Lottery Tickets of Their Day – More One Hit Wonders

We’d all like to get lucky in life just once. Writing or performing a song that hits the charts just once is like buying a lottery ticket in that it takes effort and a ton of blind luck. Here are a few songs that were one hit wonders, like lottery tickets of their day…

“Venus” by the Shocking Blue has turned out to be the most covered one hit wonder we can remember, and was a big hit for the Shocking blue in 1070 for a few reasons. The band was from the Hague Netherlands (okay that’s unusual), they didn’t speak a word of English (they had to phonetically sing the English words for the song) and it sold over 14 million units getting into the Beatles neighborhood. We loved the Bananarama version in the mid-80s, and so did Robbie van Leeuwen who made more money as the songs writer.

“Bid Bad John” was a spoken song by the singer that continues to give us quality sausage, Jimmy Dean! The song was hit in 1961 (as if you needed more evidence as to how awful the music scene was before the Beatles showed up) Jimmy’s label was about to drop him, Jimmy knew it, so he wrote a song on the flight from New York back to Nashville, hoping it would be a hit; it sure was.

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