This was written and originally recorded by the blues musician Roy Hawkins in 1951. Rick Darnell co-wrote on this. Roy was a blues singer, pianist, and songwriter. After working in clubs, he broke through with his 1950 song “Why Do Things Happen to Me” inspired by an auto accident which paralyzed his right arm.

Little is known of the early part of his life. By the mid-1940s he was performing as a singer and pianist in the Oakland, California area, where he was discovered by musician and record producer Bob Geddins, who was impressed by Hawkins’ “soulful, doom-laden style”. Hawkins seems to have made his first recordings when about 45 years old with his band, the Four Jacks, which included saxophonist William Staples, guitarist Ulysses James, bassist Floyd Montgomery, and drummer Madison Little.

After several less successful singles, including “Gloom and Misery All Around”,  Hawkins left Modern Records in 1953. He recorded for a series of labels over the next few years including Flair, RPM, Rhythm, and Music City, for whom he recorded as Mr. Undertaker. His last recordings were made for Kent Records in 1961. His later years were spent working in a furniture store. Hawkins died in Compton, California in 1974.

In the 1950s, King was a Memphis radio DJ who played the Roy Hawkins original on the air. King recorded the song several times but didn’t like any of the results. Producer Bill Szymczyk (most famous for producing the Eagles) called King at 4:00 a.m. and suggested the addition of strings (King later said that he’d agree to just about anything at that time of the night). The addition polished up the recording that gave King his first million-selling record.

This was B.B. King’s biggest hit. He didn’t have much success on the charts, but became a blues legend who influenced a generation of musicians. A music video director who worked with King once said “…he’s reticent to be anything other than B.B. King.”

King passed away in 2015 at age 89.

B.B. King’s recording earned him a Grammy Award for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance in 1970 and a Grammy Hall of Fame award in 1998. King’s version of the song was also placed at number 183 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest songs of all time .

Hits: 47

“America” was inspired by a five-day road excursion Simon undertook in September 1964 with his then girlfriend Kathy Chitty. Producer Tom Wilson had called Simon back to the United States to finalize mixes and artwork for their debut studio album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. Simon, living in London at the time, was reluctant to leave Chitty, and invited her to come with him, forgetting the album and spending five days driving the country together.

“America” is a song that “creates a cinematic vista that tells of the singer’s search for a literal and physical America that seems to have disappeared, along with the country’s beauty and ideals.” Art Garfunkel once described the song as “young lovers with their adventure and optimism”.

The narrator spends four days hitchhiking from Saginaw to join Kathy in Pittsburgh, where together they board a Greyhound bus to continue the journey. The narrator begins with a lighthearted and optimistic outlook (“Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together”) that fades over the course of the song. To pass time, he and Kathy play games and try to guess the backgrounds of their fellow passengers. Over the course of their journey, they smoke all their cigarettes. Kathy reads a magazine before falling asleep, leaving the narrator awake to reflect on the meaning of the journey alone. In the final verse, the narrator is able to speak his true emotions to Kathy, now that she is sleeping and cannot hear or answer. “I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why” captures the longing and angst of the 1960s in nine simple words. The narrator then stares out the window “counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike.” Many other empty, aching, and lost souls are on the highway, each on their own journey alone even if someone is traveling with them. The soaring harmony lines and crashing cymbals create a powerful and poignant end to the song’s final verse: “They’ve all come to look for America.” Pete Fornatale interprets this lyric as a “metaphor to remind us all of the lost souls wandering the highways and byways of mid-sixties America, struggling to navigate the rapids of despair and hope, optimism and disillusionment.”

Hits: 159

In 1999, “Midnight Train to Georgia” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. It currently ranks #432 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

The song was originally written and performed by Jim Weatherly under the title “Midnight Plane to Houston”, which he recorded on Jimmy Bowen’s Amos Records.

“It was based on a conversation I had with somebody… about taking a midnight plane to Houston,” Weatherly recalls. “I wrote it as a kind of a country song. Then we sent the song to a guy named Sonny Limbo in Atlanta and he wanted to cut it with Cissy Houston (mother of Whitney and aunt of singers Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick)… he asked if I minded if he changed the title to “Midnight Train to Georgia”. And I said, ‘I don’t mind. Just don’t change the rest of the song.'”

Weatherly, at a program in Nashville, said he was the quarterback at the University of Mississippi, the NFL didn’t work out for him, so he was in LA trying to write songs.

He was in a Rec football league with Lee Majors and called Majors one night. Farrah Fawcett answered the phone and he asked what she was doing. She said she was “taking the midnight plane to Houston” to visit her family.

He thought that was a catchy phrase for a song, and in writing the song, wondered why someone would leave LA on the midnight plane – which brought the idea of a “superstar, but he didn’t get far.”

