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The Songfactor's Choice Top Ten Facts


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The Songfactor's Choice Top Ten #17

I know that everyone will be very interested to know that all of the songs in our current top ten excepting TWO are presently part of the Songfacts database. Those missing songs are:

UNFORGETTABLE - NAT KING COLE (1951)

GLORIA - THEM (1964)

If you have any info on any of the song mentioned above, please feel free to post your knowledge in this thread. Submissions on songs will be collated and sent to the main site and you will receive credit for your contribution

The Songfish is very appreciative of your efforts! :D

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"GLORIA" - THEM

Written by Van Morrison, leader od the band, it was released in 1964 as the side B of a single - side A was "Baby, please don´ t go"- Jimmy Page plays guitar on this song. The Shadows of Knight made a version that hit the charts in the US two years later.

According to Van Morrison, "our main success was with a song I wrote, "Gloria." It was capitalized on a lot by other people, especially a lot of American groups".

Edited by Guest
Old55 told me it wasn´t a hit by THEM in the US. Thank you, Darryl! :):)
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Gloria's been covered by:

Gloria by The Shadows of Knight (1966)

Gloria by I ragazzi del sole (1966)

Gloria by Blues Magoos (1967)

Gloria by Van Morrison (1974)

Gloria by Patti Smith (1975)

Gloria by The Doors (1983)

Gloria by Count Five (1991)

Gloria by Eddie & The Hot Rods (1997)

Gloria by Rickie Lee Jones (2001)

Gloria by Simple Minds (2001)

Gloria by Popa Chubby (2001)

Gloria only reached as high as #71 on the Billboard Charts in 1966.

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Thankyou very much to edna and Malakin for your valued contributions!!

The Songfactor's Choice Top Ten #18

I know that everyone will be very interested to know that all of the songs in our current top ten excepting TWO are presently part of the Songfacts database. Those missing songs are our female hits for this week:

CHAIN OF FOOLS - ARETHA FRANKLIN (1967)

DREAM A LITTLE DREAM OF ME - MAMA CASS WITH THE MAMAS & THE PAPAS (1968)

Songs from previous top tens we are also currently seeking facts on are:

UNFORGETTABLE - NAT KING COLE (1951)

If you have any info on any of the song mentioned above, please feel free to post your knowledge in this thread. Submissions on songs will be collated and sent to the main site and you will receive credit for your contribution.

The Songfish thanks you! :D

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From Wikipedia:

Dream a little dream of me

Fabian Andre and Wilbur Schwandt (music) and Gus Kahn (lyrics) composed this song in 1931.

It was recorded by Wayne King and his Orchestra with vocal by Ernie Birchill on February 18, 1931 and released by Victor Records as catalogue number 22643.

Ozzie Nelson & his Orchestra recorded the song with vocal by Ozzie on February 16, 1931. It was released by Brunswick Records as catalogue number 6060.

The song was also performed by Louis Armstrong together with Ella Fitzgerald.

Its most famous rendition was by "Mama" Cass Elliot, former member of The Mamas & the Papas, in 1968.

It was later included in the last album of The Mamas & the Papas.

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UNFORGETTABLE: Recorded by Nat King Cole with Orchestra leader and arranger Nelson Riddle in 1951. It reached #12 on the U.S. Billboard Charts.

It became a Hit again in 1991 (U.S.#14, U.K.#19) for Nat's daughter, Natalie, when her vocals were dubbed with his to make a duet.

It also won the 1991 Grammy Award for "Song Of The Year" for it's writer Irving Gordon 40 years after he'd written it.

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Thanks to edna, Malakin, Radhi and Darryl for sharing your knowledge!!

The Songfactor's Choice Top Ten #19

Everyone will be happy to hear that all of the songs excepting ONE are currently part of the Songfacts database! That missing song is:

BRING IT ON HOME TO ME - SAM COOKE (1961)

Songs from previous top tens we are also currently seeking facts on are:

CHAIN OF FOOLS - ARETHA FRANKLIN (1967)

If you have any info on any of the song mentioned above, please feel free to post your knowledge in this thread. Submissions on songs will be collated and sent to the main site and you will receive credit for your contribution.

The Songfish appreciates your efforts! :D

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Songs from previous top tens we are also currently seeking facts on are:

CHAIN OF FOOLS - ARETHA FRANKLIN (1967)

Even though Aretha Franklin scored one of her biggest and most enduring hits in 1968 with Chain of Fools , written by Don Covay some 15 years earlier, his own recording that same year went nowhere.

.. source: Jason Ankeny, All Music Guide

In 1969 the Best Female R&B Performance Grammy was awarded to Aretha Franklin for Chain of Fools.

