100 Songs of Summer #73 “Surfer Girl” by The Beach Boys

Incredibly, we are into the second quarter of our Top 100 Songs of Summer Countdown and The Beach Boys—the group that truly deserves credit for inventing the very genre of music we’re celebrating—have yet to make an appearance. More incredible still, the song that gets them onto the list is celebrating its 50^th anniversary this year.

100 Songs of Summer #73

“Surfer Girl” by the Beach Boys

The title cut off their 1963 album, “Surfer Girl” is the first song Brian Wilson ever composed, and it reached number 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. The timeless appeal of this ballad is not only the soft sincerity with which it expresses love for that “Little surfer little one” who “made my heart come all undone,” but the serene allure it captures, all these summers later, of the waves that break on any shores, be they in California or here in the Hamptons, and carry us away.