Weatherly’s publisher forwarded the song to Gladys Knight and the Pips, who followed Houston’s lead and kept the title “Midnight Train to Georgia.” In her autobiography, “Between Each Line of Pain and Glory”, Gladys Knight wrote that she hoped the song was a comfort to the many thousands who come each year from elsewhere to Los Angeles to realize the dream of being in motion pictures or music, but then fail to realize that dream and plunge into despair.

Hits: 31

“Smile A Little Smile For Me” was a US hit for The Flying Machine, who were a pop band from the UK. The song is a story of a boy (possibly a love interest or a friend) that is telling a girl named Rose Marie that she needs to get over the boy that has left her. Rose Marie is the same girl from Edison Lighthouse’s “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)” as this was also written by Tony McCaulay, who founded Edison Lighthouse.

Hits: 25

The song has been recorded by at least 20 different artists, in styles ranging from folk to reggae to psychedelic rock. In 2010, Rolling Stone ranked it #364 on its “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list.

In his memoir, Fogerty said he borrowed the guitar lick for this song from Scotty Moore’s work on Elvis Presley’s “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone”.

Fogerty stresses that he wasn’t trying to hide that he’d borrowed the lick and was instead openly “honoring it.” In 1986, at an unspecified awards get-together, Moore grabbed Fogerty from behind and said, “Give me back my licks!”

Fogerty reportedly wrote “Bad Moon Rising” after watching The Devil and Daniel Webster. Inspired by a scene in the film involving a hurricane, Fogerty claims the song is about “the apocalypse that was going to be visited upon us”.

“Then I remembered one of my favourite old movies – a black-and-white 1941 film called The Devil And Daniel Webster, shot in that spooky, film noir way they did back then. It’s a classic tale where the main character, who’s down on his luck, meets the Devil and sells his soul to him. The scene I liked is where there’s a devastating hurricane; furniture, trees, houses, everything’s blowing around. That story and that look really stuck in my mind and they were the germ for the song.”

Given the time this was written, the late 60’s, there was a subtext to the meaning of the song:

“I don’t think I was actually saying the world was coming to an end,” Fogerty says, “but the song was a metaphor. I wasn’t just writing about the weather.”

The last line of the chorus, “there’s a bad moon on the rise”, is sometimes misheard as “there’s a bathroom on the right”. Fogerty occasionally sings the misheard lyric in concert.

“In the wonderful tradition of rock‘n’roll,” he explains, “people misconstrue the lyrics, and that’s what they thought I was singing. And when I hear the song on the radio now, I can see why they thought that – it does sound like it could be what I’m singing. So I do it for fun. I’m not one of these people that walks around going: ‘I’m a serious artist.’ I like to have fun.”

Hits: 28

“I Like It Like That” was written and originally recorded by Chris Kenner and co-written by  pianist and arranger Allen Toussaint.

The song was covered by the Dave Clark Five in 1965. Their version charted at No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100.

The song was recorded by The Nashville Teens (who had a hit with “Tobacco Road”) and also covered by the Kingsmen on their 1965 album “The Kingsmen on Campus”, Brinsley Schwarz on their 1972 album “Nervous on the Road”, and Loggins and Messina on their 1975 album of cover songs, “So Fine”.

Chris Kenner wrote a few other hits, such as “Something You Got” (covered by Wilson Pickett, Alvin Robinson, the Ramsey Lewis Trio, Chuck Jackson, Earl Grant, Maxine Brown, Fats Domino, Bobby Womack, The Moody Blues, the American Breed, Fairport Convention, Bruce Springsteen and Jimi Hendrix,  and “Land of a Thousand Dances” in 1962.

The song was also covered by Danny & the Memories, Ted Nugent, the J. Geils Band.

The song became famous for its “na na na na na” hook, which Cannibal & the Headhunters added in their 1965 version. The “na na na na na” hook happened by accident when Frankie “Cannibal” Garcia, lead singer of Cannibal and the Headhunters, forgot the lyrics. The melody to this section was also created spontaneously, as it is not in Chris Kenner’s original track.

Hits: 47

“Nobody’s Fault but Mine” is a gospel song that has been recorded by many musicians over the years. The first known recording of this song was by American gospel blues musician Blind Willie Johnson in 1927, titled “It’s Nobody’s Fault but Mine”.

In an interview, Jimmy Page explained:

“Robert Plant came in one day and suggested that we cover it, but the arrangement I came up with was nothing to do with the Blind Willie Johnson original. Robert may have wanted to go for the original blues lyrics, but everything else was a totally different kettle of fish.”

Led Zeppelin biographer George Case adds “Page was likely more mindful of John Renbourn’s 1966 acoustic take than Blind Willie Johnson’s”.

