The Story Behind the Music
Stories
The stories behind the defining songs: what they mean, where they came from, and why they matter.
Rim Tim Tagi Dim
Baby Lasagna
Marko Purišić, who performs as Baby Lasagna, wrote Rim Tim Tagi Dim alone in his bedroom. By his account the spark was a job on a cruise ship that he had been offered and turned down. The…
Read the storyCoup du marteau
Tam Sir
Tam Sir was not trying to write a football anthem. The 25-year-old Ivorian beatmaker told Jeune Afrique that he simply wanted a song for the end-of-year holidays, because in Abidjan a hit…
Read the storyBaraye
Shervin Hajipour
After the death of Mahsa Amini in September 2022, a young woman arrested for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly who died in morality police custody, Iranians on social media began…
Read the storyPatria y Vida
Gente de Zona
The title turns a slogan inside out. In March 1960, after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro coined the phrase Patria o muerte, homeland or death, and it became one of the…
Read the storyRussian Woman
Manizha
By her own account, Manizha wrote "Russian Woman" on 8 March 2020 while on tour, but did not perform it until a year later. She described it as a song about how Russian women's sense of…
Read the storySud Pang
Milli
Milli started out competing on the Thai TV show The Rapper 2, where judges praised her expressive delivery. A fan of hip-hop since about the eighth grade, she has named Nicki Minaj as her…
Read the storyApna Time Aayega
Divine
Vivian Fernandes discovered hip-hop through a school friend's T-shirt printed with the cover of 50 Cent's Get Rich or Die Tryin'. Rapping as Divine, he made songs about growing up in the…
Read the storySoy Tico (con Editus)
Carlos Guzmán
Carlos Guzmán grew up in a house full of music in Desamparados, outside San José. He learned guitar at five, got his own guitar from an uncle at six, and that same year recorded his first…
Read the storyMe Rehúso
Danny Ocean
Danny Ocean recorded Me Rehúso on Valentine's Day. He had moved to Miami to get away from the turmoil in Venezuela, but the woman he liked was still in college and could not come with him.…
Read the storySoubour
Songhoy Blues
In 2012 the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad took control of northern Mali and were soon pushed out by Ansar Dine, a jihadist group that banned cigarettes, alcohol and music.…
Read the storyAlright
Kendrick Lamar
Pharrell Williams built the beat in 2014 with another rapper, Fabolous, in mind. Kendrick Lamar started writing to it as soon as he heard it, but at first felt it did not sit well with the…
Read the storyWake Me Up
Avicii
Wake Me Up arrived in 2013 as something genuinely new: a dance record built on an acoustic guitar and a soulful vocal from Aloe Blacc, fusing house music with folk and country. Tim…
Read the storyTikur Sew
Teddy Afro
Teddy Afro's 2005 album Yasteseryal arrived during the tense months around Ethiopia's general election, and its title track, which criticised government corruption, was one of four songs…
Read the storyGangnam Style
PSY
Psy spent about 30 late nights hunting for a dance. By his account to The New York Times, Korean fans expected a lot from his moves, so he and choreographer Lee Ju-sun tried out a string of…
Read the storyDifferentology
Bunji Garlin
Differentology started as a jam. By Bunji Garlin's account in a 2013 radio interview, the song came to him during an impromptu studio session with the guitarist Nigel Rojas, whose Spanish…
Read the storySout El Horeya
Cairokee
Cairokee did not start out singing in Arabic. Amir Eid and Sherif Hawary, friends since school, began in 2003 with an English-language band called Black Star, playing covers of English…
Read the storySomeone Like You
Adele
Adele has said she wrote the first ideas for Someone Like You sitting on the end of her bed with a cold, waiting for her bath to run, after learning that the man she had expected to marry…
Read the storyThe Future
Simon Lynge
Simon Lynge was born in Holstebro, Denmark, in 1980 but grew up in Qaqortoq in southern Greenland. His father was a theatrical performer and accordionist who played with Rasmus Lyberth. By…
Read the storyHips Don't Lie
Shakira
By early 2006 Shakira's English album Oral Fixation, Vol. 2 was selling only moderately, and Epic Records wanted a hit to revive it. The answer came from Wyclef Jean. According to one…
Read the storyDroit Chemin
Fally Ipupa
In the world of Congolese bands, a singer did not simply go solo. Fally Ipupa was conductor of Koffi Olomide's Quartier Latin International and bound by a seven-year contract when, in late…
Read the storyMi Niña Lola
Buika
Concha Buika was born in Palma de Mallorca in 1972 into a family of political exiles from Equatorial Guinea. Her father was the former politician and writer Juan Balboa Boneke. She grew up…
Read the storyWhile My Guitar Gently Weeps
Jake Shimabukuro
In April 2006 someone posted a video of Jake Shimabukuro on YouTube without telling him. It showed the Honolulu ukulele player working through George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently…
