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| Snapshot from the origin story. |
The Hit
I knew the chorus, of course, if from nothing more than hamming through it with my sisters back in late 1970s Ohio. The flash of recognition that hit when I heard the opening piano part for the first time in…shit, has three and a half decades, and then rolling right into, “so many nights, I’d sit by my window,” that surprised me.
It shouldn’t have. Like any sentient person who lived through the late 70s, I heard Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” scores, if not hundreds, of times. It haunted us all. Still, there’s a lot I didn’t know about it - starting with how goddamn massive it was. A 2017 interview in Goldmine Mag says that it remains the Warner Brothers label’s all-time biggest-selling single, but Wikipedia provides a fuller list of honors: when it dropped in 1977, it broke Billboard’s record for the longest stay at No. 1 when it stuck there for 10 weeks; after they did the math, Billboard ranked it at No. 7 all-time in the 50-year history of their Hot 100; it earned Boone a Grammy as Best New Artist of 1977 and an American Music Award for Favorite Pop Single for the same year; the guy who wrote it, Joe Brooks (more on him shortly), snagged Song of the Year awards from both the Grammys and the Oscars in 1978. And that’s the first pivot in the story.
Brooks wrote “You Light Up My Life” for a movie of the same name. Wikipedia’s muddles the timeline, but the movie/song came before Boone recorded it - a detail clarified in a 2019 interview/plug with Boone in a Virginia-based outlet called the Daily Presss. The female lead in You Light Up My Life, Didi Conn (Frenchie from the movie Grease, btw), lip-synched the song while another woman, Kacey Cisyk, sang the vocals. While the movie didn’t do so hot (may have bombed, factually), the song had legs to the point where the people involved could tell they had a hit on their hands. What happened next comes from two angles:
“It became clear the song would be a hit, but Brooks had a falling-out with Cisyk and her husband. He contracted Boone to re-record the vocals over the original recording, standing with her in the studio and demanding that every note Boone sang, every inflection, was an exact match to Cisyk’s original from the movie.”
Now, from Boone's perspective:
“Who knows what might have happened or not happened if I had been allowed to do my own interpretation of that song. But it was just a vengeful move on his part, I have never had a more frustrating or unpleasant time in a recording studio.”
There’s one last detail worth noting. Nearly everyone who heard “You Light Up My Life” understood it as a love song - as did Boone - but she sang it with a particular source of inspiration: God. Asked to elaborate on this by a blog title Grigware Interviews in 2011, she had this to say:
“That is the truth. I never did it with any agenda, like ‘I want people to know this’ or that I somehow wanted to evangelize the world with it (she laughs) or anything like that. It was my private interpretation…I never expected to answer that question, but when it was there, rather than make up some story...the truth was the lyrics lent themselves to a prayer-like quality, and that was my interpretation.”
There is more from there, and there is less…
The Rest of the Story
Born in 1956, Debby Boone came from two branches of musical royalty. Her mother, Shirley Foley Boone, was the daughter of mid-century (3rd wave?) country music fixture Clyde Julian “Red” Foley. Her famous name came from her father, the clean-cut crooner Pat Boone, so small wonder that Debby Boone grew up both around and in show business. On the one hand, she has memories of going to Vegas to see her father perform - again, this was Pat Boone, so different part of Vegas - and on the other, she feels like she had a normal childhood…trying to resist the snark…failing…so cheap…okeh, sure, but define normal.
In that sense, Boone’s childhood ended in her mid-teens when she and her three sisters started touring with their parents, as the Pat Boone Family. Before long, Pat and Shirley organized them into, first, the Boones, then the Boone Girls. They sand a lot of gospel, a nod to the role that Christian faith played in their upbringing, but they spiced up the act with covers of Motown songs. Debby Boone actually caught her first glimpse of fame during this early period when they scored solid hits with a cover of The Supremes’ “When the Love Light Starts Shining Through His Eyes” (which hit No. 25 in 1975; guessing she had God on the brain there to), and with “Hasta Manana,” a cover of an ABBA tune that peaked at No. 32 in 1977.
