Songoftheday 9/19/12 - Your love is my reward, and I love you even more than I ever did before...

Eddie Rabbitt & Crystal Gayle - "You & I"
from the album Radio Romance (1982)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #7 (four weeks)
Weeks in the top-40: 21

Today's Song of the Day is the duet by early-80's country music powerhouses, Crystal Gayle and the late Eddie Rabbitt. Eddie had started the 80's crossing over from a country to a pop A-lister thanks to his #1 hit "I Love A Rainy Night" from his LP Horizon in 1980. The followup album, Step By Step, gave him three more top-40 and country top-2 hits, including "I Don't Know Where To Start" in the spring of 1982.

Crystal Gayle, sister of Loretta Lynn so in effect another "coal miner's daughter", followed her sibling's footsteps to a recording career, where she had her first country hit, "I've Cried (The Blue Right Out Of My Eyes)", which Loretta wrote, in 1970. However, it wasn't until four years later that her self-titled first album was released, but in return it scored her her first top-10 country hit, Wrong Road Again".Her sophomore effort, Somebody Loves You, went one better and spun out a #1 country hit and her first pop chart single and first adult-contemporary top-40 hit with "I'll Get Over You" in 1976. That single would be the first of her 18 country #1 hits.

As cosmopolitan country started to gain airplay and an mainstream audience, Gayle's "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue" came at the right moment and became a #2 pop hit in 1977. It also topped the country chart and went top-5 on AC, and established Gayle as a all-around talent.

Eddie and Crystal recorded "You & I", a middle-of-the-road love ballad perfect for Valentine's Day and your local wedding, for Rabbitt's 1982 album Radio Romance. It was written by Frank Myers, who would go on to write big hits for John Michael Montgomery ("I Swear") and Lonestar ("I'm Already There"), and produced by longtime collaborator David Malloy...

"You & I" proved an across the board classic in America, topping the country chart, going to #2 on the adult-contemporary (soft-rock) chart, and #7 on the pop chart, spending 21 weeks in the top-40, more than any other song that peaked in 1983. Surprisingly, however, it only grazed the top-40 in Canada and was a minor hit in England (which at the time wasn't a big country audience).

And as much as I usually detest overly sappy love ballads, Eddie and Crystal's vocal interplay really sold me and I adored this as a child as I do now. But as soft-rock and pop/country was being replaced at mainstream radio by new wave, R&B, and hard rock, this song would be both Eddie and Crystal's last top-40 pop hit.

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Sadly, Rabbitt died of lung cancer in 1998. When CMT picked "You & I" as one of the best duets ever, Gayle paired with Raul Malo from the Mavericks for a sweet and reverential reprise of the song...

Up tomorrow: the soul "Master" gets freaky and plays doctor...