Read the storyLiving Like a Refugee
Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars
When rebels attacked Freetown in the late 1990s, during Sierra Leone's civil war, the singer Reuben Koroma, his wife Grace and their friend Franco, all part of the city's music scene, fled…
Read the storyAfrican Queen
2Baba
Before "African Queen", 2Baba was one third of Plantashun Boiz, the trio he formed in 2000 with Blackface and Faze. After two albums the group broke up, he signed with Kennis Music, and on…
Read the storyGasolina
Daddy Yankee
The voice that asks for more gasoline on "Gasolina" is not Daddy Yankee's. The line is sung by the singer Glory, who was not credited on the record. Daddy Yankee wrote the song in 2003 with…
Read the storyLocked Up
Akon
Akon was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1973, to the Senegalese percussionist Mor Thiam and the dancer Kine Gueye Thiam. He spent much of his childhood in Senegal, which he called his…
Read the storyEvery Little Part of Me
Julie Berthelsen
Julie Berthelsen was born in Aarhus in 1979 to a Greenlandic mother and a Danish father. When she was a few months old her parents split up, and her mother took Julie and her sister first…
Read the storyHeartbeats
Jose Gonzalez
Heartbeats is not a Jose Gonzalez original. It was written and first recorded by the Swedish electronic duo The Knife as a pulsing synth-pop track. Gonzalez, a Swedish musician of Argentine…
Read the storyEveryway That I Can
Sertab Erener
When TRT announced its 2003 Eurovision entry in February, many Turks did not like it. Some found Sertab Erener's song too racy, others too pop, and her decision to sing it entirely in…
Read the storyCabin in the Wata
Walter Ferguson
Walter Ferguson was two when his parents moved from Panama to Cahuita, a small fishing village on Costa Rica's Caribbean coast, and he spent nearly all of his long life there. His father…
Read the storyObsesión
Aventura
The group's first album sold a total of five copies. They started in the Bronx as Los Tinellers, a Spanish spelling of "teenagers", four young Dominican Americans playing for free on the…
Read the storyPremier Gaou
Magic System
Magic System's first album flopped. The group had grown out of a sprawling Abidjan collective of more than fifty members, and by 1996 the four who remained, A'salfo, Goude, Tino and…
Read the storyChaiyya Chaiyya
A.R. Rahman
The words go back centuries, to the Sufi poet Bulleh Shah and his folk song "Tere Ishq Nachaya". Singer Sukhwinder Singh suggested it to A.R. Rahman, who was looking for a Punjabi…
Read the storyTunak Tunak Tun
Daler Mehndi
By the late 1990s Daler Mehndi was the biggest pop star in India, and, by his own account, he was tired of hearing critics say his music only sold because of the beautiful dancing women in…
Read the storyDiário de um Detento
Racionais MC's
On 2 October 1992, military police stormed a rebellion at Carandiru, then the largest prison in Latin America, in the north of São Paulo, and 111 inmates were killed. It became known as the…
Read the storySnow on the Sahara
Anggun
The song was born in French. Producer Erick Benzi wrote, produced and arranged La neige au Sahara for the Indonesian singer Anggun, and songwriter Nikki Matheson then adapted it into…
Read the storyŞımarık
Tarkan
Tarkan first heard the song from Sezen Aksu while preparing for a television shoot, and he liked it so much that he kept asking for it. According to the Turkish account, Aksu finally gave…
Read the storyAlane
Wes
Alane is sung in Cameroon's Duala language, and in 1997 that did not stop it from becoming one of the biggest songs in Europe. Wes, a Cameroonian singer, wrote it, and the French producer…
Read the storyChan Chan
Compay Segundo
Compay Segundo always insisted he did not compose "Chan Chan"; he dreamed it. By his account he woke one morning in 1984 with four notes in his head, heard as clearly as if a band were…
Read the storySzerelem, szerelem
Márta Sebestyén
Márta Sebestyén was born in Budapest in 1957. Her mother was a composer who had studied music with Zoltán Kodály, and when Márta was seven her father, an economist, came back from a…
Read the storyHonfoglalás
Demjén Ferenc
Ferenc Demjén was born in Diósgyőr in 1946, the son of an engineer at the local ironworks who lost his job for political reasons, after which the family moved to Budapest. In his early…
Read the storySibèba
Hijas del Sol
Hijas del Sol are an aunt and her niece. Piruchi Apo Botupá and Paloma Loribo Apo both come from the island of Bioko, and they write and sing in both Bubi and Spanish. Their first public…
Read the storyHow Bizarre
OMC
The video cost $7,000, paid by NZ On Air. Director Lee Baker shot it on a soundstage in Ponsonby and at Ellerslie Racecourse in Auckland, with OMC's singer Pauly Fuemana at the wheel of a…
Read the storyAng Huling El Bimbo
Eraserheads
Ely Buendia has explained the song simply. In a podcast interview he recalled a huge crush on an older girl who taught him a dance, and said it was the first time he had truly been in love.…
Read the storyZombie
The Cranberries
