Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle, a minor army office during the French Revolution, wrote the lyrics and music to La Marseillaise, the national anthem of France, on this date, back in 1792. It immediate went to #5 on Billboard's Top Revolutionary National Anthems list and stayed there for five weeks.
Rouget de Lisle (his army mates called him CJ) never followed his success up with any other hits, or much of anything at all, actually. The original one-hit wonder. He would have lived comfortably off the royalties for years (centuries, actually) to come, were it not for the many bootleg copies (bootlegs as they say in la Française) that surfaced. CJ's royalties over the decades actually (I've actually been using "actually" a lot today) totaled about ?17,356,000,000,000, or about €1.45 today. Rouget de Lisle is a member of ASCAP (deceased).