Top Ten Songs of the Summer
#9 – Elton John & Kiki Dee – ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’ (1976)
Elton John has been in the running for Song of the Summer a half dozen times during his career, for songs as varied as ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me’ and ‘Can You Feel the Love Tonight?’ But only once did he claim the title, and it was for this infectious duet with English pop singer Kiki Lee.
As we approach Labor Day, the perennial question arises: what, exactly, was the Song of the Summer?
I’ve cast my personal vote for Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Espresso,’ which seemed poised to dominate the season. But, alas, the song failed to reach #1 (it peaked at #3) and it’s hard to be the Song of the Summer without topping the charts, usually for multiple weeks.
The week of August 22, 1964, saw The Supremes atop the Billboard Hot 100 with ‘Where Did Our Love Go,’ a song I featured 15 years ago during Motown Weekends.
At #2 that week was Dean Martin’s ‘Everybody Loves Somebody,’ down a spot after a one-week stint at #1. This was a nearly 20-year-old song that had already been recorded by Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra in the 40s, but Martin had the most success with it and it became his signature tune.
Throwing back to the week of August 21, 1954, we find The Crew Cuts still on top of the charts with ‘Sh-Boom,‘ a doo-wop classic.
In the second spot that week was Rosemary Clooney’s ‘Hey There,’ a show tune from the musical The Pajama Game. Clooney stayed in the #2 spot behind ‘Sh-Boom’ for a month before grabbing #1 for six straight weeks. This was the third of four #1 hits for Clooney, all in the first four years of the 1950s.
Following Love is the Answer, Barbra Streisand’s last 15 years as a recording artist have been unremarkable. She has released just four studio albums during that time, along with several live albums.
2011’s What Matters Most was a tribute to the songs of her friends, lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman. In 2014, Partners was a collection of duets with male singers. That album did well enough to spawn 2016’s Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway, which found Streisand singing show tunes with such unlikely collaborators as Melissa McCarthy, Antonio Banderas, and Alec Baldwin.
Meet Me In Montauk 