On 20 March 1993 two IRA bombs hidden in litter bins exploded on a shopping street in Warrington, England. Three-year-old Johnathan Ball died at the scene; twelve-year-old Tim Parry died in…
Read the storyDiaraby
Ali Farka Touré
Ali Farka Touré was born in 1939 on the banks of the Niger and grew up in Niafunké. His family were of the noble caste, and in Malian society music was the duty of the griots, so he was…
Read the story7 Seconds
Youssou N'Dour
The seven seconds of the title are the first moments of a child's life. As Neneh Cherry explained it, they are the brief time before a newborn knows anything about the problems and violence…
Read the storyDead Men Don't Smoke Marijuana
S. E. Rogie
S. E. Rogie was born Sooliman Ernest Rogers in 1926 in Fonikoh, in Sierra Leone's Pujehun District. He paid for basic schooling as a boy by cutting and selling firewood, and later worked in…
Read the story海闊天空
Beyond
Wong Ka Kui wrote Boundless Oceans, Vast Skies to mark ten years of Beyond, the Hong Kong rock band he led and co-founded. Its theme, personal freedom and holding on to your dreams, came…
Read the storyLa Gota Fría
Carlos Vives
The song began as a grudge. Emiliano Zuleta Baquero, the leading accordionist of La Guajira, once met his rival from Cesar, Lorenzo Morales, in the village of Guacoche. Zuleta borrowed…
Read the storyLa Llorona
Chavela Vargas
Nobody knows exactly where "La Llorona" comes from. Around 1941 the composer Andrés Henestrosa said he had heard it in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and he popularised it, perhaps adding…
Read the storySomewhere Over the Rainbow
Israel Kamakawiwoʻole
The recording that carried Israel Kamakawiwoʻole's voice around the world was made almost by accident. One night in 1988 Iz phoned a recording studio at three in the morning, and engineer…
Read the storyCanção do Mar
Dulce Pontes
"Canção do Mar" began life under another name. Written by Frederico de Brito and Ferrer Trindade, it was first recorded by Amália Rodrigues as "Solidão", solitude, for the soundtrack of the…
Read the storySodade
Cesária Évora
Sodade was already decades old when Cesária Évora made it famous. Armando Zeferino Soares wrote it in the 1950s, and its title is the Cape Verdean Creole form of the Portuguese saudade,…
Read the storyShima Uta
The Boom
Kazufumi Miyazawa, singer of The Boom, went to Okinawa for a photo shoot and came back with a song. As he told fRoots in 2003, he visited the Himeyuri Peace Museum and learned about the…
Read the storyNan Arayo (I Know)
Seo Taiji and Boys
On April 11, 1992, a trio in baggy streetwear and backwards baseball caps performed their debut single on an MBC talent show and got the lowest score from the jury. The song was Nan Arayo,…
Read the storyTreaty
Yothu Yindi
In 1988, the year of Australia's Bicentennial, Prime Minister Bob Hawke went to the Barunga Festival in the Northern Territory, where Galarrwuy Yunupingu and Wenten Rubuntja handed him a…
Read the storyTook the Children Away
Archie Roach
Archie Roach was two or three years old when government agencies took him and his brothers and sisters from their family and placed them in an orphanage. He was one of the Stolen…
Read the storyBurbujas de Amor
Juan Luis Guerra
For decades, bachata carried a stigma in the Dominican Republic. Under Trujillo and long after, middle- and upper-class Dominicans dismissed the guitar music of the rural poor as vulgar and…
Read the storyAmor Eterno
Juan Gabriel
Juan Gabriel was on tour in Acapulco in 1974 when the news reached him that his mother had died. By his own account, that moment is the root of Amor Eterno, an elegy in which the loss, and…
Read the storyTajabone
Ismaël Lô
Tajabone is the name of a Senegalese folk celebration held by young people during Tamxarit, the local name for the Islamic holiday of Ashura. At nightfall, boys and girls in costume go…
Read the storyBongkar
Iwan Fals
Iwan Fals already knew what singing about power could cost. In April 1984, after performing two unrecorded songs in Pekanbaru, one of them about a roadside prostitute married to a man named…
Read the storyKawa no Nagare no Yō ni
Misora Hibari
The river in Kawa no Nagare no Yō ni is New York's East River. The lyricist Yasushi Akimoto was living in New York when he wrote the words in a café there, homesick and far from Japan. He…
Read the storyGula Gula
Mari Boine
Mari Boine grew up in Gámehisnjárga, a village on the Anarjohka river in Karasjok, in a Sámi family that lived from salmon fishing and farming. In the strict Laestadian Christian world…
Read the storyEl Gran Varón
Willie Colón
"El Gran Varón" was never meant to be a hit. Willie Colón put it out as the B-side of "La palomilla", on Top Secrets, his 1989 album and his last for the Fania label, and it was never…
Read the storyLa Rebelión
Joe Arroyo
Joe Arroyo grew up in the Nariño neighbourhood of Cartagena, on Colombia's Caribbean coast, and from the age of eight he was singing in the brothels of the city's red-light district. As an…
Read the storyMojoj majci (Ruža hrvatska)
Prljavo kazalište
Prljavo kazalište started in 1977 as a punk band from Dubrava, a working-class suburb of Zagreb, and their first album in 1979 was boycotted by state media in socialist Yugoslavia for its…
