In her new movie The High Note, Tracee Ellis Ross plays a high-strung, high-maintenance pop diva who wants to get back in the game. “In the history of music, only five women over 40 have ever had a No. 1 hit,” Ross’s Grace Davis laments, anticipating her label’s underestimation of a woman in the middle of her career. “And only one of them was black.” In reality, there were two black women over 40 with No. 1’s on the Billboard Hot 100 around the time the script for The High Note was written: Aretha Franklin and Tina Turner. And Mariah Carey’s record-demolishing No. 1 “All I Want For Christmas Is You” made her the third to accomplish the feat last December (likely after the movie was shot). At “49” glorious years old, the continued popularity of the singer’s 1996 holiday song made her the first artist to have a No. 1 in each of the past four decades, the artist with the highest number of No. 1’s (19, dahhling), and the oldest black woman to chart that high. The High Note noticed the lack of middle-aged women, but couldn’t have predicted that stans would storm the charts for a 26-year-old song.
https://www.vulture.com/2020/05/the-high-note-all-the-women-over-40-with-a-billboard-no-1.html