The Boones ended as a project when the two older sisters settled down to family life and the younger one (Laury, the only Boone sister Wikipedia cared to name) checked out for college. The left Debby the only Boone left on stage, but people around her encouraged her to continue as a solo artist…which was when “You Light Up My Life” fell into her lap. Its success caught everyone off-guard - Boone credits her mom as the exception - but, once the song and the album went platinum, it gave every reason for Pat and Debby to tour together again. Everything I read says things went fine from there…but then she returned to the studio.
When she and Brooks went to the studio to record the 1978 follow-up to You Light Up My Life, he came in with a single, “California.” They fleshed out the rest of the album from there…until Joe Brooks either pushed or jumped in the middle of production and passed the job off to Brooks Arthur (which inspired Boone's name of the album, Midstream, because she "jumped Brooks" part way through). When they pressed the album, Brooks’ material landed on one side and Arthur’s material on the other; none of that hurt the album, but it also didn’t help it: “California” topped out a No. 50, and two more songs released as a 45 rpm, “God Knows” b/w “Baby, I’m Yours,” stalled out at No. 74 (Boone wondered whether the mix of her squeaky-clean reputation and the title “God Knows” didn’t contribute to the scuttling). It’s worth noting that those same songs reached No. 22 on the country charts and No. 14 on the adult contemporary (AC) chart. I mean, if you’ve listened to Debby Boone. Related…
A minor hit connected with The Magic of Lassie (“When You’re Loved”) aside, Boone’s pop career largely dried up at that point - and "pop" is generous - but the inroads she’d made into the country charts opened up a new market. After her third, eponymous pop album didn’t do so well, she shifted to the country market and put together another hot streak - built, notably, on covers. She had some (fairly real, as I see it) success with some of her first singles - e.g., “Breakin’ in a Brand New Broken Heart” reached No. 29 and “My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own” popped all the way to No. 11 in 1979 (both covers of Connie Francis tunes) - but she had to wait till her second country album, 1980’s Love Has No Reason, to land her first No. 1 with “Are You on the Road to Lovin’ Me Again.” Fun detail: that single slotted straight into the middle of an historic first for the country music charts, when women held all the songs in the Top 5 spots. For the record, here's what landed on either side of Boone’s spot at No. 3:
5) Tammy Wynette/George Jones, “Two Story House”
4) Emmylou Harris, “Beneath Still Waters” (the most good country of the bunch for me)
2) Dottie West, “A Lesson in Leaving” (fwiw, my favorite of the lot)
1) Crystal Gayle, “It’s Like We Never Said Goodbye” (the crush I had on this woman…)
The tale of Debby Boone’s prime probably peaks there, but she kept busy during that time. A stage career that started in 1978 with a musical spin on O. Henry’s, Gift of the Magi lead to a couple NBC specials (Same Old Brand New Me in 1980 and One Step Closer in 1982), which lead to still more work on stage and TV. Boone herself likes to mention the fun she had playing against wholesome type when she played Rizzo in a run with Grease, but I got an (inevitable) thrill upon learning that she starred in a 1984 TV movie called Sins of the Past, the story of a call girl who finds Jesus and becomes an evangelical singer - a reverse from playing Rizzo and in the length of one movie. Co-starring Kim Cattrall and Kirstie Alley, by the way.
Boone returned to the Christian genre in 1980 and recorded even more hits over the next nine years, if for a narrower audience. She wears her faith openly and with the grace and/or awareness you’d expect from someone so used to the spotlight - i.e., she readily acknowledges it, but maintains a church/state relationship with wider audiences. Boone has put out a lot of material (most of which I skipped) and in a respectable range of genres, but all of it listens easy. She recorded a tribute to her mother-in-law, Rosemary Clooney (still more royalty; also, George Clooney is a cousin), Reflections of Rosemary, and she talked about working on a tribute for her grandfather, Red Foley, in a couple interviews I read. Another project she mooned over a bit was a throwback to “the glory days of Las Vegas” she called, Swing This, a nod to the Rat Pack era and, “glamour girl singers like Peggy Lee or Julie London...that kind of music, Louis Prima and Keeley Smith and the fun of the interplay with the band and the audience.”
