George McCrae : Rock Your Baby
To be fair to George McCrae, he wasn’t exactly a one-hit wonder. But he didn’t have a huge catalogue of hits either so I guess he can fit in here as a few-hits wonder. And I’m not being mean – I absolutely love his songs and the album George McCrae has some fab tunes. “It’s Been So Long”, “I Get Lifted”, “Baby Baby Sweet Baby”, Honey I…you guys have to listen to the whole album. All of these songs used to be on the radio regularly and in our playlists. But, this song, “Rock Your Baby”, his debut single, was without doubt his absolute best. It also has some lovely memories for me. My very first slow-dance was to this song at our school party. Sweet!!
“Rock Your Baby” was actually the baby of two young Florida musicians, Henry Wayne Casey and Richard Finch, both of whom were members of KC & The Sunshine Band – Casey was the “KC”. Finch and Casey were also record producers and were looking to create a song especially for discos – all previous disco hits had been songs that crossed over from R&B. They were considering a few different singers for this song, including Gwen McCrae (George’s wife!). But George ended up recording it, mostly because he was literally the first person to walk into the studio. At that point, George’s own singing career was in the doldrums and he had become Gwen’s manager. As her manager he was waiting with Casey & Finch for her to show up to demo this. While they were waiting for Gwen, George decided to record a couple of takes, just for kicks. He absolutely crushed it and the rest is slow-dance history. Talk about right place, right time ?