I've heard a few bits of apocryphal folklore - and I briefly met some of the CD team while in Eindhoven NL at Philips, all of whom denied these popular myths - but here goes;
44kHz was a compromise to fit a typical album of about 70 mins, reliably (with ECC etc) onto the available physical medium. Another is that, like with choices of preferred capacitor values (why choose exactly 22uF etc) there were a lot of 44.1kHz crystals knocking around in the late 1980s, so the first engineers picked those up, did a quick Nyquist calculation, and said ""hat should good enough for rock'n'roll", and it was.
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