Don’s Top 10 For September 23, 1976

(#14 last week) Chicago's biggest worldwide hit, this was recorded by over 100 other artists, including the Isley Brothers & Boyz II Men.

(#11 last week) From Cliff's album "I'm Nearly Famous", a perfect title for America, but not so England, where he'd been famous since 1959. His biggest hit here, & strangely, it didn't do as well in the U.k., barely scraping the top 10. Perfectly timed for the beginning of Halloween season.

(#6 last week) Rawls had been Sam Cooke's backup singer, then went solo in the mid 60s, almost immediately winning Grammys. This was his biggest hit by far.

(#8 last week) Barry Manilow covered this on his album "Summer Of 78". Um...Barry...two years off.

(#4 last week) A shame the original video for this has been taken off the internet. It was one of the first true music videos, & premiered on "American Bandstand".

(#2 last week) Everyone remembers this from "Saturday Night Fever", but the song was a hit, obviously, more than a year before the movie came out.

(#7 last week) The album's ahead of the single: it's already at #1. Scaggs gained semi-fame as part of the Steve Miller Band, then went solo.

(#5 last week) Like many hits, this started as a B side. The original A was a cover of the commodores "I Feel Sanctified". "..Funky Music" was inspired, said writer Rob Parissi, by the Ohio Players "Fire".

(#3 last week) Who knew? "(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty" holds the record for being the only #1 song title with a word repeated more than three times in it. The chorus consists of the title expression with the word "shake" appearing eight times. It's always interesting to me when my 10 year old son likes a song not currently on the charts, & he was shaking his booty all over the living room to this one!

(#1 last week; 2nd week at #1) Talk about a one-hit wonder! And one of the greatest disappearing acts of all time. Murphy was both. He had briefly worked with Doc on the "Tonight Show" band before they moved to Burbank. By the way, there was no "Big Apple Band". Even though Murphy played nearly every instrument on the instrumental, his record company cautioned that the record would stand a better chance if credited to a group rather than an individual. To Murphy's annoyance, they came up with the name Walter Murphy & The Big Apple Band, only to discover two days after its release that there was already a Big Apple Band. The name on the label was changed to The Walter Murphy Band and then simply to Walter Murphy.