Read the storyA Minha Casinha
Xutos & Pontapes
"A Minha Casinha" is older than the band that made it famous. Composed by António Melo with words by João Silva Tavares, it was first sung by the actress Milú in the 1943 film O Costa do…
Read the storyGruppa krovi
Kino
Kino first played "Gruppa krovi" on 3 June 1987 at the fifth Leningrad Rock Club festival, and according to people who were there, the audience received it coolly, perhaps because they were…
Read the storyBuffalo Stance
Neneh Cherry
Buffalo Stance first surfaced in 1986 as a throwaway. It was the B-side of Looking Good Diving, a Stock Aitken Waterman single by the duo Morgan-McVey, and went under the title Looking Good…
Read the storyHijo de la Luna
Mecano
José María Cano wrote Hijo de la Luna as a dark fairy tale, and Ana Torroja sang it for Mecano on the 1986 album Entre el cielo y el suelo. It tells a tragic Romani legend. A Roma woman…
Read the storyBeds Are Burning
Midnight Oil
In 1986 Midnight Oil left the city stages behind and toured the Outback, playing to remote Aboriginal communities and seeing for themselves how serious the problems of health and living…
Read the storyFairytale of New York
The Pogues
Shane MacGowan claimed it started with a bet: producer Elvis Costello wagered the Pogues could not write a Christmas hit. Their manager remembered it as his own idea. Either way, in 1985…
Read the storyYé Ké Yé Ké
Mory Kanté
Mory Kanté was born in 1950 into one of Guinea's best-known families of griots, hereditary musicians, and at seven he was sent to Mali to learn the kora and the vocal traditions a griot…
Read the storyLife Is Life
Laibach
Laibach formed in the mining town of Trbovlje on 1 June 1980 and chose a name designed to provoke: the German name for Ljubljana, used under Austrian rule and during the Nazi occupation.…
Read the story一無所有
Cui Jian
On 9 May 1986 Cui Jian walked onto a televised music competition with his band ADO and sang a song he had written himself. Nothing to My Name caused a sensation. It was one of the first…
Read the storyCaruso
Lucio Dalla
Lucio Dalla wrote it after a night in a hotel room in Sorrento. By his own account to the Corriere della Sera, he had stopped at the Excelsior Vittoria and found himself in the very room…
Read the storyA quién le importa
Alaska
The song began on holiday. Carlos Berlanga started writing it on the Greek island of Mykonos, and when he got back to Spain he finished the lyrics with his bandmate Nacho Canut. The two…
Read the storyMario
Franco Luambo
Franco had been circling the subject for years. In Mobutu's Zaire of the 1980s, a new bourgeois class was flaunting its wealth, and relationships built on money were becoming more visible:…
Read the storyTake On Me
a-ha
The riff is older than a-ha. Pål Waaktaar and Magne Furuholmen first came up with it as teenagers in their earlier band Bridges, in a tune called Miss Eerie that they felt sounded too much…
Read the storyRunning Up That Hill
Kate Bush
In 1983 Kate Bush left London for rural Sevenoaks and set up a writing room with a piano, a Fairlight CMI synthesiser and an eight-track recorder. Running Up That Hill was the first song…
Read the storyHallelujah
Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen claimed he wrote around 150 draft verses for Hallelujah, and his notebooks bear out a long struggle of revisions. The story goes that during one session at New York's Royalton…
Read the storyPlastic Love
Mariya Takeuchi
When Mariya Takeuchi made Variety in 1984, it was a comeback, and for the first time she wrote every song herself. She was pregnant during the sessions and has said she wrote simply because…
Read the storyPoi E
Pātea Māori Club
The record labels were not interested. Poi E had words by the Māori linguist Ngoi Pewhairangi, who wanted to give young Māori pride in their identity through a pop song, and music by…
Read the storyEvom Nguan
Maelé
Martiniano Abaga Elé Ndoho, born in Bata in 1958, began singing in 1976 under the name Maelé, mostly in Fang, the language of his people. His early hits got generous airtime on Radio Bata…
Read the storyL'italiano
Toto Cutugno
The idea came to Toto Cutugno after a concert in Toronto, where he played to an audience of Italian emigrants and wanted to write something for them. His collaborator Cristiano Minellono…
Read the storyBrigadier Sabari
Alpha Blondy
The record opens with a police siren. Alpha Blondy's Brigadier Sabari, from his 1982 debut album Jah Glory, tells of a night raid by the security forces in the streets of Abidjan: a young…
Read the storyBam Bam
Sister Nancy
Sister Nancy's 1982 hit was built from borrowed parts, in the best Jamaican tradition. Its instrumental is the Stalag riddim, first heard on Ansell Collins's "Stalag 17", and its chorus…
Read the storyFrench Letter
Herbs
Radio stations had a problem with the title. A French letter is British slang for a condom, so when Herbs released French Letter in 1982, DJs who played it at all tended to call it A Letter…
Read the storyMillion alykh roz
Alla Pugacheva
