(The Hit Hammer is where I'm reviewing each #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100. Starting from when the chart started in 1958 and eventually working my way to the present. To see my inspiration and more information about this blog, please refer to the "Poor Little Fool" post.)
Little Eva - "The Locomotion"
Hit Number 1: August 25, 1962
Stay at Number 1: 1 Week
For a good part of my life, I had wondered who the hell it was that originally did "The Locomotion". Apparently I didn't care to put the effort in to actually figuring it out, cause I very easily could've figured it out through a simple Google search. But doing this blog, it's taught me a lot of things. And upon all this research of #1 songs, I've finally figured out that "The Locomotion" goes all the way back to 1962, when a 19 year old who went by the stage name of "Little Eva" first did the song, and took it to #1 for a week in that same year.
"The Locomotion" was written by the familiar songwriting team of Carole King and Gerry Goffin, but they had Dee Dee Sharp in mind to record it. (Sharp was the one who did "Mashed Potato Time", and made it to #2 with it. It's a 7) But Sharp turned it down. Probably because it had nothing to do with mashed potatoes. But since she turned it down, it opened up the opportunity for Little Eva to record it herself, since she was the one who had recorded the demo in the first place. Since I like to provide you guys with fun facts here every so often, I've got another one: Little Eva was the babysitter for Carole King, and was introduced to her by the Cookies, who if you may remember, sang backup on Neil Sedaka's "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do". There are apparently rumors that the song came to be because King was playing music at home and Little Eva started dancing to this particular song while doing chores. That part isn't true, and it was only offered to Little Eva because King and Goffin thought she had a good singing voice. King herself sings backup on the track.
The song is a dance-song, with most of the lyrics being devoted to a sort of line dance that became popular after the release of the song. After the song became popular, when Little Eva performed the song live, she had to make up her own dance to this song while performing it, since it never had one before. The record is certainly a good deal of fun, and I can see why people actually wanted to make "the locomotion" a real thing. However, this version of my song is not my favorite, as it lacks some of the excitement and energy that later recordings would have. In fact, my favorite version of the song will appear in this blog at some point, when Grand Funk Railroad made a cover of the song and took it to #1 in 1974. Australian singer Kylie Minogue covered it as well, and her version went to #3 in the US in 1988. (Minogue won't appear in this blog. In fact, the closest she ever got to hitting #1 was with "The Locomotion". Her version is a 7)
Little Eva didn't hit #1 again, though she did have some sporadic hits in the early 1960s. Despite those other hit singles, everyone knows her today as "the locomotion" girl. Little Eva sadly died in 2003 due to cervical cancer at the age of 59. She was buried in a small cemetery in Belhaven, North Carolina. Her gravestone has the words "singing with the angels" on it, along with the image of a steam locomotive in honor of her smash hit.
GRADE: 6/10
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