She has many more credits than the ones listed about, but that’s pretty much her story. Now comes the hard part....
About the Sampler
Saying you…basically hate Debby Boone’s music feels a little like telling your mom she has shitty taste as a full-grown adult. That’s not a comment on my mom, or anyone else’s (my mom’s pretty damn awesome, fwiw), but Debby Boone just seems very, very nice and, because she’s not trying at all, cool. That she knew enough about the Top 40 at the time of “You Light Up My Life” at the time of its release, and “secular music” in general, for its success to catch her off guard tells you she cleared a “hep” threshold. So, with apologies to Debby Boone and my mom (who factually has questionably taste), the sampler:
I covered nearly all of it above - including the four other songs that topped the country Top 5 with Boone’s hit in 1980. I drew the bulk of it from Boone’s debut - all listed above, except “It’s Just a Matter of Time” (tonal nods to country in that) and an ABBA'ed up rendition of the Beatles’ “From Me to You” - and added a couple more from Midstream (“Another Goodbye,” “Oh, No, Not My Baby” and “I’d Rather Leave While I’m in Love,” a song she recalls fondly from her work with Arthur), and two more from Love Has No Reason (“Even a Fool Would Let Go” and “Love Put a Song in My Heart”…for its limited metaphor). One thing that stands out: her country material isn't wildly different from the pop stuff.
What keeps this from being another case where I say I can hear the quality - even with Boone’s comparatively unusual voice (an alto), it’s there, even in the music - is the overall blandness. It was clearly a pitch to a certain (square) audience, even if that audience had largely aged out. Except for that one absolute monster of a hit…I mean, that song. In the late 1970s. Mind-blowing…
Till the next one…
I knew the chorus, of course, if from nothing more than hamming through it with my sisters back in late 1970s Ohio. The flash of recognition that hit when I heard the opening piano part for the first time in…shit, has three and a half decades, and then rolling right into, “so many nights, I’d sit by my window,” that surprised me.
It shouldn’t have. Like any sentient person who lived through the late 70s, I heard Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” scores, if not hundreds, of times. It haunted us all. Still, there’s a lot I didn’t know about it - starting with how goddamn massive it was. A 2017 interview in Goldmine Mag says that it remains the Warner Brothers label’s all-time biggest-selling single, but Wikipedia provides a fuller list of honors: when it dropped in 1977, it broke Billboard’s record for the longest stay at No. 1 when it stuck there for 10 weeks; after they did the math, Billboard ranked it at No. 7 all-time in the 50-year history of their Hot 100; it earned Boone a Grammy as Best New Artist of 1977 and an American Music Award for Favorite Pop Single for the same year; the guy who wrote it, Joe Brooks (more on him shortly), snagged Song of the Year awards from both the Grammys and the Oscars in 1978. And that’s the first pivot in the story.
Brooks wrote “You Light Up My Life” for a movie of the same name. Wikipedia’s muddles the timeline, but the movie/song came before Boone recorded it - a detail clarified in a 2019 interview/plug with Boone in a Virginia-based outlet called the Daily Presss. The female lead in You Light Up My Life, Didi Conn (Frenchie from the movie Grease, btw), lip-synched the song while another woman, Kacey Cisyk, sang the vocals. While the movie didn’t do so hot (may have bombed, factually), the song had legs to the point where the people involved could tell they had a hit on their hands. What happened next comes from two angles:
“It became clear the song would be a hit, but Brooks had a falling-out with Cisyk and her husband. He contracted Boone to re-record the vocals over the original recording, standing with her in the studio and demanding that every note Boone sang, every inflection, was an exact match to Cisyk’s original from the movie.”
