1974 No. 1 Soundtrack Album From Oscar-Winning Film Featured a 72-Year-Old Song
It was a banner year for pop music in 1974 with artists such as the Rolling Stones, John Lennon, Bad Company, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney & Wings and others topping the charts. Yet there was one No. 1 album that was different than all the others.
It was the soundtrack to an Oscar-winning film that featured no singing and was centered around a 72-year-old song. It was called The Sting.
The song in question was "The Entertainer," a ragtime piano number written by Scott Joplin in 1902, updated by noted pianist/composer Marvin Hamlisch.
The musician was recruited to work on the soundtrack to the film that starred Robert Redford and Paul Newman as a pair of con men. Hamlisch and Hill were pals dating back to the days when Hill directed plays on Broadway and Hamlisch occasionally served as a rehearsal pianist.
Yet since those days, Hamlisch had become a star in his own right, co-writing Barbra Streisand's first No. 1 single, "The Way We Were" with the songwriting husband-and-wife team of Alan and Marilyn Bergman.
Working on The Sting was different for Hamlisch than writing for Streisand. Although he wasn't a particularly big fan of Joplin, he was left with the task of figuring out which of the composer's songs would work best in the context of the film.
"The way George cut the film was very musical," Hamlisch said in an interview for The Billboard Book of Number One Albums. "But Joplin's music wasn't always a perfect fit, so I had to do things to make it fit."
Initially, there weren't even plans to release a soundtrack album to the film. "It was an afterthought," Hamlisch added. "I don't think anyone realized that it would be a big hit." Since the music was recorded with a relatively small band of 10 or 11 players, the album could be recorded inexpensively, even if it wasn't a big seller."
Aside from using "the crème de la crème of Scott Joplin," which included three different takes of "The Entertainer" on the album, Hamlisch wrote some original music, including "Luther" and "The Glove." Hamlisch explained, "Anything I wrote was written in a very Scott Joplin manner, and hopefully no one could tell my originals from his music.
The formula worked. With The Sting a big hit at the box office, the soundtrack album rose to the top of the Billboard album chart the week of May 4, 1974, in its 15th week on the list, making it the first instrumental album to top the chart since "Dueling Banjos" from the Original Soundtrack Deliveranceaccomplished the feat in March 1973. Like "Dueling Banjos," "The Entertainer" did not top the Hot 100, peaking at No. 3, but the fact it was a hit at all stunned Hamlisch.
"We were totally surprised when ‘The Entertainer' became a hit single," he said. "We had no idea that in the midst of all the rock ‘n' roll that was dominating the charts, we could have a hit with some Scott Joplin ragtime."
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This story was originally published May 5, 2026 at 4:11 PM.