Before it was Russian, this was a Latvian song. Raimonds Pauls wrote the melody for "Dāvāja Māriņa", with words by Leons Briedis, and it was performed in Latvia in 1981. Its lyric was a…
Read the storyFebri Funaná
Bulimundo
For most of its history funaná was treated as music not fit for the capital. Built on the diatonic accordion, called gaita, and the ferrinho, a metal strip scraped with a knife, it came…
Read the storySoy Provinciano
Chacalón
"Soy provinciano" was written for a film that was never made. The composer, arranger and bassist Juan Rebaza Cárdenas created words and music for the soundtrack of a planned movie about…
Read the storyGülpembe
Barış Manço
By 1981 Barış Manço was one of the pioneers of Anatolian rock, and his album Sözüm Meclisten Dışarı, made with his band Kurtalan Ekspres, was full of hits, among them a rural nostalgia song…
Read the storyThe Winner Takes It All
ABBA
The Winner Takes It All is one of ABBA's most enduring hits, and it is also one of pop's most quietly devastating songs. Bjorn Ulvaeus wrote the lyric not long after his divorce from…
Read the storyCaballo Viejo
Simón Díaz
Simón Díaz liked to tell the story himself. In 1980 he travelled to the Venezuelan plains to record a programme and met a young woman named Maigualida. By his account, they fell for each…
Read the storyRabbana
Mohammad Reza Shajarian
In the summer of 1979, months after the revolution, Iran's state broadcaster was considering stopping music production altogether. Its head asked Mohammad-Reza Shajarian, then a staff…
Read the storySolo le Pido a Dios
León Gieco
León Gieco wrote Solo le Pido a Dios in 1978 at his parents' house in Cañada Rosquín, the small town in southern Santa Fe province where he grew up, and he wrote it alongside his father,…
Read the storyViljen Er Styrke
Rasmus Lyberth
Rasmus Lyberth was born in Maniitsoq in 1951 and grew up in Nuuk, the son of the teacher and writer Erik Lyberth. He was performing and playing guitar by the age of twelve. A few years…
Read the storyAnak
Freddie Aguilar
Freddie Aguilar left home at 18 without finishing school. His father had hoped he would become a lawyer and was deeply disappointed. Aguilar wandered far from home with little more than his…
Read the storyEl Cantante
Héctor Lavoe
By 1977 Héctor Lavoe's career looked to be fading. Drug abuse and depression had taken a toll on his life and work, and some people were already predicting the end. That year, by one…
Read the storyLublana je Bulana
Pankrti
In 1977 two friends from the Ljubljana suburb of Kodeljevo, Gregor Tomc and Peter Lovšin, decided to start a band. They had been listening to British punk, Lovšin was already writing…
Read the story月亮代表我的心 (The Moon Represents My Heart)
Teresa Teng
The melody was nearly thrown away. Composer Weng Ching-hsi sketched ideas in the parks around Boston while studying at Berklee, and back in Taiwan he judged this one not good enough and put…
Read the storyGod Save the Queen
Sex Pistols
The song started life under the title “No Future”, co-written by bassist Glen Matlock, who had left the band by the time it came out. Guitarist Steve Jones remembered that Matlock's first…
Read the storyLegalize It
Peter Tosh
When Peter Tosh's "Legalize It" came out in Jamaica in 1975, the title track was banned. The former Wailer had written it as a response to his ongoing harassment by the Jamaican police and…
Read the storySweet Mother
Prince Nico Mbarga
In 1974 EMI turned down the demo of "Sweet Mother", reportedly citing its childish appeal. Decca and Philips said no as well. Prince Nico Mbarga, born in Abakaliki to a Nigerian mother and…
Read the storyZombie
Fela Kuti
Fela Kuti's "Zombie" is a scathing attack on the Nigerian military, using the image of the zombie to describe how its soldiers operate. Released in Nigeria by Coconut Records in 1976, with…
Read the storyHot Koki
André-Marie Tala
André-Marie Tala built his first guitar as a boy in Bandjoun, with a childhood friend, out of bamboo ribs and fishing line, and taught himself the rhythms he had grown up with. He lost his…
Read the storyErè Mèla Mèla
Mahmoud Ahmed
Mahmoud Ahmed grew up in Addis Ababa's Mercato district, left school with little education and worked as a shoeshiner before taking a job as a handyman at the Arizona Club, the after-hours…
Read the storyKhon Kab Khwai
Caravan
Caravan grew out of the 1973 democracy movement. Its founders, Surachai Jantimathawn, known as Nga Caravan, and Wirasak Sunthawnsi, were student activists at Ramkhamhaeng University when…
Read the storyEndless Vibrations
Lord Shorty
Garfield Blackman, born in Lengua Village near Princes Town, made his name as Lord Shorty with the 1963 hit Cloak and Dagger. Then he spent nearly a decade experimenting. He wanted to fuse…
Read the storyGol-e Yakh
Kourosh Yaghmaei
Kourosh Yaghmaei got his first instrument at ten, a santur from his father, and taught himself Persian traditional music because he had no teacher. At fifteen he bought an electric guitar…
Read the storyEl Rey
Vicente Fernández
José Alfredo Jiménez never saw El Rey reach the top. He wrote and recorded the song in 1971, a portrait of a rough, hard-living man who insists that whatever his circumstances, he is still…
Read the storyEntre dos Aguas