Now, from Boone's perspective:
“Who knows what might have happened or not happened if I had been allowed to do my own interpretation of that song. But it was just a vengeful move on his part, I have never had a more frustrating or unpleasant time in a recording studio.”
There’s one last detail worth noting. Nearly everyone who heard “You Light Up My Life” understood it as a love song - as did Boone - but she sang it with a particular source of inspiration: God. Asked to elaborate on this by a blog title Grigware Interviews in 2011, she had this to say:
“That is the truth. I never did it with any agenda, like ‘I want people to know this’ or that I somehow wanted to evangelize the world with it (she laughs) or anything like that. It was my private interpretation…I never expected to answer that question, but when it was there, rather than make up some story...the truth was the lyrics lent themselves to a prayer-like quality, and that was my interpretation.”
There is more from there, and there is less…
The Rest of the Story
Born in 1956, Debby Boone came from two branches of musical royalty. Her mother, Shirley Foley Boone, was the daughter of mid-century (3rd wave?) country music fixture Clyde Julian “Red” Foley. Her famous name came from her father, the clean-cut crooner Pat Boone, so small wonder that Debby Boone grew up both around and in show business. On the one hand, she has memories of going to Vegas to see her father perform - again, this was Pat Boone, so different part of Vegas - and on the other, she feels like she had a normal childhood…trying to resist the snark…failing…so cheap…okeh, sure, but define normal.
In that sense, Boone’s childhood ended in her mid-teens when she and her three sisters started touring with their parents, as the Pat Boone Family. Before long, Pat and Shirley organized them into, first, the Boones, then the Boone Girls. They sand a lot of gospel, a nod to the role that Christian faith played in their upbringing, but they spiced up the act with covers of Motown songs. Debby Boone actually caught her first glimpse of fame during this early period when they scored solid hits with a cover of The Supremes’ “When the Love Light Starts Shining Through His Eyes” (which hit No. 25 in 1975; guessing she had God on the brain there to), and with “Hasta Manana,” a cover of an ABBA tune that peaked at No. 32 in 1977.
The Boones ended as a project when the two older sisters settled down to family life and the younger one (Laury, the only Boone sister Wikipedia cared to name) checked out for college. The left Debby the only Boone left on stage, but people around her encouraged her to continue as a solo artist…which was when “You Light Up My Life” fell into her lap. Its success caught everyone off-guard - Boone credits her mom as the exception - but, once the song and the album went platinum, it gave every reason for Pat and Debby to tour together again. Everything I read says things went fine from there…but then she returned to the studio.
When she and Brooks went to the studio to record the 1978 follow-up to You Light Up My Life, he came in with a single, “California.” They fleshed out the rest of the album from there…until Joe Brooks either pushed or jumped in the middle of production and passed the job off to Brooks Arthur (which inspired Boone's name of the album, Midstream, because she "jumped Brooks" part way through). When they pressed the album, Brooks’ material landed on one side and Arthur’s material on the other; none of that hurt the album, but it also didn’t help it: “California” topped out a No. 50, and two more songs released as a 45 rpm, “God Knows” b/w “Baby, I’m Yours,” stalled out at No. 74 (Boone wondered whether the mix of her squeaky-clean reputation and the title “God Knows” didn’t contribute to the scuttling). It’s worth noting that those same songs reached No. 22 on the country charts and No. 14 on the adult contemporary (AC) chart. I mean, if you’ve listened to Debby Boone. Related…
