SONGSPOT

Popular Songs Trivia

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The first commercial CD pressed in the United States was Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A in 1984.

Those who thought the title track was Springsteen’s way of expressing his admiration for Ronald Reagan’s administration took the album cover at face value. Those who uncoded the deeper meaning behind the track started a rumor that the cover was Springsteen secretly relieving himself on the American symbol.

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Bob Marley gave songwriting credits on “No Woman No Cry” to his childhood friend Vincent Ford, who ran a soup kitchen in Jamaica. Royalties from the hit song helped keep the kitchen running.

Marley grew up with Ford in the Trenchtown area of Kingston. Ford taught Marley the basics of the guitar and the two became close friends. While running a soup kitchen, Ford allowed Marley and his musicians to practice on his premises.

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Simon and Garfunkel bickered nonstop while recording “Bridge over Troubled Water.” Garfunkel wanted Simon to sing it (“I’m sorry I didn’t,” Simon has said), and Simon never liked Garfunkel’s closing “Sail on, silver girl” verse.

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According to Steve Cropper, Otis Redding was still pondering adding a 4th verse to “Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” or lyrics to an outro. Otis just finished up the song with a whistle as a placeholder because he had nothing else left to add. Presumably, when he was to get back from his trip to Wisconsin, he and Cropper were going to finish it up. Redding died on that trip in a plane crash, a grief-filled Cropper returned to the studio to edit the song, heard the whistle outro again, and thought it fit perfect with the fade-out but needed and overdub. Thus, the call to musician Sam ‘Bluzman’ Taylor, who provided the end whistle in the studio version of the song.

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Michael Jackson was so absorbed in writing “Billie Jean” on a ride home from the studio one day that he didn’t even notice his car was on fire. A passing motorcyclist alerted him—saving the King of Pop and one of the world’s catchiest tunes.

The song was written and composed by Jackson, the lyrics describing a woman, Billie Jean, who claims that the narrator is the father of her newborn son, which he denies. Jackson said the lyrics were based on groupies' claims about his older brothers when he toured with them as the Jackson 5.

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Paul McCartney woke up one morning with the tune to “Yesterday” in his head but not the lyrics. The placeholder words he worked with: “Scrambled eggs … oh, my baby, how I love your legs …”

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The BBC banned Bing Crosby’s “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” during World War II, worried its “sickly sentimentality” would lower the morale of homesick troops.

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Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs” was written by … someone else (on-again/off-again Beach Boy Bruce Johnston, to be exact).

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Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” was the most-requested radio song of the ’70s. Yet singer/lyricist Robert Plant once pledged $1,000 to a public radio station that promised to never play it again. (“I’ve heard it before,” he later said.)

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The Caroline in Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” is none other than Caroline Kennedy, whom Neil saw in a magazine photo in the ’60s. “It was a picture of a little girl dressed to the nines in her riding gear, next to her pony,” he recalled.

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The stories about how Diamond was inspired to write Cracklin’ Rosie are apocryphal. "Crackling Rosé" is the name of an inexpensive sparkling wine once produced by Andres Wines of British Columbia, Canada, which was popular among the Indigenous population. One story suggests that Diamond heard a story about a native Canadian tribe while interviewing in Toronto, Canada—the tribe had more men than women, so the lonely men of the tribe would sit around the fire and drink their wine together—which inspired him to write the song.

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The chord that starts Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” is a tritone—known as the devil’s interval and banned from some Renaissance church music for sounding too evil.

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Number of songs Elvis Presley recorded: more than 800.

Number of songs Elvis Presley wrote solo: zero. (He earned a few cowriting credits.)

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“Girls Just Want to Have Fun” was written by … a boy. Philadelphia singer Robert Hazard wrote and recorded the original version four years before Cyndi Lauper made it a hit.

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“Somewhere over the Rainbow” (listed by American Film Institute as the greatest film song ever) is about a girl lifting herself up from rural Kansas but also about America rising up from the Great Depression under FDR’s New Deal, of which song cowriter Yip Harburg was a supporter.

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Queen and David Bowie wrote “Under Pressure” in one night (then got pizza).