Paco de Lucía
Paco de Lucía's most famous piece was never meant to exist. While recording the 1973 album Fuente y caudal, producer José Torregrosa decided the record was one track short and told the…
Read the storyJolene
Dolly Parton
Onstage in 1988, Dolly Parton told her audience that "Jolene" was based on a true story, which was why she did not like to sing it too often. As she has told it, a red-headed bank clerk…
Read the storySoul Makossa
Manu Dibango
Soul Makossa was the B-side. In 1972 Cameroon was hosting the Africa Cup of Nations for the first time, and Manu Dibango recorded a hymn for the national team, with words by the poet and…
Read the storyConstrução
Chico Buarque
Chico Buarque came home from Italy in March 1970, after more than a year of voluntary distance from the repression of Brazil's military dictatorship. The song he released the following year…
Read the storyDum Maro Dum
Asha Bhosle
The title translates roughly as an invitation to take a puff, and Bollywood had heard nothing like it. In Dev Anand's 1971 film Hare Rama Hare Krishna, shot in Kathmandu, Zeenat Aman plays…
Read the storyOn Raglan Road
The Dubliners
"On Raglan Road" began life as a poem by Patrick Kavanagh, one of Ireland's major twentieth-century writers. He wrote it about Hilda Moriarty, a young medical student he became infatuated…
Read the storyGrândola, Vila Morena
Jose Afonso
At twenty past midnight on 25 April 1974, Rádio Renascença played "Grândola, Vila Morena", and none of the radio hosts knew what it meant. For the officers of the Armed Forces Movement it…
Read the storyAchim Iseul (Morning Dew)
Kim Min-gi
Morning Dew started out with a government prize. Kim Min-ki wrote it in 1971 and it appeared on his debut album, though the singer Yang Hee-eun released her version a month earlier. It was…
Read the storyBig Yellow Taxi
Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell wrote Big Yellow Taxi on her first trip to Hawaii. As she told the journalist Robert Hilburn in 1996, she took a taxi to her hotel, and the next morning she opened the…
Read the storyOye Como Va
Santana
Before it was a rock anthem, Oye Como Va was a cha-cha-chá. Tito Puente wrote and recorded it with his orchestra in 1962 for Tico Records, with a repeating piano figure of block chords, a…
Read the storyAlfonsina y el Mar
Mercedes Sosa
Alfonsina Storni was born in Switzerland in 1892 and grew up in Argentina, where she worked in a hat factory as a teenager, became a rural schoolteacher and, in Buenos Aires, raised a child…
Read the storyJe t'aime... moi non plus
Serge Gainsbourg
Serge Gainsbourg first wrote "Je t'aime... moi non plus" for Brigitte Bardot in late 1967. As the story goes, after a disappointing date she phoned him and, as a penance, asked for the most…
Read the storyGyöngyhajú lány
Omega
Gyöngyhajú lány, the pearly-haired girl, began with a lyric by Anna Adamis written in 1968. Gábor Presser set it to music the following year, János Kóbor sang it, and Omega put it on their…
Read the storyRockia
Bella Bellow
"Rockia" is the title track of the only album Bella Bellow ever made. In 1968 her former drawing teacher Paul Ahyi introduced her to the Togolese singer Gérard Akueson, who became her…
Read the storyIsraelites
Desmond Dekker
By Desmond Dekker's own account, the song began on a walk through a park, eating popcorn, when he overheard a couple arguing about money. She needed more; he said his work did not pay…
Read the storyL'Estaca
Lluís Llach
Grandfather Siset was a real man. Narcís Llansa, a barber in Besalú, had been elected a town councillor for the Catalan republican left in 1931, and after the Civil War Franco's authorities…
Read the storyHey Jude
The Beatles
In May 1968 John Lennon and his wife Cynthia separated after his affair with the artist Yoko Ono. The following month Paul McCartney drove out to the family home in Weybridge to visit their…
Read the storyLa Grey Zuliana
Ricardo Aguirre
Ricardo Aguirre was a primary school teacher before he was a star. Born in Maracaibo in 1939, he qualified at 19, taught in Bachaquero and Maracaibo and worked as a radio announcer, while…
Read the storyComme d'Habitude
Claude François
In February 1967, the composer Jacques Revaux was on holiday at a hotel in Megève when he realised he was late delivering four songs to the producer Norbert Saada, so he wrote all four in a…
Read the storyRespect
Aretha Franklin
Aretha Franklin cut "Respect" in New York on Valentine's Day, 1967, but the song had started life as Otis Redding's. His 1965 version was a man's demand to be treated well when he came home…
Read the storyTiny Bubbles
Don Ho
"Tiny Bubbles" was never meant for Don Ho. Leon Pober wrote it for Lawrence Welk, the bandleader famous for his champagne music, and Welk turned it down. It reached Ho only because a…
Read the storySip Hok Pi Haeng Khwam Lang
Suraphol Sombatcharoen
Suraphol Sombatcharoen first got into trouble for singing. As a young navy nursing student he kept slipping out at night to perform, until his commander caught him and locked him in the…
Read the storyCucurrucucú Paloma
Lola Beltrán
