Robbed hit of the week 6/19/17 - Sydney Youngblood's "I'd Rather Go Blind"...
from the album Feeling Free (UK-1989) & Sydney Youngblood (US-1990)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #46
This week's "robbed hit" comes from pop/soul singer Sydney Youngblood, who got his first success in Europe in the late 1980's. A cover of Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine" was a minor hit in the UK in 1988 (it would later reach the top-40 in France), but his next release, "If I Only Could", which sampled the club classic "Break 4 Love", proved to be a massive single, topping the chart in Belgium and reaching the top ten in Britain, France, and Germany. That was followed by "Sit And Wait" (which cribbed from Gwen Guthrie's "Ain't Nothin' Goin' On But The Rent", which got to the runner-up spot in Germany, Austria, Sweden, and Belgium. Sydney finally got attention in his American homeland with his fourth single, a cover of the song "I'd Rather Go Blind". First recorded by blues-soul icon Etta James, it was the flip-side of her top-40 hit "Tell Mama" from 1968, but ended up being one of her most revered recordings. She wrote the song with writer Ellington Jordan...
Sydney took the song in a completely different direction, adding a trip-hop beat like the one Milli Vanilli and Soul II Soul got famous for...
Youngblood's version of "I'd Rather Go Blind", peaked just under the top 40 on both the pop (#46) and R&B (#42) charts in Billboard magazine in October of 1990. Internationally, while the track reached the top-40 in Germany (#23) and Belgium (#34), it similarly stalled at #44 in the UK. In America, a re-release of "Ain't No Sunshine" got to #51 on the R&B list.
A year later, Sydney released a second album, Passion, Grace, and Serious Bass... which went unnoticed in the U.S. but was a moderate success in Europe, hitting the top-40 with single "Hooked On You" on much of the continent. In 1993, "Anything" from his third release Just The Way It Is got to #48 in the UK. The following year, his album The Hat Won't Fit only got Eurodance-styled track "So Good So Right (All I Can Do)" to #91 in Germany. He most recently popped back on the German chart at #89 with a remix of "If Only I Could" with Tom Pulse. Sydney came back with a new album, Black Magic, in 2014.
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Here's Youngblood performing "I'd Rather Go Blind" in concert behind his most current album in 2015...
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