Songoftheday 8/14/19 - With a little love and some tenderness, we'll walk upon the water we'll rise above the mess...

"Hold My Hand" - Hootie & The Blowfish
from the album Cracked Rear View (1994)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #10 (three weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 34

Today's song of the day comes from the mainstream rock band Hootie & The Blowfish, who came together in South Carolina, where lead singer Darius Rucker and guitarist Mark Bryan were college classmates in the 1980s. Adding bass player Dean Felber and drummer Jim Sonefeld (who replaced original member Brantley Smith pretty early on), the band, named for two other friends' nicknames, released some music independently, including an EP called Kootchypop that would contain early versions of songs that would eventually be on their major-label debut Cracked Rear View in the summer of 1994. One of those would be "Hold My Hand", which would be their debut single released a couple of weeks after the album. The bar-style anthem that had David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, and Nash singing backup would take seven months to climb the charts in Billboard magazine until it made their first top ten effort...

"Hold My Hand" became Hootie & The Blowfish's first top-40 pop hit, entering the top ten in February of 1995. The song climbed to #4 on Billboard magazine's Mainstream Rock radio chart, while crossing over to #6 on their Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") format list. Internationally, the song reached the top-40 in Canada (#36) and New Zealand (#37), and was a minor hit in the UK (#50) and Australia (#70). In 1996, the band won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist.

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Hootie & The Blowfish appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman in September of 1994 to promote the single. They also returned to the show in 2015 to help send him off...