Robbed hit of the week 7/25/16 - Carly Simon's "Let The River Run"...

"Let The River Run" - Carly Simon
from the album Working Girl (Original Soundtrack) (1989)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #49

This week's "robbed hit" comes from pop singer/songwriter Carly Simon, who had a resurgence in her career in the mid-80s thanks to her Coming Around Again album, which sold over a million copies. Four singles from that record reached the top ten on Billboard's Adult Contemporary chart, and the title track also crossed over into the pop top-40 in the winter of 1987. A subsequent live album also went platinum later in the year. Her next studio work would be five contributions to the soundtrack of the Harrison Ford/Meg Ryan/Sigourney Weaver rom-com Working Girl. One of the tracks, the anthemic theme of "Let The River Run", was released as a single for radio as well. Written and co-produced by Carly, it showed her at her best vocal form, as the empowerment ode was a perfect match for the film's premise of female upward mobility...

While "Let The River Run" climbed to #11 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary chart, the single stopped just at the halfway mark on the American pop chart in April of 1989. Internationally, the song also was a minor hit in the UK (#79) and Australia (#91). But it did make up for it in sweeping the Oscar, Golden Globe, and Grammy Award for best song from a movie, something only achieved later by Bruce Springsteen for his "Streets Of Philadelphia" song.
So far "Let The River Run" is her final lead-artist single on the Hot 100, though she did return as a listed "featured artist" on Janet Jackson's "Son of A Gun" single, which interpolates Simon's #1 "You're So Vain".

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Here's Carly performing the song live in New York in 1995...

...and lastly, an acoustic read from 2009...