( The Best Female R&B Vocal Performance Category was added to the Grammy Awards in 1968. Aretha Franklin won successively the first eight ever awarded trophies in the Category from 1968-1975 .. and added three more to her collection in the 1980s)

.. source: Wikipedia

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"Bring it on home to me"

"Bring It On Home to Me" is a 1961 song written and originally released by R&B singer-songwriter Sam Cooke. The song, about infidelity, was a hit Cooke and has become a pop standard covered by numerous artists of different genres. The most significant covers of the song include the hit versions by The Animals, Eddie Floyd, and Mickey Gilley. Lou Rawls, who sang background vocals on the original song, recorded his own charting version in 1970. In the United Kingdom, Rod Stewart released this song as part of a medley with "You Send Me" and charted it on the UK Singles Chart at #7 as a double A-side with "Farewell."

Year Chart Position

1962 Black Singles Chart #2

1962 Pop Singles Chart #13

from Wikipedia

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"Bring It On Home To Me" - from www.allmusic.com

"Bring It on Home to Me" is one of Sam Cooke's greatest songs. Over a rolling rhythm that sounds like it could go on forever, a man asks a woman to come back to him, apologizing, forgiving her for her transgressions, and promising her presents if she will just bring her "sweet loving" on home to him. But though the lyrics had a pleading tone, the melody never emphasized its desperation. You almost felt that the woman would be compelled to return just by that steady, compelling rhythm. Cooke recorded the song on April 26, 1962, accompanied in call-and-response style by backup singer Lou Rawls. The song was released as the B-side of his next single, "Havin' a Party." Both songs became hits, with the B-side edging out the A-side with a Top Ten pop showing and a ranking just below the top of the R&B charts. "Bring It on Home to Me" was not a hit in the U.K., so when the Animals released their cover as a single in the spring of 1965, it was new to their listeners, who made it the group's fourth consecutive Top Ten hit. It didn't do that well in the U.S., but it get into the Top 40. In 1968, Eddie Floyd gave the song another ride in the charts, getting to the Top 20 of the pop charts and the Top Five of the R&B charts. Lou Rawls did his own version (titled "Bring It on Home"), which figured in the pop and R&B charts in 1970. And in August 1976, Mickey Gilley's recording of "Bring It on Home to Me" hit number one on the country charts. In addition to these chart singles, there have been dozens of covers by R&B and rock stars, making the song a well-established standard.

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Thankyou most sincerely to bazooka, edna, Das and Darryl for your valued input!! :bow:

The Songfactor's Choice Top Ten #20

Good news: all of the songs currently featured in our top ten excepting TWO are already on the Songfacts database!

The two songs missing are:

BALLAD OF A THIN MAN - BOB DYLAN (1965)

ISN'T IT A PITY - GEORGE HARRISON (1970)

If you have any info on any of the songs mentioned above, please feel free to post your knowledge in this thread. Submissions on songs will be collated and sent to the main site and you will receive credit for your contribution.

The Songfish salutes you :D

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Ballad of a Thin Man" is a song written by Bob Dylan, originally released in 1965 on Highway 61 Revisited, with live versions released on Before the Flood (1974), Bob Dylan At Budokan (1979), Real Live (1984), Hard to Handle (video, 1986), The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert (1998) and on The Bootleg Series Vol. 7: No Direction Home: The Soundtrack (2005). "Ballad of a Thin Man" has been extensively performed live throughout Dylan's career, up to this day.

A dark and menacing sounding song, "Ballad of a Thin Man" addresses a certain "Mr. Jones", telling him that he simply doesn't know what's "happening." The song's lyrics have Mr. Jones facing a wild, nonsensical, and hallucinatory world and the character is portrayed as a clueless poser who cannot deal with it all.

The "identity" of Mr. Jones has long been in dispute. When asked about it in an interview in 1965, Dylan responded:

He's a pinboy. He also wears suspenders. He's a real person. You know him, but not by that name... I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel. He proceeded to put his eyes in his pocket. I asked this guy who he was and he said, "That's Mr. Jones." Then I asked this cat, "Doesn't he do anything but put his eyes in his pocket?" And he told me, "He puts his nose on the ground." It's all there, it's a true story.

Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, in a 1981 interview recounted in David Gans' book Conversations with the Dead: The Grateful Dead Interview Book (New York: Citadel Underground, 1991), said that "'Ballad of a Thin Man' tells that person who's lame that they're lame, why they're lame, which is a very satisfying thing to do. Certainly something everybody knows about."

