Classic rock, pop, and soul songs from the '60s, '70s, and '80s
Classic rock, pop, and soul songs from the '60s, '70s, and '80s
All this week we’ve been highlighting songs that were featured on the soundtrack to The Big Chill, that 1983 movie that followed a group of Baby Boomer friends adjusting to the death of one of their own and their sacrifices in adapting to lives as adults. Our final song from The Big Chill this week is “I Second That Emotion,”…
Today’s classic song featured in the movie The Big Chill of the day is “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” as recorded by Aretha Franklin. It’s one of the best songs of the 20th century—and it was written in a single evening. The story goes that lyricist Gerry Goffin was coming out of the Oyster House bar on…
Today’s classic song of the day that was featured in the movie The Big Chill is Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman.” This song was playing in the background after the after-dinner cleanup scene we featured yesterday (the one with the Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg“), as the group of old friends is sitting around the living…
Today’s classic song featured in the movie The Big Chill of the day is “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” by the Temptations. This song was featured in what may be my favorite scene in the whole movie, when the gang is working together to clear the table and clean the kitchen after eating dinner. It’s a fun scene, perfectly choreographed…
Yesterday’s classic song of the day had everybody dialing “Beechwood 4-5789” (which is actually 234-5789). Today’s phone number-related song changes the first digit from a “2” to a “6” and gives us “634-5789,” a big hit for legendary soul singer Wilson Pickett. “634-5789” was written by Stax Records stalwarts Eddie Floyd and Steve Cropper. You know Eddie Floyd as a…
Today’s classic song of the day with a phone number in the title is “Beechwood 4-5789.” Back in the days when there were fewer people, fewer phones, and therefore fewer phone numbers, local exchanges were known by their letters rather than their numbers. Take the first two letters of the word and that’s your exchange prefix—which you could translate into…
Today’s classic song of the day is “Oh Girl” by the Chi-Lites. This single, released in March of 1972, went all the way to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, Cash Box Top 100, and Billboard’s R&B chart. Billboard named it the #13 song for all of 1972. “Oh Girl” was written by Eugene Record, the Chi-Lites’ lead vocalist. Released…
Frequent readers of this blog know that I occasionally like to highlight obscure 1960s R&B singles that never made it big on the charts but were later somewhat revived by England’s Northern Soul scene. Today’s classic song of the day is one such obscure tune, “Do It” by Pat Powdrill. This track, released in 1966 on the equally obscure Downey…
All this week we’ve been looking at socially relevant songs from the late ’60s/early ’70s by prominent soul artists. So far all the tracks have been by Motown or Motown-adjacent (Freda Payne, with “Bring the Boys Home“) artists. Today we step away from the Motor City and venture to the recording studios of the West Coast with Bobby Womack and…