Songoftheday 8/2/20 - There's a spark of magic in your eye, Candyland appears each time you smile...

"Betcha By Golly Wow!" - Prince

from the album Emancipation (1996)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: ineligible to chart

Billboard Hot 100 Airplay peak: #31 (one week)

Weeks in the Airplay Top-40: 5

Today's song of the day comes from late music icon Prince, who in the mid-1990s had been struggling with his then record company Warner Brothers. His 1995 album The Gold Experience, which landed in the top ten helped by his independent single release "The Most Beautiful Girl In The World" being included on it. Another single from the album, "I Hate U", almost made the pop top ten in the autumn of 1995. But he made appearances with "Slave" written on his face, and his tenure with the label ended after one more album, Chaos and Disorder, which he didn't promote, but still landed in the top-40 on the albums chart in America (#26) and spun off a top-40 single in the UK with "Dinner With Delores" (UK #36).

Free to release his own new music how he wanted, Prince went big, and his first album on his own (well, distributed by EMI), was a three disc set Emancipation. A hodge-podge of styles and themes, with his departure from Warner Brothers and his marriage to dancer Mayte Garcia dominated the themes of the set. And for the first time, he included remakes of other artist's songs, and stunningly he chose one of those to be his first single promoted to radio from the collection. "Betcha By Golly Wow!", a love ballad written by Linda Creed and Thom Bell, was made popular by the soul group the Stylistics, who went to #3 on the American pop chart and #2 on Billboard magazine's R&B list in 1972...

Prince's version doesn't take much for granted, staying pretty true to the 1972 hit, but it obviously was a labor of love for the artist, who featured Mayte in the music video...

Since Prince's "Betcha" wasn't released as a physical commercial single in the U.S., it was unable to place on Billboard's official Hot 100 pop chart. However, the track got enough radio love to spend over a month in the top-40 of the airplay component of that list in December of 1996. The song also landed in the top ten of their R&B Airplay tally at #10, while crossing over to the Adult Top-40 radio format chart at #38. Internationally, the single made the top ten in Belgium (#5) and Canada (#9), and reached the top-40 in the UK (#11), Australia (#18), New Zealand (#24), and Switzerland (#27). The Emancipation 3-disc set came in at #11 on the Billboard 200 sales chart in the States, and topped the albums list in Switzerland.

For the second international single, the pop/rock track "The Holy River" was paired with the funky "Somebody's Somebody", and in America the former was promoted to pop stations while the latter was hyped to play on urban radio. "The Holy River" ended up stopping at #58 on the Hot 100 Airplay list, while doing a bit better on Adult Top-40 radio, peaking at #31. Meanwhile, "Somebody's Somebody" was a decent R&B hit at #15. The combined single went to #19 in the UK and #31 in Canada.

After Emancipation, Prince's release schedule went into a bit of chaos. In 1998, he put out an even bigger set, the five-disc Crystal Ball. that wasn't promoted to radio, and came in a myriad of formats and avenues to pull as much money from fans as possible. Later that year,  what was originally hyped as a Prince album transformed into one credited to the New Power Generation, but he sang lead on all the tracks. One cut from the set, "The One", missed the R&B Airplay top-40 at #44, and the album itself got to #22 (probably from fans alone). The end of the year saw his classic "1999" re-enter Billboard's pop Hot 100 and reach the top-40 again at #40 for the new year's celebrations. After a odds-n-sods compilation from Warner Brothers, Prince closed out the century with his Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic, which spun off a hit with "The Greatest Romance Ever Sold" which made the R&B top-40 at #23 and the Hot 100 at #63. But then came a flood of new album releases, with six albums that were pretty much forgotten in the space of five years.

The artist got back on track with a one-off album for Columbia Records, Musicology in 2004, which through a trick of having a concert ticket be tied in with an album purchase (which would eventually become a standard), made the album reach #3 in the US. Two cuts from the record won Prince Grammy Awards for Best R&B Vocal in consecutive years with "Call My Name" and "Musicology". He followed that up in 2006 with 3121, which made for a sustained "comeback", landing the artist his first #1 album since 1989's Batman soundtrack. Single "Black Sweat" landed on the Hot 100 at #60, his last "new" release charting appearance there, and #82 on the R&B chart. After a triumphant performance at the Super Bowl halftime show in 2007, Prince scored another top ten album with Planet Earth, which contained the song "Future Baby Mama", his last R&B top-40 hit at #39, and last current Grammy Award for R&B Male Vocal Performance.

In 2009, Prince returned with another three-CD set Lotusflow3r, which had a disc from newcomer Bria Valente, and put "Better With Time" on the main R&B chart in Billboard at #78, while the album set came in at #2. The following year, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Five years later, the artist delivered two studio album, one solo and one with the female backing group 3rdeyegirl. In 2015, he again put out two sets, both titled HitnRun with Phase One and Phase Two. From the second, the song "1000 X's and O's" became a decent Adult-R&B hit at #12, and reached the main R&B airplay list at #41. But after a tour was cut short, Prince died from a drug overdose at his Minneapolis home.

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The Stylistics weren't the first to release that song - that would be former "teen idol" Connie Stevens, who put it out as a single (titled "Keep Growing Strong") in 1970...

Up tomorrow: Another soul classic gets remake by another superstar of the decade.