In a mid-1980s interview with Q magazine, Dylan appeared to identify Mr. Jones as Max Jones, a former Melody Maker critic, supporting the theory that "Mr. Jones" was simply one of the many music critics who didn't "get" Dylan's songs, especially the more surreal ones he wrote in the mid-1960s.

Yer Blues, from The Beatles' White Album, references the song. It contains the lyric I feel so suicidal, just like Dylan's Mr. Jones...

Counting Crows's song, Mr. Jones is rumoured to reference Dylan's work, however this has not been confirmed.

From Wikipedia

I also remember reading in a Rolling Stones magazine (in the sixties or seventies) something that sounded obvious by then: Mr. Jones is "the square" who doesn´t understand what´s up because he doesn´t smoke dope nor take LSD.

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Isn´t it a pity"

Written and original pefromed by George Harrison on his first solo album, "All Things Must Pass"

For All Things Must Pass, Harrison and Spector assembled a rock orchestra of almost symphonic proportions, whose credits read like a Who's Who of the music scene. Ringo; Procol Harum's Gary Brooker, Gary Wright, and Billy Preston (all on keyboards); Dave Mason and Eric Clapton (electric guitars); and dozens more. George himself painstakingly overdubbed his voice dozens of times, and credited the result to the "George O'Hara-Smith Singers." Apple house band Badfinger was assigned the task of strumming four acoustic guitars, usually buried deep in the mix in keeping with Spector's credo that some instruments should be "felt but not heard.

"Isn't It a Pity" starts out, like many of the selections, as a plaintive dirge, with a backdrop consisting of brooding strings, the steady clanging of chimes, and the shimmering harmonics of Badfinger's guitars. At the signal of the first cosmic thud of Ringo's foot against the bass drum pedal, however, instruments begin to break out out of their metronomic straitjacket to attain an almost ecstatic release. Strings burst into thunderous crescendos; gently weeping guitars start to soar. Like "Hey Jude," which it strongly resembles, "Isn't It a Pity" is a work of towering simplicity with few and basic chord changes and an almost endlessly repetitive fade-out that somehow manages to be hypnotic instead of boring. "Isn't It a Pity" even clocked in one second shy of "Jude"'s seven minutes and eleven seconds. "

Melody Maker, Richard Williams

Recorded twice for the phenomenal All things Must Pass album, this song's melody is somewhat reminiscent to another of the album's great songs, "Ballad of Sir Frank Crisp (Let It Roll)," and this provides the album with a (possibly unintentional) thematic link. Similar to some of Bob Dylan's ballads of the period, the folksy melody rises and falls with an artless grace that became a part of Harrison's songwriting style. The lyrics are in keeping with the karmic subject matter of the album's mood, and it's deeply moving and powerful. Rumor has it that this song was written during the sessions for the Beatles' White Album.

from allmusic.com

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Thankyou very, very much to edna, Radhi and Das for your contributions!!

The Songfactor's Choice Top Ten #21

I know that you'll all be over the moon to hear that ALL of the songs in our current top ten are already on the wonderful songfacts database!

The Songfish waves you goodnight! :D

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  • 2 weeks later...

The Songfactor's Choice Top Ten #23

I can tell you that all but ONE of the songs listed in our Songfactor's Choice Top are already part of the Songfacts database!!

The missing song is:

Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting - Elton John (1973)

If you have any info on any of the songs mentioned above, please feel free to post your knowledge in this thread. Submissions on songs will be collated and sent to the main site and you will receive credit for your contribution.

The Songfish thanks you! :D

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From Wikipedia:

"Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting" (sometimes written "Saturday Night's Alright (For Fighting)") is a rock & roll song performed by musician Elton John. The song was written by Bernie Taupin and composed by John for his album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. It is one of John's harder-rocking songs, with a sound similar to bands like The Who and The Rolling Stones (indeed The Who would cover it in 1991).

The song was released in 1973 (see 1973 in music) as the album's first single, and entered the Top Ten in the U.K and the Top 20 in the U.S. Despite only being a modest hit compared to his other hits, it remains one of his best-known songs.

In 2003 it was also performed by Nickelback and included in their album The Long Road. It is also used by the US cable network Showtime as introduction music for its Showtime Championship Boxing series (as the series airs on the first Saturday of each month).

Composition and inspiration

"Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting" is a lively throwback to early rock & roll with a glam edge; the lyrics discuss a night out in town in which the narrator plans to "get about as oiled as a diesel train." Taupin has said that the song was meant to be an American rock & roll song, set in Britain, and was inspired by his raucous teenage days.

Chart performance

The single peaked at #12 in the U.S., and #7 in the U.K. It was his only song to not make the U.S. Top Ten in the three year period between 1973 and 1976.

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  • 2 weeks later...

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