Lola Beltrán got her start by refusing to stay behind a typewriter. She had moved from Sinaloa to Mexico City with her mother and found work as a secretary at the radio station XEW, where…
Read the storyDemolición
Los Saicos
For a record-cover photo shoot, the members of Los Saicos once carried a sledgehammer, an axe and fake dynamite to a railway station, and were detained by the police for it. The band had…
Read the storyDahil Sa Iyo
Ruben Tagalog
"Dahil sa Iyo", Because of You, first reached audiences in 1938 in the film Bituing Marikit, sung by Rogelio de la Rosa. It is credited to Mike Velarde Jr., although notes by one of its…
Read the storyEnta Omri
Umm Kulthum
By 1964 Umm Kulthum and Mohammed Abdel Wahab had both spent decades at the summit of Arabic music, yet they had never made a song together. She had started out as a child in the village of…
Read the storyZorba's Dance
Mikis Theodorakis
The music that the world now hears as timeless Greek folk dance was written for a film. Mikis Theodorakis composed "Zorba's Dance" for Michael Cacoyannis's 1964 Zorba the Greek, in which…
Read the storyMy Boy Lollipop
Millie Small
The song that made Millie Small famous started life in New York in the 1950s as "My Girl Lollypop", written by Robert Spencer of the doo-wop group The Cadillacs. A 14-year-old Brooklyn…
Read the storyDongbaek Agassi (Camellia Lady)
Lee Mi-ja
The record company did not expect much. Dongbaek Agassi was written by composer Baek Young-ho and lyricist Han San-do as the theme for a 1964 melodrama of the same name, starring Eom…
Read the storyThe Homeless Wanderer
Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou
Yewubdar Gebru was born in Addis Ababa in 1923 into a wealthy family and sent in 1929 to a boarding school in Switzerland, where she studied piano and violin; she and her sister were among…
Read the storyRing of Fire
Johnny Cash
The spark, some sources say, was a single underlined line in an Elizabethan poetry book owned by June Carter's uncle, A. P. Carter, comparing love to a burning ring of fire. June took the…
Read the storyGarota de Ipanema
Tom Jobim
The girl was real. Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto, a 17-year-old who lived on Montenegro Street in Ipanema, walked past the Veloso bar-café every day, sometimes stopping in to buy…
Read the storyHymn to Freedom
Oscar Peterson
Hymn to Freedom was written on the spot. The Oscar Peterson Trio, with Ray Brown on bass and Ed Thigpen on drums, was recording Night Train for Verve, an album built mostly from blues and…
Read the storyBorracho de Amor
José Manuel Calderón
For most of Rafael Trujillo's dictatorship, bachata had no official record. The word meant an impromptu party in the countryside, with melancholy, bittersweet songs played by poor,…
Read the storySukiyaki (Ue o Muite Arukou)
Kyu Sakamoto
The lyricist Rokusuke Ei wrote the words to Ue o Muite Arukō while walking home from the 1960 Anpo protests against the security treaty between Japan and the United States. The protests had…
Read the storyIndépendance Cha Cha
Grand Kallé
The song was first heard in Brussels, not Kinshasa. In early 1960 Belgium hosted a Round Table Conference to decide the future of the Belgian Congo, and the sons of the delegate Daniel…
Read the storyAdiós Nonino
Astor Piazzolla
In 1959 Astor Piazzolla was touring Spanish-speaking America with the dancers Juan Carlos Copes and María Nieves when, during a show in Puerto Rico, word reached him that his father Vicente…
Read the storyMorgen
Ivo Robić
Ivo Robić began as a soloist with the Radio Zagreb Orchestra while still a student in the city, and over the following years he made more than a hundred records at home, mostly singles and…
Read the storyNel blu dipinto di blu (Volare)
Domenico Modugno
The song began with a nap. In June 1957 the lyricist Franco Migliacci was waiting for Domenico Modugno to go to the sea, drank some wine and fell asleep. When he woke, his eyes landed on…
Read the storyTu vuò fà l'americano
Renato Carosone
Renato Carosone wrote the music almost as fast as he could read the words. In 1956 the head of the Ricordi label, Rapetti, commissioned a song for a radio contest, and Carosone set Nicola…
Read the storyJean and Dinah
Mighty Sparrow
The prize was $40. In 1956 a young Slinger Francisco, the Mighty Sparrow, won both the Calypso King crown and the Carnival Road March with Jean and Dinah, the first of what would become…
Read the storyNa Golici
Ansambel bratov Avsenik
In 1954 Slavko Avsenik was working night shifts at the Tonosa factory in Ljubljana, knitting socks on a machine. While the machine ran on its own from foot to waist, he listened to its…
Read the storyLa Flor de la Canela
Chabuca Granda
Chabuca Granda recorded 7 January 1950 as the date she finished "La flor de la canela", and she gave it its first performance on 21 July that year, her birthday. The waltz was inspired by…
Read the storyMambo No. 5
Perez Prado
Dámaso Pérez Prado learned his trade as pianist and arranger for the Sonora Matancera, the dance band from his hometown of Matanzas. In 1949 he moved to Mexico, formed his own band and…
Read the storySynnefiasmeni Kyriaki
Vassilis Tsitsanis
