Robbed hit of the week 10/13/14 - Little Richard's "Great Gosh A'Mighty (It's A Matter Of Time)"...

Little Richard - "Great Gosh A'Mighty! (It's A Matter Of Time)"
from the albums Down And Out In Beverly Hills (1986) and Lifetime Friend (1986)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #42

This week's robbed hit comes from a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer that helped start the whole genre, Little Richard. Richard, who grew up in a poor and religious family in Georgia, he started performing both in the church and secularly from a boys age, before becoming a fixture on the vaudeville circuit, including a stint as a drag performer. In the mid-50s, after being signed by Specialty Records as a mainstream R&B artist, Richard changed the face of music from the get-go with a rework of a lascivious song in his stable called "Tutti Frutti", which put him on the charts for the first time, reaching #2 on the R&B chart and #17 on the pop list. His second release, "Long Tall Sally", did even better, climbing to #6 on the Hot 100 and topping the R&B chart. During the years between 1955 and 1958, Richard score a total of fourteen top-10 R&B hits, with four of them making the same level on the pop chart. However, a religious epiphany stopped him from touring and recording anything rock and roll for the next four years, effectively ending radio having much to do with him. Coming back to tour extensively in the sixties, with both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones opening for him at some point, his newer recordings were received rather modestly, with "Freedom Blues" almost making the top-40 on the pop chart in 1970.

After cleaning up his act after years of drug abuse, and a lawsuit with former Specialty head Art Rube for royalties was settled, Richard came back on the mainstream scene appearing in the movie Down And Out In Beverly Hills with Bette Midler, Richard Dreyfuss, and Nick Nolte. Richard penned a new song for its soundtrack, "Great Gosh A'Mighty", with the "fifth Beatle" and solo star Billy Preston. The single put him back on the American pop chart for the first time in sixteen years...

"Great Gosh A'Mighty" stopped two notches short of the top-40 in the U.S. in April of 1986, while becoming a minor hit in England at #62. It would be his most recent hit of his own on the pop chart, though he did contribute to the charity effort "Voices That Care", which climbed to #11 in 1991. He also nabbed a few more minor hits on the British charts, including another movie tie-in with "Twins" with Earth Wind & Fire's Philip Bailey in 1989.

The year this record was released, Richard was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in 1993 he deservedly earned the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Here's Little Richard performing the song live on the Joan Rivers Show in 1986..

...and again more recently from the Rock and Roll Legends concert...