008), Del & Dawg on Hardcore Bluegrass in the Dawg House (Acoustic Disc, 2012), and Ronnie Bowman on his 2019 album Ronnie Bowman, recorded in Nashville with Del McCoury and Dan Tyminski singing harmony.
