Songs of 74: Rock Your Baby / George McCrae

Radioinfo is taking you back 50 years to the songs of 1974. It was a mighty fine year for music.

Another one hit wonder this week that has held up well across the decades.

Rock Your Baby was written and produced by Richard Finch and Harry ‘KC’ Casey of KC and the Sunshine Band. KC and the Sunshine Band had not yet found commercial success and they’d written Rock Your Baby too high for KC to sing.

What would become one of the defining bands of the disco era had done all the backing work with the instrumentation ready to go, including a drum machine, one of the first pop songs to use one.

The band invited George McCrae’s then wife Gwen into the studio to sing it. She was running late and George stepped in at the very last second so that a recording could actually take place.

All of that fabulous falsetto and the held high note he basically improvised on the spot.

Right place, right time.

Rock Your Baby went to No 1 in the UK and US and No 2 here. The single sold more than 11 million copies worldwide, making it one of the biggest sellers of all time.

When we get to the Songs of 75 next year, we will see the first hits for KC & the Sunshine Band, but this song paved the way and remains one of Casey and Finch’s primary money earners.

I would suggest even more satisfying than the ongoing royalties is its influence.

John Lennon’s Whatever Gets You Thru The Night, released only a couple of months after Rock Your Baby, was directly influenced by Rock You Baby. In fact Lennon said:

“I’d give my eyetooth to have written that.”

 

And in 1976 another band was inspired by the early disco flavour of Rock Your Baby and wanted to create a Europop style version. That song became ABBA’s Dancing Queen.

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Jen Seyderhelm is a writer, editor and music trivia buff for Radioinfo

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