A minor hit connected with The Magic of Lassie (“When You’re Loved”) aside, Boone’s pop career largely dried up at that point - and "pop" is generous - but the inroads she’d made into the country charts opened up a new market. After her third, eponymous pop album didn’t do so well, she shifted to the country market and put together another hot streak - built, notably, on covers. She had some (fairly real, as I see it) success with some of her first singles - e.g., “Breakin’ in a Brand New Broken Heart” reached No. 29 and “My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own” popped all the way to No. 11 in 1979 (both covers of Connie Francis tunes) - but she had to wait till her second country album, 1980’s Love Has No Reason, to land her first No. 1 with “Are You on the Road to Lovin’ Me Again.” Fun detail: that single slotted straight into the middle of an historic first for the country music charts, when women held all the songs in the Top 5 spots. For the record, here's what landed on either side of Boone’s spot at No. 3:
5) Tammy Wynette/George Jones, “Two Story House”
4) Emmylou Harris, “Beneath Still Waters” (the most good country of the bunch for me)
2) Dottie West, “A Lesson in Leaving” (fwiw, my favorite of the lot)
1) Crystal Gayle, “It’s Like We Never Said Goodbye” (the crush I had on this woman…)
The tale of Debby Boone’s prime probably peaks there, but she kept busy during that time. A stage career that started in 1978 with a musical spin on O. Henry’s, Gift of the Magi lead to a couple NBC specials (Same Old Brand New Me in 1980 and One Step Closer in 1982), which lead to still more work on stage and TV. Boone herself likes to mention the fun she had playing against wholesome type when she played Rizzo in a run with Grease, but I got an (inevitable) thrill upon learning that she starred in a 1984 TV movie called Sins of the Past, the story of a call girl who finds Jesus and becomes an evangelical singer - a reverse from playing Rizzo and in the length of one movie. Co-starring Kim Cattrall and Kirstie Alley, by the way.
Boone returned to the Christian genre in 1980 and recorded even more hits over the next nine years, if for a narrower audience. She wears her faith openly and with the grace and/or awareness you’d expect from someone so used to the spotlight - i.e., she readily acknowledges it, but maintains a church/state relationship with wider audiences. Boone has put out a lot of material (most of which I skipped) and in a respectable range of genres, but all of it listens easy. She recorded a tribute to her mother-in-law, Rosemary Clooney (still more royalty; also, George Clooney is a cousin), Reflections of Rosemary, and she talked about working on a tribute for her grandfather, Red Foley, in a couple interviews I read. Another project she mooned over a bit was a throwback to “the glory days of Las Vegas” she called, Swing This, a nod to the Rat Pack era and, “glamour girl singers like Peggy Lee or Julie London...that kind of music, Louis Prima and Keeley Smith and the fun of the interplay with the band and the audience.”
She has many more credits than the ones listed about, but that’s pretty much her story. Now comes the hard part....
About the Sampler
Saying you…basically hate Debby Boone’s music feels a little like telling your mom she has shitty taste as a full-grown adult. That’s not a comment on my mom, or anyone else’s (my mom’s pretty damn awesome, fwiw), but Debby Boone just seems very, very nice and, because she’s not trying at all, cool. That she knew enough about the Top 40 at the time of “You Light Up My Life” at the time of its release, and “secular music” in general, for its success to catch her off guard tells you she cleared a “hep” threshold. So, with apologies to Debby Boone and my mom (who factually has questionably taste), the sampler:
I covered nearly all of it above - including the four other songs that topped the country Top 5 with Boone’s hit in 1980. I drew the bulk of it from Boone’s debut - all listed above, except “It’s Just a Matter of Time” (tonal nods to country in that) and an ABBA'ed up rendition of the Beatles’ “From Me to You” - and added a couple more from Midstream (“Another Goodbye,” “Oh, No, Not My Baby” and “I’d Rather Leave While I’m in Love,” a song she recalls fondly from her work with Arthur), and two more from Love Has No Reason (“Even a Fool Would Let Go” and “Love Put a Song in My Heart”…for its limited metaphor). One thing that stands out: her country material isn't wildly different from the pop stuff.
What keeps this from being another case where I say I can hear the quality - even with Boone’s comparatively unusual voice (an alto), it’s there, even in the music - is the overall blandness. It was clearly a pitch to a certain (square) audience, even if that audience had largely aged out. Except for that one absolute monster of a hit…I mean, that song. In the late 1970s. Mind-blowing…
Till the next one…
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