Vassilis Tsitsanis began "Synnefiasmeni Kyriaki", Cloudy Sunday, in Thessaloniki during the German occupation, when the authorities considered rebetiko degenerate and he played to small…
Read the storyAsa Branca
Luiz Gonzaga
The asa-branca, or white wing, is the picazuro pigeon, and in the dry backlands of Brazil's Northeast its departure was a sign that the drought had won. Luiz Gonzaga and Humberto Teixeira,…
Read the storyLa Vie en Rose
Édith Piaf
Édith Piaf wrote the words of "La Vie en rose" herself in 1945, and almost nobody around her believed in it. When she suggested it to the composer Marguerite Monnot, Monnot dismissed it as…
Read the storyBengawan Solo
Gesang
Gesang Martohartono was 23 and had no musical training when he wrote Bengawan Solo in Surakarta in 1940. He worked the tune out by singing it, adjusting it for a few weeks until he was…
Read the storyFrangosyriani
Markos Vamvakaris
In 1935 Markos Vamvakaris went home to Syros for the first time in almost twenty years. He brought along the musician Batis, his younger brother and the pianist Robertakis, and played a…
Read the storyCalle Schewens vals
Evert Taube
Calle Schewens vals is one of the most cherished songs in the Swedish visa tradition, a waltz about a summer night in the Roslagen archipelago that Swedes have sung for nearly a century.…
Read the storyBoléro
Maurice Ravel
Boléro began as a different job altogether. The dancer Ida Rubinstein asked Maurice Ravel to orchestrate six piano pieces from Isaac Albéniz's Iberia, but partway through he learned that…
Read the storySalma ya Salama
Sayed Darwish
Sayed Darwish, born in Alexandria in 1892, was working as a bricklayer when the manager of a touring theatre troupe heard him singing for his fellow workers and hired him on the spot. Years…
Read the storyIn the Hall of the Mountain King
Edvard Grieg
Edvard Grieg could not stand it. He composed the piece in 1875 as incidental music for Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt, for the scene in which Peer, in a dream-like fantasy, stumbles into the…
Read the storyAn der schönen blauen Donau
Johann Strauss II
The Blue Danube began as a choral piece for a carnival evening, written in the shadow of a lost war. In 1866 the Vienna Men's Choral Association reminded Johann Strauss II of a composition…
Read the storyGriechischer Wein
Udo Jürgens
Udo Jürgens wrote the melody in 1972 after a holiday on Rhodes, by his own account in just twenty minutes, and he told Die Zeit he knew at once it would be a smash. Then he waited two years…
Read the storyDer Kommissar
Falco
The music was written for someone else. Producer Robert Ponger composed the track for the Austrian singer Reinhold Bilgeri, who turned it down because he felt it was too soft. Falco took…
Read the storyÜber sieben Brücken musst du gehn
Karat
The famous line came from a short story before it was a song. In 1975 the writer Helmut Richter wrote a love story about an unhappy relationship between a Polish man and a German woman,…
Read the storyDu hast den Farbfilm vergessen
Nina Hagen
In 1974 the rock band Automobil hired a 19-year-old Nina Hagen as lead singer. Their keyboard player, Michael Heubach, came up with the tune while improvising at the piano, and Kurt Demmler…
Read the storyErmutigung
Wolf Biermann
Wolf Biermann wrote "Ermutigung", Encouragement, for his friend Peter Huchel. Huchel had edited the respected literary journal Sinn und Form from its founding in 1949 until he was forced…
Read the story99 Luftballons
Nena
In June 1982, at a Rolling Stones concert in West Berlin, Nena's guitarist Carlo Karges watched a cloud of balloons being released and drifting toward the horizon. As they shifted shape in…
Read the storySonderzug nach Pankow
Udo Lindenberg
In March 1979, Udo Lindenberg said in a West Berlin radio interview that he would like to play a concert for his fans in East Berlin. East German officials recorded the interview and passed…
Read the storyMajor Tom (Völlig losgelöst)
Peter Schilling
When Peter Schilling's single came out in the autumn of 1982, it stalled at number 73 in the German charts. A few weeks later, carried by the media frenzy around the Neue Deutsche Welle, it…
Read the storySchrei nach Liebe
Die Ärzte
When Die Ärzte released this single in September 1993, it was their first record after a five-year break and their first openly political song. Germany was reeling from violent attacks on…
Read the storyMannenberg
Abdullah Ibrahim
By Abdullah Ibrahim's own recollection, Mannenberg was recorded in one take. In June 1974, on one of his brief visits home from exile, Ibrahim, who still released records under his former…
Read the storyAsimbonanga
Johnny Clegg
Asimbonanga is Zulu for we have not seen him. When Johnny Clegg's band Savuka released the song as a 12-inch single in 1986, Nelson Mandela had been in prison since 1962 on Robben Island.…
Read the storyJerusalema
Master KG
Master KG recorded the beat on 11 August 2019, posted a snippet on social media and liked the response enough to call in the singer he describes as his sister, Nomcebo Zikode, to finish the…
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