Songoftheday 3/10/13 - Baby when I met you there was peace unknown, I set out to get you with a fine tooth comb...

Kenny Rogers & Dolly Parton - "Islands In The Stream"
from the album Eyes That See In The Dark (1983)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (two weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 18

Today's Song of the Day is the country/pop superstar pairing of Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, who gave America it's last gasp of country mainstream until the country revival of the 90s. Kenny started out 1983 with a return to the pop Top-10 with another duet, this time a cover of Bob Seger's "We've Got Tonight" with Scottish lass Sheena Easton. After following it up with another top-40 hit, "All My Life", also produced by soft-rock king David Foster, Kenny returned to the studio to initially record one song with Australian singer/producer/disco king Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees, who had successfully helmed adult-pop hits for Barbra Streisand and Dionne Warwick. He ended up writing and producing the whole Eyes That See In The Dark album, bringing his brothers along for the ride.

Kenny's partner on the song, Dolly Parton, is one of the biggest acts ever to grace country music (and I'm not talking about that bigness). After years of hit singles on the country chart, Parton had her first minor crossover hit as "Jolene" reached #60 in 1973. Four years later, as her sound become more "cosmopolitan", Dolly's single "Here You Come Again" went all the way to #3 on the pop chart. But what made her an A-list performer was her turn to the movies, and both her role in the classic 9 to 5 and the title song which became her first #1 song on the Hot 100 in 1980.

"Islands In The Stream", originally written as a solo song for Marvin Gaye by the Gibbs brothers and named for an Ernest Hemingway novel, became the first American single from Kenny's album, and brought him back to the top of the charts...

"Islands In The Stream" topped the pop, country, and adult-contemporary charts in both the United States and Canada, and also made the top-10 in Britain as well. It would be both the artists' last time in the top-10 on the pop chart, though each would continue to have a flourishing career well into the new century.They also collaborated together on a Christmas album that would become one of the longest-selling holiday sets in recent times.

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Here's Kenny and Dolly performing the song live...

In 1998, Fugees rapper Pras Michel interpolated "Islands..." with singer Mya and rapper Ol Dirty Bastard to become the top-20 pop hit "Ghetto Supastar (That Is What You Are)" from the movie Bulworth...

The Bee Gees themselves recorded their own version of the song for their retrospective in 2004...

 

 

 Three years later, Canadian alt-rock vocalist Feist covered "Islands" with the Constantines...

...Finally, what took "Islands In The Stream" to the top of the British charts is a charity single for "Red Nose Day" for Comic Relief done by the cast of Gavin & Stacey with Tom Jones in 2009 (Titled "(Barry) Islands In The Stream"...

 

Up tomorrow: Scottish Communications.