On With the Countdown: Happy 50th Birthday to the ‘American Top 40’ Program
American Top 40, a show that would become a pop-culture classic, and that would turn many people (including me) on to popular music in general and the Billboard charts in particular.Casey Kasem kicked off that first countdown with this welcome: “Here we go with the top 40 hits of the nation this week on American Top 40 -- the best-selling and most-played songs from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. This is Casey Kasem in Hollywood, and in the next three hours, we'll count down the 40 most popular hits in the United States this week, hot off the record charts of Billboard magazine for the week ending July 11, 1970.