In London, Stewart auditioned for the record producer Barry Leng, and he recorded her singing “Knock On Wood.” Their version of the song is a weird and slightly awkward one. It was a touring show when Stewart joined the cast, but she stayed with the play when it came to Broadway, and then to London. For a few years, she was part of the cast of Bubbling Brown Sugar, a stage musical about the Harlem Renaissance. (She changed her name from Amy Stewart, her birth name, when she learned the the Actor’s Equity union already had an Amy Stewart.) After dropping out of Howard University, Stewart joined the DC Repertory Dance Company. The former heavyweight boxing champ Joe Frazier released a version of the song in 1976, the idea presumably being that Frazier had knocked on a lot of things.Īmii Stewart had never released a single before she did her cover of “Knock On Wood.” Stewart came from Washington, DC, and she started studying dance as a young girl. David Bowie had a top-10 UK hit with a live cover of “Knock On Wood” in 1974. Buddy Guy, the American Breed, and Cher all recorded versions of the song. A 1967 cover from Otis Redding and Carla Thomas peaked at #30. His highest-charting single, 1968’s “Bring It On Home To Me,” peaked at #17.) But “Knock On Wood” stayed in the collective unconscious. (Indeed, Eddie Floyd never had a top-10 hit. When “Knock On Wood” came out in 1966, it was a #1 R&B single, but it only did moderately well on the pop charts, peaking at #30. It’s a simple enough song, but it’s got a great hook: “It’s like thunder! Lightning! The way you love me is frightening!” Floyd recorded it himself, giving it a raw and sweaty vocal performance. Inspired by a story about Floyd hiding under the bed with his brothers during thunderstorms in Alabama as a kid, they came up with “Knock On Wood,” a song about being really into your relationship and worrying that you can lose it anytime. One night at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Floyd got together with Steve Cropper, the Stax house guitarist who co-wrote “ (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay” with Otis Redding, to work on some music. (Early in their career, the Ohio Players had been a backing band for the Falcons.) In the mid-’60s, after the Falcons broke up, Floyd went to work for Stax Records in Memphis, where he wrote songs for people like Pickett and Otis Redding. Pretty weird!Įddie Floyd, the man behind the original “Knock On Wood,” was an Alabama native who’d grown up partly in Detroit and who sang, early on, in the Falcons, a group that also included Wilson Pickett. So the disco cover of the soul song was the bigger hit, but it’s also the one that has mostly disappeared from history. But you never hear the Stewart version anymore, and the Floyd one still pops up on soundtracks from time to time. Then Amii Stewart came out with a stiff disco take on it that eclipsed the original in popularity completely. It was only a moderate hit, but it stuck around. In its original form, “Knock On Wood” had been a beautifully distilled piece of nasty Southern R&B. Eddie Floyd’s original version of “Knock On Wood” was only 13 years old when Stewart’s take on the song hit. That’s the case, anyway, with Amii Stewart’s version of “Knock On Wood,” probably one of the least-remembered big hits of the entire disco era. And by the time it reached its precarious popularity peak, disco was completely removed from soul - so far removed, in fact, that a disco version of an old soul song could almost sound like a joke. It caught on with white audiences in a way that soul - or non-Motown soul, anyway - only rarely did. But disco evolved into its own thing, especially as the synthetic Giorgio Moroder/Pete Bellotte Euro-disco sound came in. In the early days of disco, DJs in New York’s gay clubs would play fast, rhythmic soul songs, thus giving career boosts to people like ex-Temptation Eddie Kendricks. The relationship between soul music and disco is a fascinating one. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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