Lyrically, “Nobody’s Fault but Mine” has been called “Led Zeppelin’s ‘Hell Hound on My Trail'”, another Robert Johnson 1937 Delta blues song tells of a man trying to stay ahead of the evil which is pursuing him, but it does not address the cause or lasting solution for his predicament.

In Blind Willie Johnson’s “It’s Nobody’s Fault but Mine”, the problem is clearly stated: he will be doomed, unless he uses his abilities to learn (and presumably live according to) biblical teachings.

Led Zeppelin retain Blind Willie’s admission that he ultimately is to blame, but add Robert Johnson’s sense of despair. However, they shift the focus from religion to one “relevant to the Zeppelin lifestyle of the day”.

Their lyrics include “that monkey on my back”, a commonly used reference to addiction, and “the devil he told me to roll, how to roll the line tonight”; to overcome, Plant concludes “gonna change my ways tonight”. “For Robert [Plant] and perhaps the others, it was a sort of exorcism”.

“Nobody’s Fault but Mine” follows a “call-and-response method of dramatic construction”. Page’s slide guitar intro has been described as like “a supersonic 1970s interpretation of Johnson’s beautiful slide guitar technique”.

Page triple-tracked his guitar intro; playing one guitar an octave higher than the others and using a phaser. Plant adds a blues-style harmonica solo mid-song. Drummer John Bonham and bassist John Paul Jones maintain the rhythm of the song, adding some syncopated accents during repetitions of the introductory phrase.

Hits: 93

Merrilee Gunst was born in Seattle, Washington. She grew up in Seattle’s North End, and studied classical piano from a young age. In 1960, she auditioned and became the singer for the Amazing Aztecs, a Seattle-area rock & roll band led by saxophone player Neil Rush, whom she would later marry. The two went on to form Merrilee and Her Men, doing mostly cover versions of pop hits, and then joined rhythm and blues group Tiny Tony and the Statics, whose regional hit “Hey Mrs. Jones”, on the Bolo label, featured Rush’s keyboard playing and vocals.

In 1965, the pair formed Merrilee Rush and the Turnabouts, who soon became a popular act on the Pacific Northwest’s teen dancehall circuit. A member of the group’s road crew also worked for Paul Revere and the Raiders, and through this connection, Rush was invited to be the opening act on the Raiders’ tour of the southern United States in 1967.

While in Memphis, Tennessee, Raiders lead vocalist Mark Lindsay introduced Rush to record producer Chips Moman, who produced this song. Chip Taylor, actor Jonathan “Jon” Voight’s brother, wrote and composed “Angel of the Morning” and also wrote “Wild Thing” which was released by The Troggs in 1966. This tender ballad is surprisingly virtually the same song as Chip Taylor explained to Mojo magazine September 2008: “I heard some guy playing ‘Wild Thing’ real slow on a guitar. It sounded nice. So I did the same, lifting one of my fingers off a chord to create a suspension”.

According to Kent Kotal at Forgotten Hits, Chip Taylor came up with this song in about 20 minutes:

“After strumming any variety of chords for close to two hours and coming up with nothing, he says the complete lyrics ‘There’ll be no strings to bind your hands, not if my love can’t bind your heart’ flowed out of his mouth.

“His first thought was ‘What is that? That’s beautiful!’ He then thought, ‘Nobody actually TALKS like that!!! Where did those words come from?’ Incredibly, in one sitting, spread out over no more than twenty minutes, he completed the entire song.

He says that during the entire process, he never once thought, ‘I’m gonna say this’ or ‘I’m gonna say that.’ In fact, most of the time he was thinking ‘I don’t even know what this means!’ In his own mind, he feels that he didn’t so much as WRITE this song as that he DREAMED it… the way the lyrics flowed out, meshing perfectly with the series of chords he had been strumming – there just had to be some kind of divine intervention.

‘I write melody and words at the same time and I hum nonsense things until something comes out. So I don’t think about what I want to say… I just let the emotion carry me. In this song, the emotion just totally took over and carried me. It was magic.'”

Evie Sands originally recorded this song in 1967. Her version was doing well, but two weeks after it was released, her record label, Cameo/Parkway, went bankrupt. Chip Taylor was devastated when he found out the label could not promote it or even make more copies of the song. It was one of several close calls for Sands, who never hit it big; she also did the original version of “I Can’t Let Go,” which was later a hit for The Hollies.

It was originally offered to Connie Francis to sing, but she turned it down because she thought that it was too risqué for her career. The song describes feelings about a one-night stand, with the added fact it was from a woman’s point of view. While the ’60s were very permissive in some regards, it was still a taboo subject in the media.

Hits: 64